Year One Success for Grow Back Together
All the trees planted by GrowBackTogether and now cared for by local Tree Guardians
Tree Guardians have been recruited and new street trees planted as part of Greentalk’s ground-breaking Grow Back Together project with Street Trees for Living and Lewisham Council.
This innovative project focuses on tree establishment and citizen engagement, offering residents the chance to select where new trees should be planted and become responsible for their care during the first three years after planting, the critical period for establishing new street trees.
94 new full-size street trees have now been planted throughout the London Borough of Lewisham, and Tree Guardians have been recruited to care for them. The next phase of the project will be to work with the Tree Guardians to support them in keeping their trees alive and thriving.
To help with this, Greentalk will deploy the watering alert system for the next two spring and summer seasons. Reacting to real weather conditions, Tree Guardians will be alerted when their trees most need watering, and will be able to report the quantity of water the trees receive. Greentalk’s intelligent alerts and virtual reservoir technology helps ensure watering optimisation, giving every tree the best chance of survival. Tree assessments will complement these efforts, enabling ongoing tree monitoring which will be available to Tree Guardians and project administrators who can efficiently target any interventions if required.
Project Objectives
The main objectives and highlights of this project include:
Identifying suitable vacant tree pits to be re-planted
Engaging residents in areas where Street Trees for Living has not previously operated through innovative marketing techniques: QR codes spray painted on pavements next to vacant tree pits
Encourage interested residents to become ‘Tree Guardians’ with responsibility to look after newly-planted trees for three years
Managing the resident consultation period to ensure that new trees would be well received by all their neighbours
Providing Greentalk Community, powerful mapping and reporting technology guiding contractors to planting locations with instructions of what to plant, enabling contractor progress reporting and keeping Tree Guardians informed of progress throughout the preparation, staking and planting process
Grow Back Together was funded through the Mayor of London’s Grow Back Greener Fund, enabling trees to be planted in climate risk priority areas including those with:
lowest air quality
highest flood risk
sparsest canopy cover
If you live in the London Borough of Lewisham and would like to express your interest in becoming a Tree Guardian in the future, then please visit: growbacktogether.org.
