Page 117 - EarthHeroes

Within a couple of years of being married, Yuzhen and Wanxiang had built themselves a sturdy mud-brick hut to replace their desert shack. They then devoted all of their energy and any spare money to planting more trees. Wanxiang even took extra labouring jobs in nearby villages and towns, asking for saplings instead of wages. The area of green began to grow around their home, but there were still setbacks. One time, Yuzhen and her husband bought 5,000 poplar saplings from a faraway nursery, bringing them home on the back of two cows, but no sooner had they been planted than the saplings were swept away by a sandstorm. Yuzhen learned that Mongolian pine grew better in the desert and she nurtured the baby trees close to her home before planting them out in the desert. She also learned that it was best to stabilise the land first by planting shrubs, like sage brush and sand willow, which held the water in the sand and stopped it blowing away. But once she planted thousands of willows, only to see them carried away by the wind. Despite these failures, Yuzhen was never deterred. She refused to let the desert beat her.
One day while working in Erlinchuan, Wanxiang learned that the government had given the village 50,000 saplings to plant to try to hold back the desert and dunes. Most of the villagers thought this was a waste of time and the saplings lay unplanted. Wanxiang asked if he could have them and was delighted when the village officials agreed. The next morning, Yuzhen and Wanxiang left their home at 3 a.m. to make the six-hour round trip to Erlinchuan, returning with bundles of saplings on their backs. They went back and forth for over 20 days collecting the trees. Over the following months, they planted them, often working late into the night. That year, they were lucky to have some good periods of rain and, miraculously, half of the saplings survived and started to grow into strong trees. They named them ‘Yin’s Forest’.
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