Show the Love

 Every year around Valentine’s Day, hundreds of thousands of people join in the Climate Coalition's #ShowTheLove campaign for the places, people and life that we want to protect from climate change. This year’s campaign runs from 5-24 February. The Woodland Trust are challenging people to take one action to show your love for woods and trees.

There are many ways to do this of course but part of this campaign is the symbolism of the Green Heart. People across the UK and no doubt elsewhere craft green hearts to wear, share and display!

Here is the heart I decorated for this year, it's a bit of a cheat as the wooden heart had already been painted and I just added some stickers that had come in a stash of crafting supplies I bought in a second hand shop

and these are the green hearts I made for last year's campaign

The wooden heart in the middle is attached to a clothes peg and came in a birthday gift bag of craft supplies, the two cardboard hearts I bought recently from a second hand shop. The beads and thread are from my stash of upcyclable craft supplies. I painted all the hearts with poster paint, which is water soluble.

World Wildlife Fund sent me a green heart as part of this campaign a couple of years ago. It's now permanently pinned to one of my coats and is a little faded but this is what it looked like originally!

 As well as making, wearing and displaying green hearts, you may like to try some of these suggestions from the Woodland Trust about how you can show your love for nature, particularly for trees

Plant a tree – make your surroundings greener, healthier and happier
Record wildlife with Nature's Calendar – share your seasonal observations of nature to help chart the effects of climate change (This is something I should do more regularly. I send my wildlife records to the local wildlife record centre but somehow forget to send them to Nature's Calendar).
Contact your local political representatives and ask them to help protect the things you love from climate change
Sign the Tree Charter – join thousands of others to celebrate and protect trees, and combat threats like climate change

And remember get out there and enjoy nature, it's good for your health and it's great fun and you may even make some new friends like this grey squirrel we met on Corstorphine Hill this lunchtime (when the sun came out between showers)