The Growing Diversity Project
A joint partnership between Fellowship Of The Trees and The Woodland Trust, funded by The Forestry Commission’s Tree Production Innovation Fund, supporting Community Tree Nurseries in England.
This new exciting partnership initiative between Fellowship of the Trees and the Woodland Trust is funded by the Tree Production Innovation Fund from the Forestry Commission.
The project will support Community Tree Nurseries in England and will
run until March 2025. It is really important that those involved in CTNs in England contribute to the development of the project with ideas and feedback. So we encourage you to contact us by email here or through our Social Media platforms. We will have a mailing list too, so if you wish to be added to this, please click here.
The main active aims of the project are as follows:
- Strengthen CTNs: through providing focused access to the tools and knowledge they need to effectively meet the demands outlined in the England Trees Action Plan – to find out more click here.
- Prioritising seed sourcing: through sourcing bio-secure seeds and trees from specific native seed zones and also to ensure that the current market shortcomings are addressed.
- Empowering and enabling CTNs to grow sustainably: We aim to work together with CTNs to enhance capabilities in administration, nursery skills, marketing and more so that CTNs are meeting forestry sector needs.
- Address gaps in seed collection: To identify and act on regions where there’s very little seed collection, especially for those hard-to-source native species.
- Focused strategies: To help develop strategies to address barriers in tree planting, offering training and resources on topics like seed collection, propagation, and biosecurity.
- Innovation and collaboration: Encouraging the adoption of new methods, sharing of expertise and accessing specialised advice.
- Promotion of Native species: This is the prioritisation of hard-to-source native broadleaf species for a variety of tree planting projects.
- Community engagement: To enable diverse tree planting initiatives,
emphasising the uses of natural regeneration and of traditional methods and hands-on community involvement. This is a key priority in the project’s aims. - We are planning a programme of webinars and in person training sessions at different CTNs in England. The details of these events and other news will be posted in the News and Update section at the bottom of this page.
The Growing Diversity Project Episode 1 – Introduction to the Joint Initiative
In this introductory episode, we have Hilary Campbell Project Co-ordinator and Matthieu Baudry head of tree supply from the Woodland Trust sharing details about this exciting new project. This includes a Q&A section after Matthieu’s presentation. The event is aimed at those who are involved in a CTN (community tree nursery) in England. Please share with others this is relevant to.
News & Updates
New Project is launched! We are delighted to share that we are partners in a new initiative with the Woodland Trust to support Community Tree Nurseries in England. ‘Growing Diversity’ is supported by the Tree Production Innovation Fund, provided by the Forestry Commission.
This is a ground-breaking project which for the first time will tackle head on the challenges tree nurseries have in England, in growing a diverse range of native trees from seed, which include barriers due to cost, capacity and resources.
Together, the Fellowship of the Trees, the Woodland Trust and community tree nurseries will combine knowledge, expertise and resources. There is promising potential to address barriers in the forestry sector by targeting areas of the country with low seed collection and the project will enable us to identify specific seed sources that have genetic resilience to withstand local environmental stressors.
By working closely with nurseries it will look to and ensure more trees are UK sourced and grown and in turn this will reduce the devastating impacts of tree disease. We hope to create business opportunities for community tree nurseries and as a wider goal see more native tree species sprouting up across England’s landscape as a result. We look forward to you being involved.
You can watch out introductory session on YouTube here.
Growing Diversity Survey to CTNs: We recently conducted a survey with CTNs in England to gather data that will help us to plan the most appropriate and effective learning programme. This includes webinars and in the field training sessions. If you would like to contribute to the survey and have not had a chance to do so, you can still complete the survey up until 5th December here.
Join us to grow and restore forests and communities for future generations.
Please contact us regarding The Growing Diversity Project via the form below, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
