Looking back on this year’s planting season

This past spring planting season has been an unusual and intense one: this spring seemed to compress the transition from winter to summer into a single month.

This year’s late and compressed spring was likely connected to a strongly meandering jet-stream pattern, which allowed repeated cold-air intrusions into eastern Europe even while other parts of the continent were unusually warm.

We hope that the future forests we have designed for climate resilience will indeed be able to withstand the weather extremes we are already experiencing: mild winters, late frosts, and dry summers.

If all goes well, the seedlings we have planted will become witnesses to the lives of many creatures with much shorter life cycles than our own: the harvest mice nesting among the grasses, the descendants of the ravens stealing snacks from the planting crew, the wolves leaving their tracks at our planting site in the Hășmaș Mountains — and, in their own quiet way, to our human lives as well.

Ravens

Badger footprints

Wolf footprints