Visiting the Portland Park blocks (see before and after photos) with our local urban forester and community activist put tree planting on our minds. What kind of tree planting activities do you have in your community? Are your children, schools, and communities involved? Do you have special, significant trees in your community? Where are they and why are they important?
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We are such a small community...we do not have an urban forestry program. We are, however, very rural still and there are trees in our little town, including many around our courthouse which is in the center of town. You don't have to go far to find a green area for a picnic either. Unfortunately we lost some of our historic oaks and other trees in Hurricane Katrina. As a result of what we did today I would like to start some type of "greening" project for our little town.
We do have an Urban Forestry Board that I work with to plant trees at our schools. The board is activity in the creation of parks and planting of trees. I hope to become more involved with this organization, involving them in our PLT activities and in the creation of two Environmental Ed schools.
Every year we celebrate Arbor Week during the third week in May. The purpose of Arbor Week is to promote tree planting in school communities, to enhance bidiversity in school playgrounds. My organisation participates by having schools in our local community plant trees in a scenic reserve or other areas in our forest. We do this because the trees that we plant are grown specifically to be housed in the Melbourne Museum Forest Gallery when they are seedlings. When they grow too big (every 6 months), they are taken to the forest where the seed was sourced. This is important to maintain the genetic integrity of the plants in the forest. Mountain Ash are way too big to plant at schools also (to 100m).
Urban forestry is a complex issue in my community of Corvallis, Oregon. We are a Tree City USA, which requires that we have a tree protection ordinance, an urban forester, and some tree planting activities every year. We have a Civic Beautification Committee (I think that is the name) and a Madison Avenue Task Force that conduct tree planting efforts, largely in our small historic downtown area. Neighborhood tree planting projects are not currently being conducted to my knowledge, but I would like to help that happen.
Most of the planting that area ecologists, foresters, and community volunteers do with students is habitat restoration, involving riparian (stream-side) planting or wildflower planting and control of invasive species like English ivy, Himalayan blackberry, and Scotch broom.
A big problem in our community is that new subdivision developers are removing most of our native Oregon oak trees and planting small caliper nonnative Norway maples as street trees. If we want to protect our urban forest, we need to revise our land development code to favor protection of existing native trees. We have made progress in that area in the last couple of years but not enough.
We have our local watershed council that sells native trees for a small price each year, but they are only one gallon pots, maybe 3 feet tall. I would like to work with my community to establish a Friends of Trees group and begin to do some neighborhood native tree planting projects.
My neighborhood had a special tree--an 80 foot tall Willamette Valley Ponderosa pine tree. About 3 or 4 nights a week, we would all hear an owl come to that tree between 10pm and midnight, and call who--who-who--who. None of us knew how much we all enjoyed that sound as we were falling asleep until a developer cut the tree down. At our next neighborhood gathering one person after another commented on how sad they were to no longer hear the owl at night. I wonder if the developer knew about this if he might have chosen to leave the tree alone.
Individual groups in Casper engage in tree planting activities, especially in conjunction with Earth/Arbor Day. I do not know how successful the plantings are, and I do not know who is responsible to maintain them. This is something I will investigatge when I return home. When I was hired at Red Creek School 17 years ago, there was not one single tree or shrub on the one acre school grounds. Now we have about 25 established trees, all in various stages of development. The year our pinon pine produced cones, we celebrated! I feel a need to do so much more, and I am in the process of writing a Greenworks grant for the small community I live in.
My region like many in Australia has a number of different types of tree planting activities. Although not termed urban forestry a number of parks and recreational sites are being planted and maintained by community groups in conjunction with school groups. The town of Tumut is known for groves of Poplar. There are numerous historic plantings of this species. Over time the community is slowly growing to appreciate the diversity of native species and poplars are now having to compete with native species in the selection process.
Schools are invited to participate in tree plantings as part of arbour week, and we have a local volunteer nursery (Landcare) were seedlings are raised for this and other land rehabilitation purposes.
In our community, Quaking Aspen trees are a tree of concern. Our non-profit, Wallowa Resources, has an Apsen Restoration program where we fence off aspen groves from ungulates (elk, deer, and cattle). This fencing prevents the browsers from eating the young sucker shoots (new growth). To date, aspen groves inside the fencing in general are regenerating and looking healthy.
To help promote the planting of aspens by local individuals, we gave away aspen suckers (about 1/5 feet tall) at our Watershed Festival which we coordinate. We also raffled off a large aspen tree.
Urban Forestry is a new concept for most people even this might have happened many years ago. In China, urban forestry just starts, more and more people think they need trees around their neighbourhood, we call "living in the forest", but this is still a long way off in my opinion. The most difficult thing is how to deal with the disturbance from citizens, more importantly, how to encourage them to participate in forest creation and protection, because this is a big weakness for us. hopefully, our cities will be livable,loveable...
At Shadeville Elementary School, we have set aside an area of our school grounds to restore a Longleaf Pine Ecosystem, the native forest that once existed in the area. Students and teachers took part in this schoolwide tree planting event. The Longleaf Pine is a disappearing tree in our area. It is home to many species of wildlife, many of which are now endangered.
Georgia has a strong Urban and Community Forestry program which is administered through the Georgia Forestry Commission. Through this program, communities are encouraged to form tree boards, adopt tree ordinances and meet the requirements to be designated a Tree City, USA by the National Arbor Day Foundation.
I am personally involved in Arbor Day tree plantings and a new grant initiative called "Made in the Shade" that provides schools with funds to plant trees in playground areas onschool campuses. I also just completed a UC&F grant project at my center that demonstrates the benefits of "planting the right tree in the right place" in suburban housing developments.
Portland also has been leading the way with semi-permeable pavers bio- swales and roof top gardens to lower water run off. These are important parts of our urban forestry that most people never see.
I am pretty sure that nowadays urban forestry is a key issue in developing modern, livable and loveable cities all over the world. Lithuania is not an exception and people greatly enjoy green building activities in the cities. As we are small and developing country we still are not so much urbanized. It seems to me that we have more free spaces, grass and open areas in Lithuanian’s biggest city Vilnius and less concrete and asphalt comparing to Portland. There are several public organizations which organizes various activities (as trees planting, trash picking and etc.) where activists from schools with kids are widely involved. Actually the volunteering idea is not so common in Lithuania… but it doesn’t mean people don’t help each other. Actually society still has quite specific attitude concerning property… mainly there are two types: public and private. It seems that almost everyone understands the meaning of private property and who is responsible for its prosperity – our homes are our castles. And when we talk about public property usually face quite big unconcern. Actually each city has a special enterprise or division in municipality which takes care of the green building activities in the city. They are responsible for keeping the city nice and green and are financed from the budget which is always more than limited. Usually such situation negatively effects general view of the cities and quite often people start to feel like they miss just a little bit more passion, love and efforts in order to make this small country nicer and better place to live.
There is a link to description of the most significant tree in the country: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?pf=&guid=5123041c-2fbc-43fa-802d-945a52fde40d&decrypt=y&log=&numlogs=
Americorp is another "volunteer" organization (like a stateside peace corp that plants many trees every year.
http://www.americorps.org/
They are very active all over the northwest. Every group is different but for some reforestation is a major part of what they do. I planted many trees during my 2 years of service both as special days and creating community gardens and school gardens. Students helped with the planting and took over from there. I checked in but that was about it.
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