Phellodendron amurense - Amur cork tree

Admittedly, the fact that there are 50 tree sponsors scared me a little. However, as a copywriter, conducting small interviews for short individual portraits is an all-time favourite task for me. Then I started talking to tree sponsors - and was thrilled by the commitment and the sponsor personalities.

I remember well that already after the first phone calls, I thought: "I would love to be a tree godmother, too!" The more impressive people I got to know during the project, the more I learned about the climate trees in the arboretum, and the more enthusiastically I told my husband about the project.

At some point, together with my stepmother, a passionate hobby gardener, we chose a tree and became sponsors ourselves.

My husband and I are advertisers. He is a creative director in a Munich agency; I have been a freelance copywriter for many years. HSWT has been one of my clients for a long time, and I have had a strong bond of sympathy with Tanja Tenschert from the very beginning. As dog people with a rather demanding hound-mixed lady, we like to be out in nature and roam across meadows and through forests on adventure walks. Since the pandemic, we have been doing this in our old home, the "middle" Upper Palatinate. Here, we have set up a pleasant second home in my parents' house. Both of our enthusiasm for nature is not new. But the fact that I get to start my texting day in the early hours of the morning in the Upper Palatinate forest with Coffee (the dog lady) is something I always find a great and unique gift today. The HSWT planting campaign, my conversations with the tree sponsors and the writing of the portraits have wrapped the most beautiful of all "job loops" around this gift for me in the spring and summer months of 2021. They have fuelled my enthusiasm for the forest, for trees in general and our climate tree in particular, a cork tree (Phellodendron amurense), even more.

That is why I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you above all: thank you to all the tree-sponsors for the remarkable conversations and your great support in the arboretum and during the portrait process. Thanks to the University of Applied Sciences. For the planting campaign, of course, but also for your explorative interest and the scientific examination of a future-proof environment. Special thanks to Tanja Tenschert, who carried me through this major project with her reliability, friendliness and warmth. And thanks to my wonderful husband, who understood my enthusiasm and let himself be infected by it.

Distribution: Floodplain forests, lowland forests in north-eastern China, Manchuria, Amur region.

Size: 10 to 12 metres high and 10 to 12 metres wide

Leaves: deciduous, opposite, pinnate, 35 cm long, golden-yellow colour in autumn

Flower: yellow-green, hairy panicles

Fruits: spherical, pea-sized drupes, smelling strongly of turpentine