On the 28th of NOvember 30 schoolchildren transplanted 600 trees in 2 hours
On the 28th of November Easy Treesie Project with Crann, Trees for Ireland joined More Trees Now in an initiative to plant more indigenous trees through circular forestry. Trees can produce hundreds of saplings every year, with the majority not reaching maturity. A large part of that is due to routine forest management practices. On Tuesday 30 schoolchildren with community volunteers took elder and willow cuttings and saplings at Seagrange Park, Baldoyle, Co. Dublin and have re-planted them within the park in areas where they have space to grow. Amid tree shortages and a dire need to restore native biodiversity in Ireland, circular forestry can provide a solution that any member of the community can be a part of.
Crann: Trees for Ireland & Easy Treesie
Easy Treesie, a part of Crann: trees for Ireland, is planting a million trees with Ireland’s one million schoolchildren and their communities.
Orla Farrell, Easy Treesie Project leader fondly recalls her grandmother (born in the 1800s in rural Cork). “Granny would never leave the farmhouse without a scissors and plastic bag in her handbag to secure cuttings from plants she admired, begging slips from her sisters’ and neighbours’ gardens”, tells Orla. Granny Mary Kenneally’s walled gardens on the Castlehyde Home Farm were famous.
Orla is a new grandmother herself twice over this year so was delighted to hear that this old practice is alive and thriving in Holland. In the Netherlands, More Trees Now (Meer Bomen Nu) has distributed over 1.4 million saplings in three winters in the most densely populated country in Europe. Orla was most interested to watch and learn from the crack Dutch team “harvesting” bundles of “elder wands” and “whomping willows” during National Tree Week in Spring 2023. Local school children used the cuttings to fill gaps in recently planted areas and school nurseries were also established, growing the cuttings in bottles and pots as science experiments. “Now that Science Week is here, with its focus on how decisions we make today will impact on humans of the future, our 2023 saplings are ready for planting out! We’ve planted 400k nursery saplings so far, this easy method will complement our programme, helping us to accelerate our planting rates and adding resilience to our woodlands using local resources.”
More Trees Now
Every mature tree can create hundreds of saplings a year. The majority of these saplings will not reach adulthood. They either disappear naturally due to competition, but quite often they are removed in routine landscape and forest management. They grow for example in roadside garages, on vacant land, in bogs and hedgerows, on hiking paths, or they are thinned due to a lack of diversity of tree species in the area. This “Nature’s Nursery” is a source of diverse, ecological, free and indigenous trees. By transplanting these saplings – with the permission of the landowner of course – one can restore ecosystems and create forests and green areas elsewhere. More Trees Now is an initiative based on Meer Bomen Nu, a Dutch initiative which has inspired a mass volunteering movement that has transplanted over 1.4 million saplings in three winters in the most densely populated country in Europe. They have created an online tool which allows for a decentralized organisation where anyone can organize events and register and track saplings from their old to their new destination. The aim is to make tree planting accessible and free for all who are concerned about biodiversity loss and deforestation.
