Pat Savola is travelling around her abundant backyard garden, which couldn’t be more different from the forest full of spiky spruce trees she once worked in.
“If you had to go head first through spruce it was nasty and scratchy and prickly,” Pat says.
But when she would happen to brush past a western larch — a tree with needles that turned yellow in the fall, before losing them in the winter, and growing new ones in the spring — it was lovely.
“Oh they are so soft,” Pat says.
It was love.
“A love affair with larch,” she says with a smile.
That was about 40 years ago, before Pat received a debilitating diagnosis that left her reliant on a wheelchair.
“For the first six months, we sat on the couch and cried,” Pat says.
But eventually she processed the information and learned to “befriend the fear.”
“It was picking myself up, dusting myself off,” Pat says. “And we keep going.”
More recently, Pat found herself feeling a familiar sense of helplessness. But this time it was about the adversity facing the environment, and she recalled a compelling question.
“What is it that I can do, that I would like to do, that no one else is doing, that would make a difference?” Pat recites a quote from architect Buckminster Fuller.
“Because of my disability, there’s a lot of things I can’t do,” Pat says. “But I can get trees planted.”
So Pat bought 60 western larch seedlings online, and has spent the past year fostering her beloved trees at home.
“Trees cool the air. They shade the streets,” Pat says before listing the complex ways trees benefit the environment. “And they raise property values to boot!”
Now Pat is taking out ads in her local paper and online, offering a baby larch to anybody who wants to plant one in their neighbourhood – for free.
“If I don’t do it,” Pat says. “I can’t expect anyone else to do it.”
After planting one larch in her backyard, and giving away almost 50 trees and counting, Pat’s also growing optimism for the future.
“Everybody has something to contribute. The world needs a lot of change,” Pat says. “And we all have a responsibility to do something about it.”
