By people, for people.

10/10/2026 – 16/10/2026  by Uwe Heitkamp

Edition 40.2026

An important note to begin with: both our short stories and this website itself are written and designed by real people. There is no place for artificial intelligence on https://www.eco123.info. We work exclusively with natural intelligence and we allow ourselves to make mistakes. That’s all part of it. When we plant trees with our own hands, we draw on the knowledge we’ve gained from years of experience in botany. Does that make you curious?

When, following the major forest fire in Monchique in 2018, we decided to reforest our newly acquired plot of land in Esgravatadouro, we agreed that we would first install a sprinkler system using collected rainwater and then plant around 1,000 native trees of various species. The sprinkler system is intended to provide protection against further forest fires. The water comes from the rain and is collected via guttering and stored in cisterns.

In the centre of our botanic woodland garden, there has been an underground water source (a mine) for centuries, which naturally provides us with the water needed to irrigate the new tree plantations. We will therefore use the two terraces below the water source to plant the next batch of trees from November 2026 onwards. Over the coming hot summers, we will water the young trees automatically; in other words, we will make use of gravity to allow water to flow slowly from the mine and seep into the soil around the plantations. To cope with the sometimes hot summer days, we will build cork shades for these trees, which we can then remove during the winter months. Below the terraces, the stream cascades down from the mountain into the valley and runs through the centre of the Botanic Garden.

If you’ve never planted a tree before, you’ve come to the right place. Don’t be afraid. You can adopt a tree – that is, you can sponsor your own tree – or plant one yourself. One Saturday morning, you’ll learn how to dig a small hole and create a little pit with straw and water, where the sapling will be placed. Then the hole will be filled in again. Trees are just like humans and resemble them in their behaviour. Trees love company and enjoy chatting to one another. How do they do this?

The botanist Susanne Simard, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has shown her students, in an experiment involving mother trees, how older, strong and healthy trees supply and share nutrients with young trees via their root systems. If you like, we’d be happy to show you our mother tree – a 300-year-old cork oak in our Botanical Woodland Garden – a mother tree that has adopted both an olive tree and an avocado plant. Do come and visit us.