  How many monochromatic paths, cycles or general trees does one need to cover
all vertices of a given $r$-edge-coloured graph $G$? These problems were
introduced in the 1960s and were intensively studied by various researchers
over the last 50 years. In this paper, we establish a connection between this
problem and the following natural Helly-type question in hypergraphs. Roughly
speaking, this question asks for the maximum number of vertices needed to cover
all the edges of a hypergraph $H$ if it is known that any collection of a few
edges of $H$ has a small cover. We obtain quite accurate bounds for the
hypergraph problem and use them to give some unexpected answers to several
questions about covering graphs by monochromatic trees raised and studied by
Bal and DeBiasio, Kohayakawa, Mota and Schacht, Lang and Lo, and Gir\~ao,
Letzter and Sahasrabudhe.
