He used the racial ability of Yggdrasil, pillar of the world, to absorb large amounts of the world's energy and transform it into nutrients before injecting it into the land, preventing the trees from dying and its entire territory from turning into a great desert. This happened over 1000 years ago, when the sprout was not yet as powerful as it is today.
The sprout even younger than it is today was not able to bear the burden of using the pillar of the world on such a large scale and this affected its growth. To make matters worse, the races that lived in those lands invaded and tried to destroy the sea of trees, forcing it to further improve the natural defenses to contain the advance of the barbarian races.