Locals were left heartbroken by the violence inflicted on trees in South Dublin’s Dodder Valley Park in April. The anger that drives someone to bring a chainsaw into a park and attack the lone trees in flower is truly puzzling. Unfortunately, this is not the first time these attacks have occurred. Widely spaced trees are known targets for antisocial behavior. They are tall and slender specimens, set on low wooden supports as their pruned roots struggle to anchor them sufficiently against wind and other challenges. They stand out from the grass around them, unfortunately attracting willful vandals as sitting targets.
So it was interesting to visit a project in Maidstone in Kent recently where they are trying a different kind of tree planting in public parks. The local authority has been battling anti-social behavior at the park in Maidstone, where they planted two control plots side by side in February 2021, explained Kent Trees Outside Woodlands program project officer Louise Butfoy.
On one side of the experimental plot they planted solitary native seedlings with wide spacing directly in the grass. On the other side they prepared the land and planted four trees and shrubs per square meter, following the Miyawaki method, named after the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who pioneered the method in the 1970s.
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The trees in the wide space have struggled to grow and have been severely vandalized, Butfoy explained, the most obvious problem with a wide space of grass with several trees stunted in place. But on the other side, where the trees had been planted in densely prepared soil, a thick goblet bloomed. A blackbird foraged among the trees to nest while we stood there chatting.
The Trees Outside Woodlands program is a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs project working with five local authorities in the UK “investigating innovative and practical solutions to increase resilient tree cover in non-woodland areas, which have great potential to contribute significantly to national tree cover targets and increase the benefits of trees for people and nature”. The three-year pilot has been extended to five years to test “cost-effective methods of establishing trees in agricultural, rural and urban landscapes that can often be impractical for afforestation”.
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None of the trees planted by Miyawaki have been damaged in four years, Butfoy explained. They have had a 100 percent survival rate compared to widespread widespread tree vandalism. Trees outside forests also have higher benefits per tree than planting forests: they are enjoyed by more people, contribute more to habitat connectivity, and provide more ecosystem services.
There are a number of organizations planting Miyawaki style forests in Ireland. An Choill Bheag is an excellent schools program from An Taisce, Stepping Stones, plus Pocket Forests, which I co-founded. A move to replace those single destroyed trees with a community-created forest would send a positive message, allow the method to be tested in a challenging environment and hopefully heal some wounds.
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