By Ratnaghosha
This January we are going to plant another woodland at Adhisthana. Another 500 trees will join up with the current woods in the upper field to create more wildlife habitat, provide wind shelter for the flower gardens and enhance the environment. At Adhisthana there are the usual wild creatures such as squirrels, weasels, rabbits, deer, badgers and so on. And then we have a vast array of insect life attracted by the wildflower meadows.
The woodland provides habitats for all of these and more and will be a haven for pollinators too. In addition, more trees will provide some screening for our new solitary retreat huts, which are currently being prepared for use.
We will be planting mainly native species such as rowan, hazel, hawthorn, oak, blackthorn, crab apple, downy and silver birch. For colour there will be dogwood, cherry and dog rose and also fruit trees and flowering currant. We are continuing to beautify the whole site, adding to the already stunningly beautiful gardens.
If you would like to be part of creating this exciting new addition to the beauty and ecology of Adhisthana, you just need to book on the Tree Planting retreat which runs from January 5th to 11th . On the retreat we will plant trees between breakfast and lunch and in the afternoon there will be an opportunity to study with Saddhanandi and Ratnaghosha. Of course, there will be meditation and puja too. We will study a
talk by Bhante Sangharakshita called Fields of Creativity, which you can find on Free Buddhist Audio here.