More than 1,800 trees have been planted at a woodland site near Harrogate.
Over 100 volunteers grouped together to plant the trees at Long Lands Common - a 30-acre site between Harrogate and Knaresborough.
It came as part of National Tree Planting Week, funded by White Rose Forest, the community forest for North and West Yorkshire.
Ian Fraser, woodland officer for Long Lands Common, said:
“We are extremely grateful to White Rose Forest for enabling us to undertake this crucial work, to provide a new woodland for the local community and to contribute to nature recovery locally, part of the massively important national effort to reverse nature depletion.
“The climate emergency will not be resolved without sufficient nature recovery.
“The fact that so many people in our community support Long Lands Common and Knaresborough Forest Park I find truly awesome.”
The week’s activities form part of a larger scheme on Long Lands Common to create new areas of woodland, hedgerow, ponds, an orchard, coppice woodland, wildflower meadow and new permissive access paths.
The first woodland block was planted in March 2023, and the saplings are already thriving and outgrowing the tree guards.
This latest phase, two more woodland blocks, also funded and supported by White Rose Forest with delivery partner YORgreenCIC, saw the planting of a mixture of native species: oak, wild cherry, birch, rowan, lime, sweet chestnut, alder, aspen, willow, hawthorn, hazel and holly.
The volunteers included grandparents and grandchildren, as well as Peyton’s Explorer Scout Unit and a family who had come to plant a celebration tree in memory of a loved one.
Other volunteer groups from the Environment Agency Biodiversity team and from DEFRA finished off the planting after the weekend.
The whole event was very well organised and run by the Long Lands Site Rangers and the YORgreenCIC team.
Site Ranger and Volunteer Co-ordinator Barry Slaymaker said:
“It was a wonderfully heartwarming sight to see dozens of volunteers planting trees in the mild winter sunshine at Long Lands Common.
“It’s a magnificent testimony to community action, a real coming together of children, teenagers, young adults, older adults, and even older adults, all keen to be part of the development of Long Lands Common.”
The achievements at Long Lands Common offer a preview of what could be accomplished in their new project, Knaresborough Forest Park, which is also consulting White Rose Forest to see what would be appropriate for parts of the new site.
This is the second tranche of funding for Long Lands Common from White Rose Forest under their Trees For Climate scheme, which is funded by the HM Treasury’s Nature For Climate Fund.
This will pay for the two woodland blocks just planted, covering 1.43 hectares, as well as a compost toilet for the use of volunteers working on the land.
White Rose Forest undertakes to support the woodland planted for the next 15 years, by which time the woodland should be established.
The new woodland lies within a White Rose Forestry priority SUNO (Swale, Ure, Nidd and Ouse) catchment under the Landscapes for Water scheme (https://whiteroseforest.org/about/our-work/landscapes-for-water/).
The proposed new native woodlands and hedgerows will add to the biodiversity value of the North Yorkshire County Council District.
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