‘The plan is 22,000 trees’
Ambitious roadside planting project underway in Woolwich
All it takes to plant a tree is a spade, stake and a seedling with a cocoa mat and a cover, and one local group is doing it 22,000 times.
“The plan is 22,000 trees,” said Inga Rinne, the chair of Trees for Woolwich, a volunteer group established in 2011 with its goal to increase the forest cover in Woolwich Township.
Two years ago, the group embarked on what Rinne calls the largest roadside tree planting program since the 1880s.
Dubbed Bring Back the Maples, the project entails planting thousands of sugar maple, red maple, bur oak, walnut and crab apple trees over three years, on road allowances owned by the township and region.
Hundreds of yellow tree shelters wrapped around stakes are now visible to passersby in areas off Hwy. 85 and along rural roads throughout the township.
“I’ve had lots of people asking what the plastic sleeves are for,” said Woolwich Mayor Sandy Shantz.
So far, with the help of private donors and township funding, the group is about halfway to its goal, with an annual budget of about $110,000.
On Tuesday, Rinne made a presentation to the region’s planning and public works committee and requested a financial contribution of $100,000 to help offset the cost, touting the many environmental benefits trees provide.
Planting trees is the most costeffective way to capture carbon to offset climate change and the project has the potential of capturing 68,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 283,000 kilograms of airborne pollutants over the next 80 years, Rinne noted.
Many of the large trees on country roads were planted 140 years ago.
In the 1880s, the Ontario government had a roadside tree-planting program, Rinne said.
“For every landowner who planted along a rural roadside and had a tree survive for five years, they got 25 cents from the government. That was a lot back then, and that’s where a lot of the big, old beautiful trees that you see along the roadsides came from.”
Gradually, however, they’ve disappeared. “Old age, development, disease, road widening, you name it, and so then you have these great bare stretches of road.”
Vast swaths of farmland between Elmira and St. Jacobs include areas that were cleared years ago, but maybe shouldn’t have been, said Rinne.
An increased canopy provides cooling and slows wind speed to reduce the drying of crops, she noted.
“For a lot of different reasons, it’s really a very good thing to have some, some windbreaks instead of having the wind howling across endless acres. We’re planting roadside partly to create those windbreaks and partly because, if you want to increase the tree cover, there’s not a lot of land around here to do it with.”
Project management and installation, tree watering and initial pruning is being performed by volunteers in partnership with Earthscape, a local landscape company owned by Mark Schwartz — who Rinne refers to as “the visionary” — along with a youth work crew that was planting plugs along Hawkesville Road earlier this week.
The total cost has been whittled down to about $15 per tree and the group had some success with similar projects on a smaller scale, Schwartz said.
A trial planting of 300 trees along Floradale Road, Kramp Road and Lerch Road in 2022 yielded a firstyear survival rate of 80 per cent.
The group realized a much larger project was doable with seedlings that don’t experience the shock that larger trees do when they’re replanted.
“In 10 years, you won’t be able to see the difference between this and a big park tree that gets planted,” Schwartz said. “In 10 or 12 years they’ll be about the same size and statistically these will actually outperform the bigger trees in the very long term.”
The seedlings are supported by a stake, with shelters and cocoa mats to protect them from winter snow damage, weeds and animals.
Trees for Woolwich claims that 680,000 cubic meters of stormwater runoff will be diverted into soil absorption as the trees act as water reservoirs and reduce erosion over the next 80 years.
They’ll also provide habitat for wildlife, and their aesthetic appeal will be enjoyed by people and passersby for generations to come.
“This will be 800 acres of park if you measure it all out in the end,” said Rinne.
“Not tomorrow at least, but you know, eventually.”
Planting will soon conclude for spring and will resume in the fall.
Regional council deferred a motion by Shantz that would see regional taxpayers contribute $50,000 to the initiative this year and next.
Regional Chair Karen Redman said it’s important to establish a funding source first, seeing that the request is outside of the region’s budget process.
Another group in Wilmot Township is already looking to establish a similar program with the help of Trees for Woolwich, with Wellesley Township Mayor Joe Nowak saying he was a envious of the project initiated by his next-door neighbours.
“A lot of municipalities will be looking to partner,” Redman said.
A staff report on the matter is expected later this year.