One of the organizers behind a project to plant a thousand trees in an inner-city neighbourhood says increasing shade and greenery isn't really the goal.
"The thing that will make this successful or not is how well we can connect with neighbours, which is kind of the point of the project anyway," said Dustin Bajer of Shrubscriber. "I mean, the trees, obviously, there's a lot of benefit that they do, but I think part of the project is stitching a bunch of community members together that may not know each other, that are all interested in gardening and plants and community building."
Shrubscriber, an urban tree subscription community, received a grant from the city to plant the trees in McCauley. Cultivate McCauley will help increase the neighbourhood's tree canopy from 13% to 15%, Bajer said. Edmonton hopes to increase the city's tree canopy cover to 20% by 2071.
"Truth be told, it's not hard to grow a thousand trees. That seems really ambitious, but it's doable," Bajer said. "The tricky part, actually, is going to be to find a thousand homes, or a thousand places for trees."
The first step will be to build micro tree nurseries. Volunteers will build propagation boxes out of old beehive components and install them on 16-square-foot wooden pallets. Each of the nurseries can grow about 144 trees. "I'm hopeful that the folks who have these little micro nurseries can kind of tap into their neighbours and friends in the community to tell them about the project and to offer trees to them," Bajer said. "The goal is to build a little bit of a network where Shrubscriber will work with the community to set it up, but we also want folks to take ownership over them and to propagate the trees and get excited about them and offer them as gifts to their friends and neighbours in the community."
McCauley is a good neighbourhood to try this project, Bajer said. It's culturally diverse, and while language barriers can present a challenge, people from different cultures bring unique gardening knowledge to the table, Bajer said. Italian, Ukrainian, and Chinese immigrants settled in McCauley in Edmonton's early days, and there have been more recent waves of people immigrating from Somalia and Vietnam. "So we have grapevines and pear trees and goji bushes, and I think it makes the neighbourhood kind of horticulturally interesting, if you're looking for it," Bajer said. "I think this is an opportunity to take a lot of that knowledge, to take a lot of that passion, and just bring those folks together on somewhat a regular basis, and get to know each other." McCauley residents who are interested in participating can sign up on the Cultivate McCauley website. Bajer is looking for people to host nurseries in their yards, but also to translate and volunteer for workshops, and will spread the word at a March event at Paper Birch Books.
Other than stitching community members together, Bajer said the thousand trees will have ecological and social benefits. Increasing tree canopy has been linked to reduced crime and increased property values. Trees add protection from wind and sun, which helps reduce heating and cooling costs in both summer and winter, and can help reduce flooding.
Most of the trees will eventually be planted on private property. Trees on public property are under stricter requirements, but for private property, you just need the permission of one landowner. Plus, the percentage of Edmonton's trees on private property is higher than those on public property — there are more trees on private property than there are in the entire river valley — meaning there is more space to make a real difference to Edmonton's tree canopy, Bajer said.
Bajer said he hopes the model could be used in other Edmonton neighbourhoods. "If I'm thinking big picture, I would love to see little mini tree nurseries throughout the city," he said. "A single person can grow a thousand trees in a very small piece of land. A hundred people each growing a thousand trees, or a hundred little nurseries — you're talking about tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of plants that could be propagated locally."