This week is National Tree Week (Saturday 27 November – Sunday 5 December), the UK’s largest annual tree celebration. Across the UK, people are planting thousands of trees to mark the start of the winter tree planting season. The council’s ‘Planting Our Future’ team has marked the week by planting hundreds of trees along the borough’s highways and in local parks.
Cllr Ian Courts, Leader of Solihull Council, said: “As part of our commitment to tackle climate change and achieve net zero emissions for the borough by 2041, the council has pledged to plant 250,000 trees over the next ten years. We created the ‘Planting Our Future’ campaign with a small team of staff to make sure that this happens and this season alone, they will oversee the planting of 25,000 trees.
“Trees play a tremendously important role in tackling climate change as a single tree can absorb as much as 22kg of carbon each year. That makes them a very cheap and effective way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and helping us to tackle the climate crisis. They also produce oxygen, purify the air, lower the air temperature, help prevent flooding and sustain wildlife. Of course they’re also very beautiful and lower our stress levels so when we plant trees we really are planting our future.”
As well as planting trees, the ‘Planting Our Future’ team has launched an updated ‘Shirley Tree Trail’, developed in conjunction with Solihull Tree Wardens and Friends of Shirley Park. The tree trail takes you along a guided tour of the trees within the ‘Green Flag’ park, which includes the rare Warwickshire Double Pink Hawthorn.
To download the Shirley Tree Trail visit – https://www.lovesolihull.org/tree-trails
To get involved in ‘Planting Our Future’ or offer space for trees, email plantingourfuture@solihull.gov.uk or follow @LoveSolihull on social media.