Starting With Nothing

In 2018, fire swept the Garden Route. It took farms, homes, and a hillside I’d come to love near Kraaibosch.

When the smoke cleared, I did something that looked, on paper, slightly mad. With no funding and a few thousand seedlings, I started planting it back.

I want to tell you how that began, because it’s the reason this letter exists.

A few years earlier, my son Benjamin was born. Like a lot of new parents, his arrival cracked a question open in me that I couldn’t put down: what do I actually value, and will my life reflect it? The honest answer came back as a short list. A healthy environment. Clean food and water. Real relationships. Community. Everything else was noise.

So I went looking for work that served that list. I learned permaculture, then syntropic agroforestry, the art of growing food forests that get richer over time instead of poorer. I built a small social enterprise. And when the fire came, I had just enough skill, and just enough stubbornness, to start.

The numbers, eventually, added up. We cleared eight hectares of invasive growth by hand. We put 4,500 indigenous trees in the ground. We built a food forest, 400-odd trees across fifty species, designed to feed people and soil for generations.

But here’s the thing the numbers don’t tell you.

Restoring that land changed me as much as I changed it. You cannot spend years on your knees in burnt soil, coaxing life back, without something shifting on the inside. I watched it happen to volunteers, too. People would arrive to “plant some trees” and leave quietly rearranged.

That’s when I understood the idea I’ve been chasing ever since: you can’t heal a landscape without also tending the people doing the healing. The outer landscape and the inner one are a single system.

It sounds poetic. It’s actually practical. Degraded land and depleted people tend to go together, and so does their recovery. The most resilient restoration projects I’ve seen aren’t the best-funded ones. They’re the ones where the people grew alongside the trees.

I’ve since taken that conviction into work at a much bigger scale: 30,000 trees a year across Southern Africa through the programmes I help run, urban greening days in cities, restoration that has to stand up to spreadsheets and funders and time. The scale changed. The conviction didn’t.

This letter is where I’m going to think it out loud. I’m calling the idea Inner & Outer Landscapes, and I’m building it in public, one letter every two weeks. Some issues will bring you a story from the field. Some, the harder, human side: the grief, the doubt, the stubborn hope this work runs on. Always one idea you can actually use.

If you came here for ten ways to plant more trees, you’ll get some of that. But I think you’re really here for the other thing: the part where regenerating the world and regenerating yourself turn out to be the same project.

Glad you’re here. Let’s get our hands dirty.

Chris