Trees for Woolwich finds receptive audience in Wellesley

A VOLUNTEER GROUP

HAS PLANTED 11,000 roadside trees around Woolwich during the past year, meeting half its target in a bid to beautify 335 kilometres of routes around the township.

Trees for Woolwich says its project, the biggest of its kind in Ontario since the 1890s, had been done at a cost far lower than if it was a purely municipal program.

“Our innovative planting process and the use of volunteer time has reduced our cost to $15 per tree planted and maintained,” a video presented to Wellesley council meeting on Tuesday explained as it described how the scheme worked in the neighbouring township.

“By contrast, a tree planted by the region costs in the neighbourhood of $700.”

Wellesley Mayor Joe Nowak said he’d been impressed by the progress when he travels to Woolwich.

“You’ll notice more and more along the roads driving in that direction, all the tubes that are set up,” he said.

“And actually today I was driving to Elmira and you could see some of the trees coming through those tubes.”

Trees for Woolwich chair Inga Rinne said she hopes her organization, whose volunteers are insured by Woolwich Township and is able to raise much of its funds from private donations, will plant all 22,000 seedlings within a year.

When all the trees are mature, there will be 800 acres of canopy cover lining roadsides, which would look more like they had 100 years ago, when this was a more common site in the province.

There are a variety of species being planted, including sugar maple, red maple, bur oak, walnut, crab apple and pin cherry.

The latter two “short stature trees” are particularly useful for planting beneath power lines, noted Rinne, whose group has been in existence since 2011 and is a subset of the Township of Woolwich Environmental Enhancement Committee (TWEEC).

The innovative method the group uses involves putting a seedling with a cocoa mat, which helps keep the roots warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

Rinne said 80 per cent of the trees planted had survived so far.

As well as making relatively featureless rural routes look more beautiful and interesting, the organization also said there are numerous environmental benefits, notably carbon capture.

“The 80-year cumulative capture from roadside trees is equivalent of taking 196 cars off the road every year for 80 years,” its video to council explained.

“Trees also divert stormwater from running off into the ditches and causing flooding.”

Rinne said that might be of particular interest to a previous speaker to council, Kyra Chisholm, the plan manager of community organization ClimateActionWR.

Chisholm said Waterloo Region was “not on track” to reaching its target of a 50 per cent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to a

2010 baseline.

She noted that part of what was causing slow progress was an increasing trend of local motorists buying more gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs that belch out more carbon.

“We do see some improvements due to lesser distance travelled, resulting in slightly improved emissions for transportation,” said Chisholm.

“However, the trend of purchasing larger vehicles is limiting this progress with lesser fuel efficiency in larger vehicles than cars.”

Nowak asked whether electric car sales were still rising and whether that was helping the region get closer to its “50 by 30” target, which is part of a wider scheme of reducing emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

“They are growing pretty significantly,” said Chishiolm about green vehicle purchases, although she noted that it’s harder to see how much electricity they use “because people are charging at home and that electricity is really being counted in the building sector.”