Our organization did quite a bit of tree planting work in Truro's Victoria Park this past September (2022). This work was completely funded by One Tree Planted, who was the lead organization on this project. One Tree Planted is a wonderful organization that fundraises and supports the planting of trees all over the world.
Edit: We also did several thousand trees of additional planting in the Fall of 2023, as a lead-up to another larger phase of our work planned for 2024, but the rest of this blog post will talk about the 2022 phase.
Truro is located in central Nova Scotia, and is often referred to as "the hub of Nova Scotia." From Truro, highways branch out in all directions to other points within the province. Truro is a small town which has an official population of only about twelve thousand people, but when you count everyone within a fifteen minute drive of the town, the number is probably closer to fifty thousand. That may not sound like much to anyone who lives elsewhere in a dense urban area. But Truro also has something else rather special. It has a municipal park, called Victoria Park. And that park is over three thousand acres in size! The people of Truro are extremely lucky to have access to such a large and beautiful park, located right inside the town limits.
But exactly how big is three thousand acres? Well, to put it into perspective, New York City's famed Central Park is less than a thousand acres. And Central Park has its own police precinct (the 22nd) which polices the 58km of pedestrian trails found there. Victoria Park doesn't have its own precinct, but it definitely has an extensive trail network.
Here's an overview graphic of eastern Canada (courtesy of Google Earth), showing the location of Victoria Park:
When we originally contacted Victoria Park in 2020 to discuss the possibility of planting some trees there, we learned that there were several areas which could definitely benefit. There were a few sections where trees had been removed after being killed by insects. Also, the former municipal landfill (now decommissioned) was relatively barren. Although some parts of the topsoil cap over the landfill had already been replanted several years ago by the Scouts and other organizations, there was still a great deal of work to be done.
We started our work within the park that year, initially funded by public donations. We got off to a very good start to the project in 2020, planting approximately fifteen thousand trees. However, the project really started to have a major impact in 2021 (another thirty-five thousand trees) thanks to support and financial backing from One Tree Planted.
Our initial review in 2020 had indicated that there could be as many as fifty to sixty acres of open ground that were suitable for afforestation efforts. That fall, we did our initial work around the trail heads up at the top of the park, for the first phase of what would obviously need to be a multi-year project. Phase 2 in 2021 more than doubled our impact. And this year's Phase 3 included the planting of 51,305 additional seedlings!!
In addition to those areas, we also planted a section further to the southeast (within the Lepper Watershed) which was impacted by insect damage.
To date, we've been able to plant six types of conifers (red spruce, eastern white pine, black spruce, white spruce, Jack pine, and a small number of eastern larch) plus six deciduous species (white birch, yellow birch, sugar maple, red maple, mountain ash, and red oak) within the Park.
Phase 3 of this project (in 2022) was successful in most respects, although we had a major interruption in late September due to the landfall of Hurricane Fiona, which passed directly over central and eastern Nova Scotia. We had originally planned to do some work in the Gorge areas of the Park on September 26th, but Fiona caused massive damage, closing the Park due to safety concerns. We were able to get into the site later in the week to plant the seedlings, but we had to divert them to some of the areas outlined in the graphic above, rather than planting them throughout the Gorge as originally intended. The hurricane also impacted our deciduous seedling availability, which was regrettable, as we had hoped to further increase the number of hardwoods. Additional hardwoods will now have to wait for a future phase. In the meantime, the Park continues to clean up damage and slowly re-open affected areas. It may take more than a year before the entirety of the Park is assessed for cleanup needs.
Here are a few photos from our work in 2022:
You can see more photos of our 2022 tree planting work at this site by visiting our public 2022 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "Victoria Park" sub-folder.
We'd like to thank Larry and the park staff for having us, Don from the Department of Lands & Forests for helping with logistics coordination, and especially One Tree Planted for being the Sponsor that made this project happen.
As mentioned, we also planted several thousand additional seedlings in the Fall of 2023, although the ongoing hurricane cleanup efforts precluded us from having a major presence for 2023. We look forward to finishing what may be the final phase of our current work in the Park in the Fall of 2024. After that, we'll probably give the seedlings a few years to grow, while doing regular survival surveys and health assessments to ensure that the new forests are off to a strong start.
Edit: Here's a link to our blog post talking about our 2021 work, in case you want to review the earlier work that we did:
replant-environmental.blogspot.com/2021/10/tree-planting-project-in-victoria-park.html
If you'd like to learn more about Truro's Victoria Park, visit their website:
Victoria Park is the #1 rated attraction in Truro, and has over fifteen hundred very positive reviews on Google.
Thanks for reading!
Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests. We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases. We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world. If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page. Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!
To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website. Thanks so much for your interest!
Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects. Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.
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