How Many Trees Make a Forest?

My partner is an ecologist (as a profession) and he said you can plant trees all you want, but you cannot plant a forest. There are so many intricate relationships between bacteria, soil composition, mushrooms, insects, birds and so forth, that it is almost impossible to plant a forest.

What I find interesting is the threshold. When do you just not have a forest? Would one tree more make a difference? Two trees more? Let’s say you have three hundred trees in a certain space, when would it stop being a bunch of trees and start to be and feel and interact like a forest?

So I’ve sent off an email to the forestry organization of my country and asked them the question. I wonder if they have a service to answer the foolish questions of the public, or if this sort of question comes up a lot? And I have a response…

…that there is no easy answer. I guess that people have made up the word “forest”, so people define what is and isn’t a forest. The forestry department copied out the part of our federal legislation, and a forest is pretty much what people say is a forest. Like, duh, but you know, sometimes you need to ask a stupid question in life. The trees should be over a certain age (more than ten years) and a certain number of them per hectare, but that can be modified or adapted if folks need it to be a forest, or not a forest, for whatever reason. Forests have certain legal protections sometimes, like you can’t cut them down because they’re protecting an area from mudslides. Or if they don’t qualify for the protections, then you can cut them down to have cows graze there or build something.

So I kind of have an answer, but I kind of don’t. I don’t know how I feel about that. Foro is just doing his face-palm thing, because I just spent (wasted?) time not really getting an answer to a question that I could probably live perfectly well not knowing the answer.

It’s still better than a book I picked up when I was a kid titled Where does the Butterfly Go When it Rains. It was very poetic, and talked about what badgers do, what people do, what fish do, but then it would always finish with “…but where does the butterfly go when it rains” and I wanted an answer, dammit!