To plant more than 4,500 trees in one day, you don’t move like a gardener, you move like a machine.
In a video viewed millions of times on social media, Leslie Dart walks across a desolate and burnt landscape in Saskatchewan. She plunges a small spade into the ground, levers open a hole, drops in a seedling, then stomps the hole shut, barely breaking stride as she does it again, and again, and again.
By the end of that summer day last year, Dart had planted 4,545 trees. In the past three summers, she has planted 372,290 trees across Canada.
Dart, who now works in the aerospace manufacturing industry after graduating from Durham College in Ontario this spring, is among the thousands of tree planters, many of them college students, who work mostly for logging companies across Canada to plant trees each summer….