Tree stumps are very much alive. Not only do they make for great outdoor seating — minus the chafing and fresh dirt staining your jeans — they can regenerate and grow into a brand-new tree. If you thoroughly enjoy breathing oxygen, savouring what’s left of the Earth, or feel like picking up a new hobby, here are some tips on how to regrow that sad stump sitting in your backyard.
The Right Conditions
Regrowing your stump requires you to become a tree connoisseur. You should first identify the tree stump to tailor how you will cultivate it. Slow growing trees such as oak, maple, and most conifers (the boring ones), don’t sprout well from stumps and cannot regrow. Hopefully your tree is more perseverent.
You’ve won the tree lottery if you have a willow, cottonwood, or elm stump! They grow rapidly, and are most likely to grow shoots that can transform into a smaller, but
still-respectable tree. I’d advise you to download apps like ‘PlantSnap’ or
‘Planto,’ where you can take pictures of your trees, and discover if you’ve been endowed with an eligible, tree-growing stump.
The Best Way to Grow your Tree
If your tree stump resides in the shadiest corner of your backyard, chances are, it’s probably dead. To revive your tree, you need to provide it with the nutrients it needs. When you step out for some Vitamin D, check that your stump is also receiving its much-needed sunlight and rain. Enrich the soil with organic materials like weeds, paper or even hair, and lay wood chips as mulch to protect the outlying roots whilst the canopy forms.
The next step to growing your tree is patience. Sprouts will form on their own, and there are
some cool ways they do it. My favourite is a lovely process called ‘root sucking.’ If you have an Elm Tree, they will produce ‘root suckers’ or small shoots that emerge from the roots, which will grow into a new tree if left undisturbed. If your tree isn’t into root sucking, they may have epicormic shoots instead, which are dormant buds located beneath the bark of the tree trunk. When the tree is cut down, these buds are stimulated to grow, resulting in epicormic shoots that sprout from the stump. These tend to appear following exposure to increased light levels, or even fire. If you really want to embrace your inner tree-hugger, coppicing is another traditional forestry technique, practised to produce more sustainable wood. Trees are cut close to the ground to encourage growth of new shoots from the roots. So, if your stump is a bit short, this technique may work for your tree.
Why do we care?
We live in a world where our phones, clothes and morals dwindle every year. Voracious consumerism insists that we are starving despite being egregiously full, and suddenly one can find themselves anticipating yet another parcel, containing two pairs of jeans, three shirts and five necklaces wrapped neatly in a glossy Shein plastic bag. Now, we live amongst 20 million metric tonnes of plastic that’s accumulated into mountains of landfill or the digestive tracts of precious marine life.
But capitalism not only contaminates our minds, it takes over our forests. In the perpetual quest for maximising profits, over 10 million hectares of trees are being cut down each year. Normally, Earth’s complex natural systems can rejuvenate itself to maintain a state of equilibrium, but when it absorbs excessive stress, it falls into a new state of equilibrium that cannot be reversed.
It is incumbent on us to be sustainable however and whenever we can, and to embrace unconventional practices. Growing a tree from a stump you assumed to be dead and useless harnesses nature’s abilities to regenerate itself, and allows forests to be managed in a more sustainable manner. Through coppicing and selective cutting, we can maintain the integrity of our lands, support diverse plant and animal species, and continue to sequester carbon to mitigate the effects of climate change.
So, leave your stump in the shining sun, regrow your tree and breathe easy!
