Trees for Cities, the facilitator for this year’s National Tree Week tree planting, joined the BTP and BCC teams on 28th November, to green up Newtown in Birmingham.
Mac, Steve, and Julianne, three of BTP’s Trustees, assisted the BCC Woodland and City Parks teams, helping the T4C corporate volunteers put the new trees in the ground. The Woodland team marked out the eight sites and provided tools. Four T4C employees, from all over the country, turned up and dug their hearts out. One of the trees, a London Plane or Platanus Orientalis ‘Minaret’, was damaged and replaced free of charge!
Planting brings many benefits…
Newtown is one of our target, low canopy, priority wards. Thanks to the planting of these trees, the area will receive new benefits from them. Trees filter air pollution, provide shade and biodiversity, as well as protection from storm water. Planting these trees will contribute long-term to the Urban Forest Master Plan, and the Urban Forest Accelerator projects.
Mac chatting away with the Trees for Cities volunteers, supervising the hole digging. This is to ensure the correct depth in relation to the tree. If we plant these trees well, they will flourish in the years to come.
Here we see the city parks team digging with T4C, preparing the holes for the semi-mature trees going in. The trees are being protected by stakes and metal mesh cages, to prevent extensive vandalism.
It was a truly lovely morning planting trees in Newtown with several partners involved. We would like to thank the Woodland and City Parks teams, the Trees for Cities volunteers, and also Julianne who provided these images and videos. We look forward to more tree planting throughout Tree Week 2023!
