Sustainable Swaledale’s ‘Together for Trees’ project is in its second year of operation. It’s a community-focused project, joining people with a small patch of land to offer with a team of willing volunteers from our locality ready to plant it with trees.
In our first year we acted as a local organising group for The Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust who provided funding (and trees!) and much needed expertise and guidance with the aim of establishing local tree planting and management capability. After selecting a dozen sites ranging from a small run of hedging to a woodland grove of several hundred trees, we eventually planted over three thousand trees in Swaledale and Arkengarthdale.
Our second season has a similar number of sites but a significantly larger number of trees, and is funded by the Tees-Swale: naturally connected programme. The map above shows the distribution of our planting sites across the two seasons.
As part of building for long-term success, we also operate an annual tree-monitoring project to keep track of the survival rates of the trees we’ve planted, and take any remedial action to ensure the long-term health of the woodland and hedges we plant.
If you’d like to be involved in any way, even just for a couple of hours as part of a friendly tree-planting team, please get in touch!
