How to Plant a Tree That Survives

From my land in the Lake District, I look across at a hillside scattered with fallen plastic tree tubes. Many lie flat in the grass. Most of the trees they once protected are now dead. They mark good intentions that never quite became woodland.

This episode explores a simple but often overlooked truth: planting a tree is easy, but establishing one is not. 

We talk endlessly about planting trees. Governments count them, charities celebrate them, and photographs capture the moment a sapling goes into the ground. But what happens next is rarely discussed. And yet, it is this next phase that determines success or failure.

Because planting is only the beginning. 

Establishment is everything. 

A young tree must survive transplant shock, extend its roots into living soil, and withstand wind, water, and weather. It must avoid being eaten by deer, rabbits, voles, and sheep. It must cope with drought in some places, and waterlogging in others. It must be protected, monitored, and revisited, again and again, during its most vulnerable early years. 

This is the real work of tree planting. 

Across the UK, millions of plastic tree tubes are used every year, amounting to thousands of tonnes of plastic. Many will never fulfil their purpose. Survival rates in large-scale planting schemes can be surprisingly low, sometimes as little as 50%, meaning that half the trees planted may never reach maturity. 

From the landscape’s point of view, the arithmetic is stark. A dead tree stores no carbon, shelters no wildlife, and holds no soil. A fallen plastic tube marks not just a lost tree, but a failed assumption - that planting alone would be enough. 

Drawing on firsthand experience from the Lakeland fells, this episode looks at what trees actually need to survive. Soil structure, drainage, root development, protection from animals, and ongoing care all play a role. Small details matter. A poorly placed planting hole, compacted soil, or neglected guard can make the difference between life and death.

Ultimately, this is a story about attention. 

Planting is a single act. Establishment is a long negotiation with place. 

If we want real woodland, we must think beyond the spade. We must measure success not by how many trees are planted, but by how many are still standing years later. 

Because in the end, the only thing that matters is this - that the tree survives, grows, and becomes part of the landscape.

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#TreePlanting  #RewildingBritain  #LakeDistrictNature  #WoodlandRestoration  #TheBitOutside

