Germaine Greer: Don't bark up the wrong tree with the Jubilee Woods The suppliers nominated by the Woodland Trust will charge £30 for a similar black poplar, plus £7.50 for shipping. A tree provided at such a price is meant to be grown as a specimen tree in a garden. Even so, the price seems steep. From October to March the same suppliers will let you have six bare-rooted woodland trees for a mere £79 plus shipping, which may seem reasonable - but think again. "Plant your own wood!" they burble. Six trees won't make you so much as a spinney, let alone a wood. If you are trying to create woodland you need around 900 plants to the acre. You plant many more than you want because it is competition between the species that will give you the mix best adapted to the growing conditions. In nature, seedlings of various species compete for their patch of sky, and the maker of new woodland needs to replicate that situation, usually by planting the trees no more than a metre apart, that is, 3,600 saplings to the acre. This is not something you can do at £30 a pop, or even £79 for six. At that rate only a millionaire could plant a wood. A quick surf around the websites of hedging suppliers will reveal an entirely different scale of prices for bare-rooted whips to be supplied in the off-season, from October to March. These are the same in all respects as the plants that are uprooted and potted on to be sold for much higher prices in the spring. Most growers will quote a wholesale price for large quantities of hedging plants, and that brings the wood into the realm of possibility for non-millionaires. At this level, £79 will buy you 100 plants or more rather than six, and you will have a wide variety of native species to choose from. Just what you choose should be dictated by what you see already growing on your kind of soil in your part of the world. Bare-rooted plants are not bulky, so shipping is much cheaper. Once the plants have arrived, they should be unpacked and the roots set to soak for a few hours, before being heeled in. This means digging a trench deep and wide enough to accommodate the roots, with one sloping side; the whips are then leant against the sloping side and the roots covered with earth. The trench is best dug in mild weather and in a sheltered place so that there is no chance of frost being trapped in it. Once put to bed in their trench, and maybe scarfed with straw, the whips will survive the winter, but they should be planted out before the sap begins to rise. Preparation of the ground -removal of competing species (grasses, nettles, brambles and such) - and maybe some landscaping such as the marking out of a path or the digging of a pond, should already have happened, but the planting holes should not be dug in advance. The digging of a few hundred holes is no easy task - a mini-digger on planting day will earn its hire. Gone are the days when we used special mulches for treeplanting. These days we try hard not to disrupt the soil profile. The best of good news is that the RHS has developed Rootgrow, a granulated version of the mycorrhizas that are necessary for root growth and efficient conversion of nutrients. For bare-rooted whips, half a scoop in the bottom of each planting hole is probably more than enough. If baby trees dry out in their first year of life after transplanting, they will certainly die. Some legal method of watering must be devised in advance of planting. Otherwise all the expense and effort will be for naught. The black poplar the children were planting was destined to be staked, apparently with a tall stake. Root growth is discouraged by hard staking as the tree is prevented from flexing, and in wild weather a tender little tree can be galled by the stake or broken against it. It is always better to shelter a baby wood than to stake the individual plants, just as it is better to rabbit-proof the wood rather than encumber the struggling plants with spiral guards and whatnot. Six million saplings will not necessarily become six million trees. Even if they do, Britain will still have less than half the EU average percentage of tree cover. Though 60 new 60-acre woods may seem a lot, most of us will notice no change. A glance at the Jubilee Woods Activity Map on the Woodland Trust website shows just how sparse and far-flung the new plantings are and how many are on farmland, where most of us can never enjoy them. Woods don't have to be 60 acres; a wood can be quite tiny and yet be proper woodland with its full complement of indwelling species. It can be long and thin or short and fat. It could fill that corner that is now a mess of brambles; it could replace that patch of grass you have to mow every weekend. A wood doesn't need pruning, herbiciding, insecticiding, fungiciding; once growing, a wood takes care of itself. The moss you scrape out of your lawn is one of the beauties of the wood. Snails belong in the wood, and so do the thrushes that eat them. All the losing battles you fight in a garden are victories in a wood.