FAÜNNEP – OVER A HUNDRED

On the last day of May, we planted in Tolna. Three words, one sentence. 

Yet behind it, a novel hides.

This was the 100th planting in a series that we started on November 30th last year.

Between the two events, 98 plantings took place.

Those who followed the plantings of the past six months by 10 Million Trees might not have heard about these 98 (+ two) plantings in the K&H Bank Cooling Groves program. We didn’t talk about it.

We talked about the nearly fifty thousand trees we planted from the start of the autumn planting season until the end of the spring season. These are closely tracked on the 10 Million Trees page.

But we remained silent about this.

But now, having completed the task in exactly six months, we are happy to bring it up.

We planted 555 mature trees and twice as many shrubs from nearly fifty tree species in 100 settlements across 19 counties of the country. Always in schools, kindergartens, nurseries. 

The entire program was realized through the financial cooperation of K&H Bank, while we contributed expertise, organization, and actual physical work to the success. Huge thanks and gratitude to one of our most dedicated volunteers, Gabriella Kéri, who put in superhuman dedication, engineering attention, and unavoidable manual labor. Without her, at the end of the work, there would be no calm and satisfied leaning back. But nothing.

And of course, thanks to everyone who participated, at least 20-30 people per planting, or around three thousand in total. Perhaps even more. But more than twenty of our own 10 Million Trees volunteers also participated in the work: Rita Görgei-Reiner, Kriszta Konorót, Imola Bereczk, Franciska Hervai, Dénes Nagymihály, Lőrinc Hervai, Balázs Toth-Szabó, and certainly others, were regular returning participants in these plantings. Big thanks to them too!

Today we planted in Tolna, – as I started at the beginning. It was one of many plantings over nearly four years, where I took a shovel in hand, and at the end, I bid farewell to our trees placed in their eternal habitat, perhaps never to meet again. Your lives start from here and now, to which I could contribute a little. We could contribute, we, the 10 Million Trees. However, today’s planting was different. Firstly, the 100th in a long line, and secondly, because the presence of the young students of the Tolna primary school reinterpreted, if I wanted to use grand words, gave new meaning on a metaphysical level to the planting. It was tangible that these eight St. Stephen lime trees, which from today will strive to provide shade as soon as possible to those running on the school football field, became deeply connected to the children, who, as if they were the white-clad dance troupe from Csontváry’s Pilgrimage to the Cedar of Lebanon painting, welcomed and surrounded the arriving saplings with love.

The school’s teachers also deserve much credit, as they turned today into a project day for all classes: some wrote poems about the tree, the choir lined up for the ceremony in beautiful white blouses and shirts, and the backdrop was formed by exhibition panels made up of children’s drawings. Even the students sitting in the audience were not passive: they asked questions, worked, and gave feedback. Everything felt as if we were in peacetime, as if there were normality and order in the world, as if the truly important things, like the attention to the eight new trees arriving, were what mattered in life. And all this was not artificial; it stemmed from the most sincere, undisturbed natural existence of the children. They celebrated the trees,

On September 19, we shared the call for applications for the K&H Bank Cooling Groves project. 487 institutions applied. On November 31, we planted the first tree in Budakalász, and in accordance with our promise and commitment at the time, today we planted the last one.

I love such stories. I love the beauty of the trees, the subject of our actions, the precision of our activity, the cooperation not only between the bank and the foundation but also among a hundred schools, kindergartens, nurseries, children, and their parents. I love that 10 Million Trees, after concluding its most successful planting season to date, can still pull off such an achievement from its back pocket. I am proud of our national community and my colleagues. At times like this, under such joy, I experience most deeply what our motto is: Long live life!