It’s taken us years of having a garden to consider planting a tree. We finally summoned up the courage last spring, partly to hide the gap of the big maples that the neighbours behind us took down a few months ago, and partly because we wanted to experience the joy of watching trees grow, season by season.

We planted four trees:
– Rowan (I see them on mountainsides on my roams with the dog)
– Liquid Amber, (the leaves turn fiery each autumn)
– Himalayan birch (cheerful, upright, papery stems in winter)
– Weeping Pear (the silver-grey leaves flicker like tickertape in the evening).

There’s something about planting trees that feels so, well, grown up. My wife is the gardener, I’m the reluctant labourer, doing my best to take credit for her wise horticultural decisions. We hope these four trees will be there long after we’ve left this house, long after I’ve retired, maybe long after we are in the soil ourselves. And that’s a weird thought.

But more pressing is how do you keep four young trees alive through the blazing hot summer drought we’ve just experienced? That’s a lot of watering-cans to be carried to the back of the garden when a hosepipe-ban kicks in. It came as a shock to me exactly how much your young trees drink in their first two or three years until their roots are well and truly bedded in.

What seemed at first like a monotonous and sweaty trudge, became a rather enjoyable and meditative evening routine of slowly filling watering cans fill with precious water. And simply spending time with my trees. We bought a nice bench to sit on, beneath shade we hope one day will emerge. I know we won’t benefit fully from our trees – they’ll ultimately be for someone else.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
Nelson Henderson

Investing in our leaders
All this watering gave me lots of thinking time. About the leaders that I have the privilege of working alongside and watching grow. The knowledge that even while we work closely to try to solve challenges in our schools, we share a vanishingly short and precious professional life together. Two things became more and more clear to me with every watering can I filled: (a) that we need to cherish this time and never take each other for granted, and (b) that not only are we investing in our leaders for 2025, but also for five or ten years down the line. For future children who have not yet been born, even future teachers who are children in our classes in school right now.

What’s your soil like?
Soil and the choice of site is key for all new plants. We want our leaders to feel the early support,  nurturing, pep talks, frequent phone calls and cups of coffee to help them through the first set of leadership hurdles. All those essential messages to remind them why they took on this role, and to reassure them that they’re not alone.

There needs to be space too, at the right time, for them to open their shoulders, to make their own decisions, and eventually spread their wings. There’s nothing worse than trees planted too close together, unable to stretch out their branches when ready. Each one of my trees looks and feels very different: the texture of the trunk, the curve of the crown, the shifting leaf shadows. I like how they’re stamping their own character in the garden already, but I know they’ll need time and nourishment to realise their full expression.

Recognise their unique identity
Each leader is different, and while we may have designed a well-oiled CPD program or leadership offer, we have to remember that human beings are, well, human. You can read all the plant guides or follow the advice on Gardener’s World, but at some point you’ve actually got to look closely at your tree to check its vigour. You feel it, study it, sense whether the sap rising, and if you’re as mad as me (with a glass of wine in your hand in the evening), you begin to talk to it.

Often when driving home after a particularly intense or an exciting day, I spend a few moments thinking about the leader I’ve just had the joy of working alongside. I give thanks that because of their own particular skillset, experience and context, they always seem to have different (and usually better) solutions to the challenge we faced today. Then I try to imagine what their future might look like over the next few years, beyond today.

Leave it alone
Once you’ve planted something, you leave it well alone. You let it grow. When we see a plant apparently doing nothing, we want to pull it up and take a good look at what’s going on underneath. But of course, we know not to do that, because what’s going on is invisible work – the plant is pushing roots down to prepare for rising up. Once you’ve got the conditions right, you have to leave things for longer than you thought you needed to. This is the opposite of constant checking up and micromanagement, which can unsettle the leader, thinking they haven’t got your support. Healthy, long-lasting growth takes time and patience to bed in, more than we thought might be necessary.

Don’t pander to every need
When it’s dry as it has been, if you keep watering a tree it won’t extend its root systems. Trees need a little stress because it makes them search for water, it makes them resilient to future dry spells and stops them becoming lazy.  I was sorely tempted to overwater in the heat, but there’s a fine balance: a little struggle is a good thing. Beware of over-helping.

Plant for next year not this year
Mostly what you are doing in a garden is producing colour this year, or shape for the next. If you go for colour this year (annuals, for example), you’ll be planting them every year from now on. Whereas if you go for structure (planting perennials and trees) then they’ll repay you in spades (pardon the pun), in the years to come.

If you are looking for short term gains and quick wins then go for colour, but beware grabbing things that look showy but which, after a burst of colour, shrivel up and die. Annuals grow quickly, and then disappear. There are too many temporary, gimmicky things in education, that come and go. Instead it can help to picture what it is that you want to see in five years’ time. This may take time, but you get the joy of watching it grow. You might have to wait for the plant to develop before it produces its first bloom, but it will be stronger as a result. What’s your perennial tradition?

Succession
Last year my wife bought me the book Wilding by the beautifully named Isabella Tree, and in it she describes a five-hundred-year-old oak tree, the Knepp Mighty Oak, which is perhaps only halfway through its life. It began growing during the war of the Roses and would have lived through the English Civil War as a fine young tree in the mid-17th century. A single mature oak produces ten thousand acorns each autumn, meaning that a long-lived tree may produce nine million acorns in its time. People are asking whether this year, 2025, is a mast year for oaks – a year where they produce a bumper crop of acorns – where the surplus seed overwhelms squirrels, ensuring enough seeds germinate into new trees. 

Nature’s way of ensuring succession seems gloriously abundant. It’s a ridiculously over-the-top, energy sapping way of ensuring that the future is safe. To do the same for our future leaders in schools, we may need to prepare the ground more carefully, sow seed more liberally and water for longer than we thought. Hope isn’t just a stab in the dark – it may involve practical support and deep planning, spreadsheets and CPD, policy writing and building the right culture to attract, develop and retain leaders for the future.

I don’t know what will become of my trees. I hope they’ll stay for a long time in our garden, but also that they’ll spread their branches beyond our fences and flourish in the future, bringing colour and joy, and ultimately cool shade in the blazing summers to come, for future generations.

Let’s plant trees together this year.