More Trees
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now." – Chinese proverb.
Trees are climate heroes. Like most plants, they photosynthesise. That is, they capture carbon dioxide from the air and break it down to store the carbon and release the oxygen. They are among the biggest and longest-lived organisms on the planet, so each tree takes in large amounts of carbon dioxide and holds the carbon in their bodies for decades or centuries.
Trees provide homes and sustenance for a wide range of living beings from sawflies to mosses to bats. Simply walking through woods makes us humans feel healthier emotionally and physically.
Richard Higgs, Director of More Trees
We don’t have enough trees
There is about 13% tree cover in the UK. In the EU it is 39%. We have lost trees from hedgerows, to agriculture and we've lost entire woodlands. You might think of Bath as a leafy city, but it would benefit a lot from more trees. As well as bringing beauty, they provide shade and cool the air in hot weather and reduce wind and absorb rain when it is cold and wet.
Since More Trees BANES (www.moretrees.earth) was set up by Adam Gretton in 2008, we've planted about 14,000 trees. We're a young organisation finding our way but we've already achieved a lot. Some of the planting has been on the edge of the city. Some of it has been urban planting. We want to put trees in places where they're going to have the most impact for people, the local environment and the city. Trees and woodlands can be enjoyed when they are young, but at around 10 to 15 years they really begin to make a difference, and they might continue to grow for a hundred years.
We may be unique
More Trees, BANES will never be one of the really big providers of trees for large scale carbon capture. We don’t plan to be the provider of thousands of trees for planting in big blocks to create entire woodlands, but our model of growing and planting does still have a big impact.
We have a unique model in that we don’t buy-in our trees. We collect seeds locally and bring them to a central hub nursery for processing and planting in trays and root trainers. We have a network, currently 17, of other community nurseries where the young trees are cared for and grown in the ground in planting beds for a couple of years before they are moved to their final planting site.
Volunteers are involved in every stage, so each of our trees has a story to tell. The seed was collected by a volunteer who probably lived near the collecting site. Someone else sowed that seed and grew it on. It was cared for by volunteers in a community nursery somewhere in the city. Then others planted it. Those two thousand trees we plant every year have already delivered a huge beneficial impact to the volunteers involved. As they grow, they will make an impression on people who live close to them. They will provide shade, attract nature and beautify the areas where we live.
One of the challenges is keeping all of the nurseries connected. We want them to work independently, but also want them to feel part of the whole. Fortunately, nowadays we can use things like WhatsApp groups to make this easier.
A balancing act
It's a balance between deciding the numbers of trees that we want to grow and also delivering the best experience for the volunteers involved. We try hard to balance the benefits the trees bring to the environment and the benefits we can deliver to the volunteers.
Sorting seeds
For example, at the moment (April) we're really busy pricking out seedlings, potting them on and preparing to distribute them to our nurseries. That’s an awful lot of work and we rely on very capable, trained volunteers who can deliver all of that for us, which is absolutely brilliant. But then we also want to work with some other groups who need a bit more support in terms of their volunteering.
There are lots of different volunteer roles. Some people come seed-collecting. Others like planting and some come every Thursday morning for seed sorting, pricking out and so on. I have worked with the various teams and found sorting seeds very engaging. You're doing something with your hands, doing something productive, and you have some really good conversations. I'm not a knitter, but I imagine it's probably similar to a ‘knit and natter’.
We have a big and busy year-round operation, and involve volunteers in every step of the tree production and planting calendar
Finding the nurseries has been pretty easy. Now we are established and known we actually have lots of requests from people who want to have a nursery. Some of our current ones are on private land, some on allotment sites. We've got six in various schools. We have a little one in the backyard of the Bath Building Society, right in the centre of town. We have a good range.
Growing up
We take bio security very seriously. We train the team and our volunteers so that we supply healthy trees to our nurseries and planting sites, and minimise health risks to the environments we work in including local woodlands.
We get requests to plant the trees in all sorts of sites. One of the challenges is deciding where the trees will have the most impact. This is usually a city centre site where the local community can be involved. We look for areas where we can plant them in groups like mini forests which will have a big impact for people. It's not easy because city sites tend to be smaller spaces. Urban green space is highly contested, with lots of uses from playing football to general recreation. But we have a very good relationship with Curo housing, who have provided quite a lot of our sites - and they have other sites that we could use. They've been really great partners. The Council has as well. In 5 years and beyond, we might need to think about the future for More Trees BANES in terms of planting sites.
Aftercare
Trees planted, staked and mulched.
We are grappling with how we manage aftercare at the moment. Traditionally we have gone back to our plantings after 2 or 3 years to check them. It isn’t as easy to find volunteers for that. As we add more planting areas each year, it takes more of our resources to manage it. So, we're looking at two things. One is to make sure that when we plant, we give the trees as good a start as possible. We use mulch mats to suppress weeds, with more mulch on top. We use tree guards to make it really obvious there's a tree planted there, that needs to be looked after. And second, we're thinking about options such as having lease or contract arrangements with the landowners for us to provide longer aftercare. We need to make sure that those trees survive.
Widening our approach
We collect local seed from native trees mainly in semi natural ancient woodland. The definition of ‘native’ is those species of trees which colonised the UK when we first became an island – when the ice sheets retreated about 4000 years ago. There's lots of research going on around what people should be planting nowadays because of climate breakdown and we may in future broaden our range of trees.
In ‘Managing England’s woodlands in a climate emergency’, the Forestry Commission says that people should think about collecting seeds from 2° South of where they live. Probably we should be going to northern France to collect our seeds from trees growing in a warmer, wetter climate. That sounds quite an attractive idea, but at the moment our choice is a good one: we collect seeds from trees that are thriving locally, so we know they should be adapted to the climate here and now. We also have genetic diversity as the seeds come from a number of different woodlands.
Our other important consideration for the future is that our charitable purpose is more trees for Bath and NE Somerset. So, we are thinking about expanding into other areas of BANES. We are confident we have a very successful model of growing and planting that benefits both people and the local environment that could be followed elsewhere.
April 2024
Visit the More Trees website at www.moretrees.earth
If you would like to get involved with the work of More Trees please email volunteers@moretrees.earth
(Thanks to More Trees for providing the photos.)