Planting trees with local schools for National Tree Week

To celebrate this year's National Tree Week (28th November to 6th December), we decided to partner with local schools to deliver educational tree-planting events. With teams of enthusiastic Primary School children from Charlbury CE Primary, Woodstock CE Primary, and St Mary's CE Primary in Chipping Norton, we planted young whips and two-year-old heritage fruit trees on the school grounds, while delivering fun sessions teaching them about biodiversity, nature, and the roles trees play in ecosystems. We also gave tree-planting advice to Wychwood Primary and Tower Hill Primary, to help them establish what, where, and how best to plant trees on their school grounds.

Thanks to The Conservation Volunteers' I Dig Trees (sponsored by OVO Energy), we were able to source many of the trees we planted for free. We were determined to avoid using plastic tree guards, so Toby masterminded some creative alternative tree-guards made from metal wire and wood.

Inevitably, a couple of our planned planting events had to be delayed as schools grappled with changing advice and local lockdowns. We're looking forward to visiting Great Rollright Primary School, Kingham Primary School, and Hailey Primary School after Christmas.

Though tree-planting can play a good role in habitat restoration, we believe firmly in the refrain “right tree in the right place for the right reason”. In line with this philosophy, we ran detailed site visits before the sessions, and took care to only plant appropriate quantities and species of trees in the schools.