PUSLINCH – Recent years have brought challenges, but the county’s municipal tree planting program is set to hit three million trees planted in 2022.
Green Legacy manager Rob Johnson said the program started as a way to celebrate the municipality’s 150th anniversary by planting 150,000 trees in 2004.
The program now makes the claim of being the largest municipal tree planting program per capita in North America.
Planting this many trees takes a lot of volunteers. That’s where local school children from the UGDSB and WCDSB would normally come in. Johnson said their involvement changes and progresses as they move through elementary schools.
Kindergarten to Grade 3 students get a presentation and plant seeds in blocks which grow from around March until about June before being brought back to one of the two nurseries, in Puslinch and Damascus.
Grades 4 through Grade 6 students spend a morning volunteering at the nursery and getting orders ready before being taken on a 90-minute hike to get them connected with nature.
The students in Grades 7 and Grade 8 physically help plant the trees for those who order them.
“Jacques Cousteau said ‘we protect what we love, we love what we understand,’ so I kind of go backwards, understanding is the education and then when you understand it, you’ll love it and then protect it,” Johnson said on the benefit of exposing people to the benefits of trees and nature early in their lives.
“We pass things on to generations and this is something we can pass on, you know, a greener, healthier environment.”
Johnson said volunteers make up about 60 per cent of the workforce hours for Green Legacy and unfortunately the students haven’t been around since 2020.
“Since COVID, we haven’t been able to have the kids come,” Johnson said. Students from the Community Environmental Leadership Program have also scaled back their involvement with Green Legacy which in the past has been part of their grading and curriculum.
To keep the program running, Johnson said the hired staff just have to do everything themselves. Some budget allocated to things like busing students have been shifted to staff but Johnson admitted they can’t quite do what they normally could.
But the program is reaching the three million milestone despite the labour issue, but it does require a lot of prep-work year-round.
In the winter, most work is done at the Bradford Whitcombe Tree Legacy Nursery in Puslinch, named in memory of the former Puslinch mayor and warden who died in 2014.
This nursery sits on a 200-acre land near the Little Tract Trail around Wellington Road 34 with an old farmhouse converted into an office, multiple greenhouses and an underground facility with a regulated temperature.
Jessica Trzoch, nursery coordinator, said during a tour of the grounds a lot of people think about volunteering during the spring but a lot of people don’t get to see the work done in the winter to keep the trees growing and ready for spring planting.
“That’s where that education comes in, if you are teaching these kids the value of these trees and how much work it takes to grow them, to get them to the point where they can be planted in the community, hopefully they have more of an appreciation and become better environmental stewards,” Trzoch said.
As pandemic-restrictions once again ease, community outreach coordinator Adam McDowell said he hopes volunteers start returning in March but realistically the programs with the students should relaunch in the fall.
More information on Green Legacy and how to make tree requests can be found here.
