Every movement claims a founding moment. Plant Your Age has three, decades apart, and none of them looked like the beginning of anything. Between them runs one unbroken thread: someone planted without waiting for permission, a title, or an audience.
The 1970s: Nau’s Seeds
David Kalua, known simply as “Nau,” was a Kenya Prisons constable earning about $20 a month. He planted constantly, not as a hobby but the way other men breathe: State House grounds, a children’s home board, nursery beds that were never his to claim, all tended with total care and no expectation of ownership. He left behind two lessons, taught by being lived rather than said: greatness begins in service, and the strongest voice is the one spoken in truth and humility.
Age 14: The Boy Who Planted His Years
No ceremony, no organisation, no photograph: a teenager doing sums in the school holidays, planting trees for his own age, then his mother’s, then his father’s. The idea travelled decades later not because it was clever, but because it was available to anyone, instantly, at any scale. Twenty-two years before any organisation existed to carry it, the founding act of Plant Your Age had already happened.
2011: Seventy-One for Wangari
On 26 September 2011, one day after Professor Wangari Maathai’s death, Dr. Isaac Kalua Green called on Kenya and the world to honour each year of her life by planting and growing 71 trees. The first Wangari Maathai Green Corner was planted that October at the University of Nairobi’s Kabete Campus, under the leadership of William Ruto, then Minister for Agriculture. Both original Green Corners (Kabete and KICC) still stand today.
2012 and 2019: A Presidential Endorsement, Then a National Garden
On 30 April 2012, at Kitui, President Mwai Kibaki planted the tree that completed a collection of 80, one for each year of his life, and formally endorsed Plant Your Age for global adoption. This is the movement’s real launch year: 2012, not 2026.
Seven years later, on 14 September 2019, the Living Legacy Garden rose at Uhuru Park: 50 trees in total (47 for Kenya’s 47 counties, one for Kenya itself, one for the international community, and one for Green Africa Foundation) planted by 47 schoolchildren. Seven years on, all 50 are alive. We can walk you to them.
2026: Counted, Honestly
Since 2011, the movement has logged 981 million tree-growing contributions, the Founding Living Legacy, dated to 30 June 2026. It’s published with its own honest range: 700 million to 1.2 billion. Plant Your Age applies its own Seven Questions accountability test to that number and scores itself able to answer only two of seven, and only partially: the same honesty standard it asks of everyone else, applied first to itself.
Today: You Join the Story
What began as one boy’s sums in the school holidays becomes, on 14 September 2026, a live platform: Access. Register. Enter your age. Commit to trees. Track. Share. Fifty-plus years after Nau first put his hands in soil that wasn’t his, the movement he never named now has one.
Every one of the 981 million contributions counted since 2011 started exactly the way yours will: one name, one number, one decision to begin. Nau never asked for credit. The boy with the sums never asked for a following. The movement was built by people who planted first and explained later. Fifty-plus years on, that’s still the only qualification it asks of anyone who joins.