Our first tree-planting day was a modest affair: a handful of seedlings sourced from a local supplier, a small group of founding members, and no nursery of our own yet to fall back on if anything went wrong.
What actually went wrong
A fair number of those first seedlings didn't survive, insufficient watering during a dry spell that followed the planting, and species choices we hadn't yet learned to be more careful about. Several ornamental seedlings we'd chosen partly for how quickly they'd look impressive struggled badly once the dry spell set in, a lesson that shaped our later, much stronger preference for hardier indigenous species. It was, frankly, a humbling start for an organisation whose Constitution had just committed it to environmental restoration as a core objective barely two weeks after registration.
At the time, it felt like a genuine setback rather than a learning experience, we'd invested real effort and a modest budget into seedlings that mostly didn't make it. In hindsight, it was probably the most useful failure we've had.
What we built because of it
What came out of that first attempt was the decision to build our own nursery rather than rely entirely on bought seedlings, giving us control over how seedlings were hardened and prepared before ever reaching a planting site, and to lean toward hardier indigenous species going forward rather than choosing partly for visual impact.
Every planting day since has built on lessons that first, imperfect one taught us, and our nursery's steadily improving survival rates are, in a real sense, a direct answer to that first day's failures. It's a story we tell fairly often at planting days now, mostly because new volunteers seem to find it reassuring that we didn't start out with everything figured out either.