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to The Bit Outside, where we step away from the noise and spend time with the living world. I'm Richard Viller, speaking to you from the English Lake District, where I'm working to restore woodland, fowl, and the wild things that call it home. Together we'll explore the connections between people, landscapes, and the fragile systems that sustain us. It's about nature, yes, but also about how we belong to it and what it means to care for it in a changing world. How to plant a tree that survives. Why establishment matters more than planting with Richard Viller. There is a hillside opposite my land in the lake district that tells a quiet story. At first glance it looks harmless enough, just at other fell side, sloping gently down towards the valley floor, grass, bracken, scattered rocks. But if you look carefully, you start to notice them. Hundreds of pale plastic cylinders, tree tubes, many of them are lying flat in the grass. Some lean sideways at improbable angles, others have collapsed completely, their plastic walls twisted by wind, rain, sheep, cattle, deer, or plain neglect. Inside each tube there was once a young tree. Many of those trees are now dead. When the wind rises, the tubes rattle faintly against their stakes, at least those stakes that remain unbroken. The sound carries across the valley on quiet mornings. It's not loud, it's not dramatic, but it is unmistakable. It is the sound of a good intention that never quite became a landscape. The trees were planted only a few years ago. Volunteers probably arrived with enthusiasm, spades, and bundles of young trees wrapped in damp packaging. Someone may even have made a speech about restoring nature. Photographs were taken. They would have shown muddy boots, smiling faces, and a hopeful line of thin saplings stretching across the hillside. Then the planters went home, and the real test began. Because planting a tree is easy. Establishing a tree is something entirely different. Dig a hole, put the tree in, replace the soil, stamp it down with your boot, stand back, admire. The whole thing takes a few minutes, and it feels complete. A tree now stands where there was only grass before. But that moment of planting is only the beginning. If I were forced to put numbers on it, planting might represent 10% of the whole task. The other 90% is establishment. Establishment means roots spreading into the surrounding soil. It means surviving the fierce Lakeland weather. Believe me, it can be fierce. Animals, drought, flooding, plenty of visitors, and neglect. It also means becoming part of the place. Planting is a single event, but establishment is a long negotiation with the landscape. When a tree is planted, it experiences what biologists call transplant shock. Roots have been lifted from nursery or soil, some have been broken, others have dried slightly. The tree must suddenly adjust to an entirely new environment. Above ground, very little may seem to happen. Leaves appear, perhaps a little growth, nothing dramatic. But underground, something extraordinary is taking place. Fine roots are spreading into the soil, searching for air, searching for moisture, searching for nutrients. This underground expansion determines whether the tree survives. And that is why soil matters so much. Soil is not simply dirt, it is a living system. Mineral particles, organic matter, fungi, bacteria, insects, air, water. Healthy soil breathes. Roots move easily through it, water drains without stagnating. Meanwhile, compacted soil is different. Roots struggle, oxygen is limited, water sits where it should not, and the tree survives only reluctantly. Planting technique therefore matters. It rarely matters big time. A hole that is wide rather than deep encourages roots to spread. Planting too deeply can suffocate the base of the trunk. Planting too shallowly risks drying the roots. The aim is balance. And then comes something people often misunderstand: firming the soil. Roots need contact with soil. Air pockets are not kindness. They can do harm. They dry roots, they harbour water. So the soil must be gently but firmly squashed down. The so-called tamping. A tree that rocks in a loose hole is already in trouble. But here in the Lake District, we often have the opposite problem: too much water. Roots need oxygen. Water log soil excludes it. A tree can drown just as surely as it can dry out. This is why small landscape details matter. A slight hollow on a slope, a patch of heavier soil, a compacted track, all of these influence where water flows. Sometimes I dig small swales and berms around young trees. They are not dramatic earthworks, just modest adjustments, enough to persuade water to slow down, or to flow around the planting point rather than through it. Wind presents another challenge. A newly planted tree has little grip in the soil. Strong gusts rock it backwards and forwards. This damages delicate new roots. The process is called wind rock. Staking can help, but a tree tied too tightly becomes weak. Trees strengthen in response to movement, so the aim is not to imprison the tree, it is to support it while it learns. Of course, there is another problem. Young trees are edible. Deer browse the tender shoots, rabbits strip bark, hares nibble, voles gnaw quietly near the base. And sheep, in my experience, investigate absolutely everything and eat far more than is good for them. A sheep spends much of its day munching. Even if it does not eat the tree, it may rub against it. Sheep are also enthusiastic scratchers, often seeking out something rough to rub against. A young and spiky tree might just do. A more mature branch, a dry stone wall, or a tree just planted, each might do. Plastic tree tubes were invented to solve some of these problems. They are light, cheap, quick to install, and they work sometimes. But they also lean, split, collapse, and slowly degrade into plastic fragments. Across Britain, the countryside is now dotted with their remains. A collapsed tube often hides a dead tree inside it. From a distance