How to mend a broken world
Meet Dianna Beresford-Kroeger a 78 year old botanist, biochemist and climate visionary who has compiled a master plan to heal the planet: a living library of tree DNA, inspired by an ancient Celtic prophesy she learned as an orphan.
Born in England and raised in Ireland, Dianna was 11 years old when her parents were killed in a car accident. She was taken in by her bachelor uncle, a noted chemist and scholar, and her summers were spent with her great-aunt Nell, a medicine woman, who taught her the ancient ways of Brehon law. These teachings viewed trees as sentient beings, plants as medicine and prophesied “the world would be in very bad shape” at our current time. Dianna was told she was the very last child to carry the Brehon forward.
When she entered university to study botany and biochemistry, Dianna was keen to put her ancient lore under the microscope. The more she studied, the more it confirmed the symbiosis between plants and humans. In 1966 she went to America to explore the impact of nuclear radiation on biological systems and then moved to Canada to study plant metabolism before commencing work as a cardiovascular research scientist in 1972. Dianna’s scientific career connected her love of trees and the human heart.
In the early 1980s, Dianna felt a deep calling back to her ancient childhood teachings. She left academia “to take the knowledge of the ivory tower down to the people” and started writing books to translate the power of trees to heal ourselves and the planet. Her work inspired the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a small group advised by Dianna, that handpicks the world’s ‘grandmother tree' species to reproduce and replant them wherever their eco-function will be most effective against climate change and pollution.
Her legacy will be a living library of the global forests that will continue to heal and preserve our planet for generations to come.
“We have to pick up where we left in destroying the world. We have to put it back together. The bio plan is to take each little part of your world around you — be it a pot on a balcony, look after that- look after the trees, look after your street, look after the people of the street. That will actually save the planet.”
