Tree Planting in Mactaquac Provincial Park, New Brunswick (2025)

This past Fall (2025), Replant.ca Environmental finished the fourth phase of our long-term tree planting project at Mactaquac Provincial Park.  The work that we did in 2025 was made possible by support from Forests Canada (formerly known as Forests Ontario), and their ongoing Forest Recovery Canada program.

Mactaquac Provincial Park is only a 30 minute drive from Fredericton, over to the west through either Keswick or French Village.  The park is situated on the St. John River, across from the Mactaquac Dam and power generating station.  This station generates one eighth of the electricity for the entire province of New Brunswick.

Here's a graphic (courtesy of Google Earth) showing the location of the park:

Mactaquac has a golf course, campground, two beaches, hiking trails, and [in the winter] it also has cross-country skiing trails.  The camping options are excellent, with around four hundred camping sites and several rustic cabins.  The washrooms and showers were extremely clean, and the entire project was a wonderful experience.  Here's a link for anyone who wants to make reservations:

www.parcsnbparks.info/en/parks/10/mactaquac-provincial-park

In 2014, the first named hurricane of the season was Hurricane Arthur.  It was a very early hurricane, hitting North America in early July.  It swept up the east coast and over the Maritime provinces.  The winds did a tremendous amount of damage to trees and infrastructure, especially in the Fredericton area.  Mactaquac was hit quite hard, and lost a lot of trees.  Our goal was to start the slow process of replanting some of the areas that had blown down during that storm several years earlier, and also to begin creating new wooded areas in other sections of the park.

We had already done work in this park in 2021, 2022, and 2024. This year, we were able to complete several more sections that we had not worked in previously, including doing some reclamation on the north and east sides of the major new lagoon treatment development area.

Some of the planting for this site involves planting tree seedlings in fairly open areas, where the Parks team is turning some of the under-utilized fields and openings into future mature stands of trees.  This latter goal is important for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation, and provides additional habitat for birds and wildlife.  It also allows the Park to better manage their budget for grounds maintenance (controlling the costs related to mowing the grass). There is also some underplanting at lower densities in some of the thinner sections of woods that are still recovering from the damage created by Hurricane Arthur.

Here are a few photos of the team in action at Mactaquac:

 

In total, our team added 29,435 more trees to this provincial park in 2025!

You can see more photos of our tree planting work at this site by visiting our Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "2025 Planting Photos" folder, then into the "Mactaquac Provincial Park" sub-folder.  Start here:

    www.replant-environmental.ca/photos

 

We'd like to thank Kevin (the Park Manager) and Rob and their staff for their hospitality and support while we were on site.  We definitely look forward to returning in 2026 to continue the work that Forests Canada is making possible.

Jonathan "Scooter" Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

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. 

 

 

The Red Spruce tree (Picea rubens)

For this week's look at various trees that we plant at Replant.ca Environmental, I'm going to focus on the red spruce.  As is common with many different tree species, this one is known by many names.  The other names that I'm most accustomed to hearing are eastern spruce, Maritime spruce, and yellow spruce.  The Latin name is Picea rubens.

Red spruce is an extremely common and valuable tree in eastern Canadian forestry.  Due to its versatility and economic value, it is the most commonly planted tree in the Maritime provinces.  Although it isn't the fastest-growing conifer, it is considered to be a late succession tree.  This means that it "catches up and wins," like the tortoise in the fable of "the tortoise and the hare."  The red spruce can often live to be 250-400 years old.

When the red spruce is young, it prefers to grow in moist soils.  It helps if the groundwater moisture is aerated.  Well-drained soils, or soils that are moistened by flowing water, are ideal.  However, red spruce is quite versatile, and will still thrive in many other types of ground conditions.  Red spruce is quite biologically similar to black spruce (a species which does really well in swampy areas with more stagnant water).  Red spruce is also extremely shade-tolerant when it is young.  This is important, because spruce trees generally grow more slowly than other conifers (such as pine) for the first decade or two.  Due to this slower start, spruce usually fail to get above competing grass and vegetation for several years.  However, they don't usually get choked out by plant competition due to their shade tolerance.

When a red spruce matures, it can be twenty to twenty-five meters in height (seventy to eighty feet).  A mature tree will often achieve a DBH (diameter at breast height) of 50cm to 60cm (up to two feet).  Red spruce often grows straighter than conifers such as red pine and white pine.  Although the red spruce doesn't grow as large as an eastern white pine, it's a beautiful and long-lived species in its own right.  Perhaps this is why the red spruce is the provincial tree of Nova Scotia.

