Treezilla

I deliberately don’t often include links on this site because I am very mindful of the fact that “the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it,” as Nicholas Carr puts it in his fascinating book, The Shallows. However, today I’m going to make an exception because I want to mention Treezilla, a project from the Open University and other organisations to map all the trees in the UK.

For some time, we have been trying to identify trees in our local area but Treezilla has given this work a new focus, as we now have an opportunity to add our discoveries to the national map. What a wonderful project for this time of semi-lockdown.

All we need is a tree book and a tape measure (to measure the trunk’s circumference). It’s a science lesson, of course, but arguably the real value of the project is that it forces us to look really closely at what we see everyday. And when we start to look we are always amazed by what we see.