Blog — Tree planting

2022 marks our 25th anniversary of publishing cards! We wanted to celebrate the occasion in a meaningful way that reflected our values as a business. After a little bit of thought we decided to set ourselves the ambitious goal of planting 2500 trees in our 25th year.

Reducing our environmental impact has become increasingly important to us in the last few years. Reaching our goal of planting 2500 trees would be a great way to celebrate 25 years.

We have created a grove of trees with the fantastic charity Trees for Life. For every donation of £6, Trees for Life plant a tree in a protected site in the Scottish highlands within 12 months. We've started our grove with a donation of 231 trees, and will be donating more throughout the year.

We know our suppliers and customers share the same environmental concerns that we do, and we're hoping with your help we'll be able to reach our goal of 2500 trees. Everyone who makes a donation, small or large, will be featured on our grove page here.

We're really excited to see our grove of trees grow, and we're hugely grateful to anyone who is able to help. If you would like to plant a tree (or a few!) in our grove you can do so here.

We are delighted to have created a grove with Trees for Life.

Trees for life are rewilding the Scottish Highlands by enabling the restoration of the globally unique Caledonian Forest, which once covered much of Scotland. Their ongoing projects involve planting trees, reintroducing wildlife and providing rewilding training.

Our grove currently contains 231 trees, which will be carefully planted in protected sites in Glen Affric in the Scottish Highlands, often considered Scotland's most beautiful glen. The trees will be a healthy mixture of native species, including Scots pine, oak, hazel and aspen, which create homes for wildlife and forests for the future.

You can visit our grove here, and we would be delighted if you would like to help Trees for Life with their work by planting a tree, which you can do at the bottom of our grove page.

Our most recent donation through our membership to 1% for the Planet was to TreeSisters, a social change and reforestation charity.

TreeSisters fund tropical reforestation projects across 12 locations in Brazil, Borneo, Cameroon, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Nepal and West Papua. Their reforestation projects are ethical and community led, they expand natural forest cover and aim to avoid further deforestation.

So far they have funded the planting of over 15 million trees, and their goal is to plant 1 billion trees annually. We are delighted that our donation will directly fund the planting of 875 trees.

TreeSisters stood out to us as their projects support local communities and focus on gender parity and the participation of women. They explore what it would be like if there were more woman taking leadership roles in respect to the environment, and they provide training and support to encourage this.

Their work combines four of today’s big issues: gender, climate, behaviour change and ecological restoration. You can read more about TreeSisters’ projects, their values and how to support them here.

We had an unusual sale this Black Friday.  I recently read about how the Patagonia clothing brand had given 100% of their sales to environmental causes from Black Friday several years ago.  We thought this was a wonderful idea and we decided to do the same this year.  

I’m delighted to announce that we managed to raise £3536 which we have donated to Avon Needs Trees, an organisation that we’ve been involved with before that is involved in buying land in the Bristol-Avon catchment area for reforesting.

Many, many thanks to all our customers.

Our most recent donation as a member of 1% for the Planet was to the charity Temwa.

Temwa works in one of the world’s poorest countries, in the Nkhata Bay North district of Malawi. Founded in 2003 by Jo Hook and Sophie Elson who are both from Bristol, the charity’s roots are closer to home, and their office is just across the city from our studio. When running a backpackers’ lodge in Usisya, a remote village in Malawi, their friend Lotti Nkhwazi died as a result of AIDS. Lotti had been supporting his sister, brother, and sister-in-law and 15 children who were all drastically impacted by his death. After their experience in Malawi, Jo and Sophie returned to the UK in 2000 to spend the next 3 years fundraising and researching how they could help Malawians like Lotti. They called the charity Temwa, which means the love within a community.

Their community-led approach develops self-sufficiency providing long term sustainable solutions to the problems locals face. Temwa has developed a ten year strategy in partnership with staff, trustees, community members, and local chiefs and government, and at the end of this strategy comes their exit plan. After setting up structures, training and opportunities with these communities, the locals should no longer need Temwa, but will continue to benefit from the initiatives they began.

‘Our mission is to develop self-sufficient communities by supporting projects in education, health, agriculture and forestry, and microfinance.’ Examples of their work include training villagers in the importance of good nutrition and sustainable farming, and promoting young children’s literacy skills and funding students through secondary school.

As our products are mostly paper based, and we aim to minimise our impact on the environment, we are particularly interested in tree planting and combating climate change. Deforestation in Malawi has caused a rise in extreme weather such as droughts and floods. One of Temwa’s projects is carbon balancing. This enables locals to plant trees and enforce forestry management to tackle deforestation and climate change. Tree planting improves soil quality for farming and helps provide resilience to climate shocks, which in turn prevents malnutrition.

To learn more about Temwa, and find out how you can balance your carbon through their tree planting initiative, please visit their website here.