Paul Valencia Palaçios has walked for two hours from the east end of Glasgow to Govan to describe what it is like to plant a tree.

The 39-year-old asylum seeker from El Salvador sits in the offices of Govan Community Project – a charity that provides everything from English lessons to legal advice for refugees – and beams.

“You take a tree and you say: ‘Oh my God, that is a baby’. When I plant it, I see into the future, and imagine it to be a tall tree.” He struggles with the language and emotion, and so taps his words into Google Translate and hands over his phone: “It’s like being born again.”

Valencia Palaçios arrived in Glasgow earlier this year having fled “a terrible situation” in his home country. After several months learning English in his sometimes bewildering new home, he was offered a week-long trip to Dundreggan, 150 miles north of Glasgow. As part of Trees for Life’s Rewild and Recover programme, refugees as well as people coping with poor mental health or homelessness can plant native saplings, helping the charity to rewild 10,000 acres of the Highlands.

Valencia Palaçios jumped on a minibus with two friends from El Salvador and three Kurdish refugees, alongside Ruth Lamb of Govan Community Project. “It’s all about recovery from trauma,” says Lamb. “It’s open to people in different forms of recovery – refugees, victims of drugs, alcohol and the welfare system. It’s a kind of eco-therapy, bringing yourself back to how you truly are.”

Paul Valencia Palaçios fled El Salvador and now lives in Glasgow. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/the Observer

They drove past Loch Lomond, where Valencia Palaçios stopped and picked blackberries for the first time. “Everyone was amazed,” says Lamb. “They had come to Glasgow, the concrete jungle, and then saw this beautiful countryside. Everybody was, ‘I didn’t know Scotland was like this’.”

Trees for Life is one of four charities chosen for the Guardian and Observer’s 2019 climate emergency appeal. All four are committed to renewing nature and the planet by planting and protecting trees, forests and woodland.

At Dundreggan, Valencia Palaçios and his fellow asylum seekers spent arduous days on the hillside, planting small trees. In the evenings they cooked for each other, practised English and shared songs and stories. Palaçios went running and tried yoga.

“You have contact with nature and all the different birdsongs, and no people. It’s very quiet. You can listen to the trees,” he says.

Trees for Life’s modest wooden lodge at Dundreggan houses up to 12 volunteers at a time and the charity’s 25 staff are fundraising to build a centre to accommodate 40 people, with better facilities for people with special needs and for women (who, according to Lamb, sometimes struggle to make these trips for a variety of cultural and childcare reasons).

“We’ve always been very mindful that tree-planting has a profound impact on people’s lives, and we’d love to do a lot more of our Rewild and Recover programme,” says Steve Micklewright, chief executive of Trees for Life. “The feedback we get is quite emotional – planting trees is about hope for the future, doing something that will grow up after you’re not here, and will contribute to a bigger thing, restoring biodiversity in the Highlands and fighting climate change.”

The ecstatic comments in Dundreggan’s volunteers’ book evoke the passion of a pilgrimage. Volunteers include students but also older people from all over the world (anyone can book a volunteering week, with subsidised rates for those on low incomes).

“An intense, profound and beautiful week,” wrote one. “A step towards fulfilment, a step towards rejuvenation of this already beautiful land,” wrote another. One volunteer described how she chose to plant by herself, away from the group. “I took my time with the trees, dedicating each one to someone I love and am grateful for. Tucked them each in with the utmost care.”

Steve Micklewright says they receive emotional feedback. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/the Observer

Another visitor told how he took a tent to join the planting and slept on the hill, where late snow turned his abode into an igloo. He planted “his” trees in a figure of eight, and took GPS coordinates so that he could return to watch them grow. Plenty of volunteers do.

Valencia Palaçios hopes to continue his studies to become an engineer, enabling him to give something back to “the society of Scotland”. Meanwhile, the act of planting a tree caused him to reflect on his journey to Britain, and his future. “If you have contact with nature, you think for the future, for your family in the future,” he says. Tears well at the thought of his parents in El Salvador.

In the Highlands, planting trees, Yet he now feels a sense of freedom. “You can feel a new opportunity for your life. It was a beautiful experience. The smell, the clean air, you forget the bad situation for your family, for your studies. After that, you have energy, you are happy, you say, ‘When can we go again?’”

Palaçios hopes to plant more trees, and thinks everyone in Scotland should. “People in Scotland, wake up! You have many opportunities. You have a magnificent place, the best, most beautiful country in the world,” he says. “The government needs to make more activities like that. I think it should be obligatory – ‘Hey you, how many trees have you planted?’ We need to plant more.”