The Best Time to Plant 700 Trees…
The saying “The best time to plant trees was 20 years ago, the second best time is today” may or may not be an ancient Chinese proverb but it certainly makes sense.
Earlier this year a chance meeting with a lovely lady whose aim was to educate people about dormice started us thinking. Dormice love hazelnuts but need other hips, haws and berries like Guelder Rose, Dog Rose, Hawthorn and Rowan too, as do many other mice and voles. Even larger mammals like foxes, badgers and deer eat berries and native and migratory birds depend on them in winter. Hawthorns alone support over 300 species of insects as well.
Now we have had some boundary changes at Helsbury Park over the summer and this has given us the perfect opportunity to plant trees in a new hedgerow and in a small way to support the Cornwall Climate Action Plan to create an ambitious 8000 hectares of additional tree cover.
Helsbury Wood is very ancient and precious so we have been meticulous in our research and sourcing of new trees. All the varieties are on the RHS list of Native trees, that is “species that have occurred naturally in the UK since the last Ice Age” and were grown from traceable seed by the country’s only RHS endorsed tree nursery on the edge of the Malverns.
In the last week or so our heroic groundsman, Andy, has planted almost 700 whips (two-year-old saplings) of ten varieties of tree all of which are identified by the Woodland Trust, the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and the RHS as suitable for hedgerows and local wildlife.
If you fancy planting some trees yourself inspiration, advice and trees are available from the Woodland Trust’s ‘The Big Climate Fightback’ and the RHS’s ‘Greening Great Britain’ campaigns.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/get-involved/greening-great-britain/why-green-great-britain
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk