Toto Malvar: Planting trees, and giving new life to forests

It’s become fashionable to say one has planted a tree. A few can boast to have nurtured a forest. Recently, I met a man who can rightly say he planted a mountain of trees—and gave new life to forests.

- By PINKY CONCHA COLMENARES

In 1999, this man’s initiative was credited to have planted 700,000 trees in the Upper Marikina River Basin by a Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) audit report. Although there is no official figure on how much that number has risen since then, it is likely to have surpassed one million trees covering an area of more than 1,000 hectares.

This man is Alberto M. Malvar, who is known as “Toto” or “Lolo Toto” to residents in Barangay Calawis, Antipolo, and to family and former classmates.

Toto’s connection with nature is extraordinary; it celebrates the meaning of Easter, of new beginnings and new life.

At Mt. Purro Nature Reserve (MPNR) where I interviewed him for this story, I saw how a man like him could plant a million trees and now work on planting the seeds to nurture nature in the hearts of the next generation.

Toto has a smile that stays in his eyes, a soft voice like the sound of swaying trees in the wind, and a pace that defies his 77 years in the planet, walking through the rough forest terrain in the MPNR every day to visit his trees and to water each tree he had planted to commemorate a classmate who had passed away.

Toto has followed an unusual vocation for 35 years now. “I have a calling; God has called me to plant trees,” he said sitting in the bamboo chapel built on a hill in MPNR. “And my mother had advised me to plant trees to prevent floods that cause death and destruction.”

His inspiration also comes from his grandfather, General Miguel Malvar, a Philippine national hero, also considered as the "father of reforestation" in the Philippines. Today, a 90-cm in diameter, 25-meter high tree stands in Barrio San Miguel in Sto. Tomas, Batangas as the Malvar Tree.

The Bamboo Chapel