Experiencing
Time in woodland that already exists: the embodied experience that real care grows out of.
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The Children’s Forest at Roots Field
The Children’s Forest is a movement to inspire and enable children to plant healthy forests, and Roots Field is where that happens in Guernsey. Its aims run through every Saturday session, and its planting days are open to the whole island.
- Movement
- The Children’s Forest
- Here
- Roots Field
- Open day
- Free, each autumn
What the Children’s Forest is
It began from a simple observation: children carry real anxiety about the state of the natural world, and very few of them are ever handed something practical to do about it. The Children’s Forest hands them a forest, one they experience, imagine, plant and then keep coming back to tend.
Its vision is “a vibrant healthy forest at the heart of every community”. Twenty-seven Children’s Forests have been planted so far across the UK and US. What makes it work is that it isn’t a one-off planting event: the children who put the trees in are the same children who come back, year after year, to look after them.
Why it belongs here
A Children’s Forest needs three things: land, a group of children, and a nature educator. Roots Field has all three, which is unusual. Most projects have to assemble them from separate places. Here, they’re already in the same field every Saturday.
The four-step journey
The shape every Children’s Forest takes, and the shape the work takes here. It runs across seasons rather than a single afternoon, which is exactly why weekly groups on the same land suit it so well.
Imagining
Looking out over bare land and picturing the forest to come, through art, story, poetry and song.
Planting
Learning to plant properly, each tree going in with a wish for the future on a birch bark scroll.
Tending
Coming back over the years, with the community’s help, to care for the trees and the connection.
How it runs in our sessions
The four steps aren’t a separate programme bolted onto Saturdays. They’re the frame the sessions already sit inside. Nature Explorers spend most of their year experiencing and imagining, because that’s what five to eight year olds do best. Wilderness Guardians carry more of the planting and tending, which feeds straight into the conserve and share strands of their John Muir Award.
Because the same children return term after term, they see the consequence of their own work: the sapling they put in last winter, still there, taller.
Four aims
- Environmental: trees planted and looked after on land that was bare.
- Psychological: children placed on the solution side of the problem, the honest answer to eco-anxiety.
- Emotional: experiences that build belonging and hope rather than dread.
- Cultural: an intergenerational habit of caring for a place.
Community planting days
The free Children’s Forest Community Day each autumn brings time and craft in nature, food from the Wellness Centre, and tending the trees already in the ground. No experience needed: bring boots, warm layers and whatever curiosity you arrive with.
Sponsor a planting day
The weekly groups are funded by the families who attend. The community planting days are free by design, so cost is never the reason a child misses out. That’s where local business support comes in.
Fund a planting day
Sponsor a full community day on the land: the trees, the materials, the facilitation and the food. Free to every family who comes.
Fund the trees
Support saplings, stakes, guards and the aftercare that keeps them alive through their first hard years on an exposed clifftop.
Bring your team
Join a planting day with your colleagues and put a lasting piece of woodland into the island, together.
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