Why I keep a tree log

(Placeholder text — write over this.)

There is a particular kind of not-knowing that gets uncomfortable after a while. I had walked past the same trees several hundred times and could confidently name about four of them. Oak, obviously. Beech, usually. Horse chestnut in conker season, which is cheating.

So I started writing them down. Photograph the whole shape, the bark, a leaf in the hand if I could reach one, and a pin on the map. Then work out what it is — sometimes from a book, sometimes from an AI that has read more field guides than I ever will, and always with the option of going back next week to check.

One file per tree

The thing I keep coming back to is that a spreadsheet would not have survived this. A tree is not a row. A tree is:

• a species, which might turn out to be wrong,
• a place, which does not change,
• a girth, which does,
• and a pile of half-remembered folklore that is the actual reason I'm out there.

So each one gets its own file, and each visit gets appended to it. Two visits, two girths — and that difference is the point.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

That proverb gets attributed to about nine different places, none of them reliably, which is a good early lesson in checking your sources before you write them down as fact.