everything looks fine. Up close, the truth is different. Personally, I prefer wire cages. Its mesh is sufficiently small to resist a determined vole, and its height is sufficient to dissuade a passing deer. Cages are stronger than tree tubes, they're more durable, and certainly easier to inspect. The sapling grows in natural air and light, and the cage will not become plastic litter on the hillside. There is another part of this story that is harder to ignore once you begin to look for it. The scale. In the United Kingdom alone, it is estimated that many millions of plastic tree tubes are used every year. The figure often quoted is somewhere around 15 to 20 million annually. That is not a small intervention. That is an industry. The figure comes from the Forestry Commission and gives a sense of scale that is difficult to ignore. Fifteen million every year. And many of those tubes will never protect a tree to maturity. Over the past few decades, the total number of tubes placed in British soil has run into the hundreds of millions. Each tube is designed to protect a tree. Each tube is also made of plastic. Many of them now lie somewhere on a hillside, maybe a river below, or break down slowly into smaller fragments. And then there is the question of success. If you listen carefully to planting programs, you will sometimes hear survival rates spoken of in cautious terms. A 50% survival rate is not unusual in large-scale schemes. That is, half the trees planted are expected not to make it. More optimistically, perhaps, UK woodland creation guidance often assumes that 10 to 20% of newly planted trees may fail in the first few years, even under reasonably good practice. This figure comes again from the Forestry Commission, which expects replanting as part of the process. But in more exposed sites, or where aftercare is limited, losses can be much higher. Which means this: for every ten trees planted, one or two may be expected to die, and in poorer conditions it may be far more. Now one can understand how that happens. Difficult terrain, variable weather, limited follow-up, grazing pressure, human enthusiasm that fades after the planting day. But it does raise a question. If we planted a forest and expected half of it to die, would we call that success? Or would we quietly lower our expectations to match our methods? Because from the landscape's point of view, the arithmetic is simple. A dead tree stores no carbon, shelters no birds, holds no soil. It is something of a waste of time and effort. A collapsed plastic tube marks not just a failed tree, but a failed assumption. The assumption that planting alone would have been enough and that establishment was an assured success. It was clearly not. There is also the question of plastic. Those seemingly many tubes scattered across the hillside are not benign. Estimates suggest that tree tubes used in the UK amount to roughly 2,000 tons of plastic each year. Much of that is polypropylene. And while some are collected, many are not. Over time they degrade, not clearly, not completely, but into smaller and smaller fragments. Microplastics. Dear me. These then enter soil, streams, and the wider ecosystem. So when a tree falls inside its tube, the legacy is not just the loss of the tree, it is the persistence of the plastic, and all that can mean. The first five years of a tree's life are decisive. Stakes loosen, guards tilt, grass grows thick, rabbits arrive, a wet winter floods the soil, a dry summer stresses the roots. A tree that looked healthy in January may be dead by the following spring. This is why revisiting matters. Establishment requires attention, checking the stake, resetting a guard, clearing grass, adding mulch, refirming soil after windrock. These small interventions often decide whether a tree lives or dies. Large planting schemes sometimes struggle here. Planting days are easy to organize. Long-term care is harder. But success should not be measured by how many trees are planted. It should be measured by how many are still alive ten years later. So I returned to the hillside opposite my land, the slope scattered with fallen plastic tubes. I do not know exactly why each tree failed, but I can see their tubes are supine, or in some cases have rolled down the slope, to the river below. Perhaps it was water that did for them too much or too little. Perhaps it was animals, perhaps the wind, the weather, the temperature. Perhaps it was visitor footfall, maybe with a wayward pet. Perhaps it was simple neglect. Perhaps it was even inadequate planting. But the lesson is clear. Planting without establishment is not restoration. It is an aspiration. To plant a tree properly is to think beyond the day itself, to ask whether the soil will breathe, whether water will pass or linger, whether animals will eat it, whether anyone will come back to check. Years from now, the plastic tubes on that hillside will probably disappear. Wind will break them apart, grass will hide them. Perhaps someone will remove them. Far too many have never made it past their first few years. But it is important to remember that if establishment succeeds, something else will remain. Trees, their trunks thickening, their branches spreading, birds settling among them, wildlife calling at home. And that, in the end, is the real point. Not the planting day, not the photograph, not the number in the report, simply this. That years later, the tree is still there, holding the soil, catching the rain, and becoming part of the long memory of the landscape. Just remember, it is not planting that matters. It is what happens afterwards. If this podcast sparked something, please share it, follow, and tell anyone, indeed everyone you know about it. It really does help others find their way here. You can also read more stories and gather more detail at thebitoutside.com. Until next time, wherever you are, take a step outside, look a little closer, and remember, every small act of care for the natural world matters. You won't be here forever, but the natural world will be a little bit more than a little bit.