Ending the Year on a Green Note

Our Grow Back Together project, in partnership with Street Trees for Living and Lewisham Council has been a huge success!

We’ve reached our target to plant 100 new, standard size street trees in some of the areas they are most needed in the London Borough of Lewisham. 

The project has been funded through the Mayor of London’s Grow Back Greener Fund, enabling trees to be planted in priority areas including those with:
1) lowest air quality
2) highest flood risk
3) sparsest canopy cover

Through the Greentalk platform deployed to Grow Back Together, Lewisham residents applied to adopt a tree and to become a ‘Tree Guardian’ taking on the responsibility to look after and water their newly planted trees, especially during dry and hot seasons. Using this approach, we maximise the opportunities for these trees to survive their critical first years, setting them up to thrive for many generations to come.

Greentalk created innovative and user-friendly technology to identify and manage vacant tree pit locations, link resident applications to those locations, canvass the local areas, and provide an internal back-end system for the tree contractor to report on their progress digging tree pits, staking and planting trees – keeping all the Tree Guardians informed throughout the process.

But for Tree Guardians, this is just the beginning. Greentalk will be deploying our intelligent weather-aware watering alert system in 2024 and for the following two spring and summer seasons. Tree Guardians will get alerted when their tree most needs watering, and will be able to report how much water it has received. This will help ensure every tree has the best chance to survive.
If you live in the London Borough of Lewisham and would like to express your interest in becoming a Tree Guardian for future funding rounds, then please visit: growbacktogether.org.