Red spruce is mostly an eastern Canadian and northeast US seaboard species.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Spruce needles and balsam fir needles often look very similar to someone who doesn't spend a lot of time in the woods.  However, there's a neat trick that you can do to distinguish between them.  Spruce needles are four-sided.  When you put a needle between two fingers and try to "roll" it, it rolls easily.  Balsam fir needles are three-sided but their shape is like a very flattened triangle.  Due to this shape, balsam fir needles don't roll easily between your fingers.  This trick can still be a bit confusing.  If you use a lot of pressure, it's still possible to "roll" the needles of a balsam fir.  And if the spruce needles are sticky or if your fingers are rough, they don't necessarily roll perfectly.  However, if you are out in the woods and see two trees that look slightly different, and you think one is a spruce and one is a fir, try the needle-roll test.  Also, try grabbing a branch and squeezing.  Be careful though!  Spruce needles are much more pointy at the ends, so they'll feel a lot more prickly than fir needles.

If you're looking at the trunk of a juvenile tree, the appearance of spruce and fir are quite different.  Spruce trees will look scaly, and usually have a yellowish-brown or reddish-brown colour.  They will also have more needles on the trunk.  Conversely, a juvenile balsam fir tree will usually have grey bark, and it's usually quite smooth with almost no needles, except maybe some spare needles on the top foot or so of the tree.  The bark of each of these trees becomes much more rough as the trees passes the juvenile stage.  Both types of trees will develop vertical furrows on the bark, although the furrows will be more pronounced on spruce trees.

Take a close look at the underside of this red spruce branch.  What obvious colour patterns do you see?

When you look at a red spruce branch on a young tree, the new growth has a yellowish tinge, and the older growth has a brownish tinge.

Here are four interesting facts about the red spruce:

1.  This tree is monoecious.  This means that individual flowers (cones) are either male or female, but both sexes can be found on the same tree.  The cones are cross-pollinated by wind.

2.  Red spruce trees do not do well in areas with high atmospheric pollution, or "acid rain" (rain contaminated by industrial smoke and chemicals).  This is one more reason to keep our earth clean.  There's a slogan that says, "The solution to pollution is dilution."  I think a better solution is to avoid polluting in the first place.

3.  Red spruce is the most sought-after wood for making most musical instruments.

4.  Spruce twigs can be boiled with sugar, and the resulting liquid can be used to make spruce beer.  I think a lot of people would prefer spruce beer to hemlock tea.


As I mentioned, the red spruce is the most economically valuable species in the Maritime provinces, and is planted very frequently in post-logging operations.  Unfortunately, in that type of work, the logging companies generally plant it as a monoculture.  At Replant.ca Environmental, we endorse biodiversity.  Red spruce is definitely an important species within our planting mixes, but we never plant it by itself.  Here's a photo of some of our red spruce seedlings:

Thanks for reading ...

- Jonathan Clark
www.replant-environmental.ca



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!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

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.

How Many Trees are Planted in Canada Each Year?

I've been curious to know approximately how many trees are planted in Canada each year.  Apparently, I'm not the only one, since several other people have asked me this same question over the past month.  I'm going to try to come up with a very rough guess here, based upon what little information I can find, coupled with some semi-educated assumptions.  If anyone has any access to official data for any of the provinces, please let me know so I can update this post!  I originally wrote this post for my commercial tree planting blog, but it's good information for anyone thinking about our national capacity for tree planting for carbon capture purposes.

British Columbia
This one is easiest, since the Western Forestry Contractors' Association pays close attention to these numbers, and publishes charts frequently.  Their best guess for 2020 planting in BC is approximately 308 million trees.  They base their information upon a survey of sowing requests at various forest nurseries.
Source:  https://wfca.ca/2019/09/western-forestry-contractors-association-rumour-mill-roundupdate-volume-19-issue-13/

Alberta
I have 2016 data for Alberta.  That year, the province planted 57,605 Ha of the 83,786 Ha harvested (the rest was left for natural regeneration).  Assuming an average planting density of 1500 stems/Ha, which is purely a guess, I estimate approximately 86 million trees.

Saskatchewan
I have 2016 data for Saskatchewan.  That year, the province harvested 17,701 Ha.  Let's assume that they planted half of that amount, and that the average planting density was 1500 stems/Ha.  Those assumptions may be quite inaccurate, but the number of trees in Saskatchewan doesn't significantly affect the national total.  I estimate approximately 13 million trees.  Lots of room for growth in the northern boreal.

Manitoba
I have 2016 data for Manitoba, which is very similar to Saskatchewan in limitation.  Manitoba harvested 10,686 Ha in 2016, so if we again estimate that half of that area was replanted, at a density of 1500 stems/Ha, we have another 8 million trees.

Ontario
In 2016, Ontario planted 67,369 Ha of land (57% of the 117,230 Ha harvested).  If we estimate a planting density of 1500 stems/Ha, that works out to approximately 101 million trees.  Incidentally, Ontario is the only province that also seeds significant areas.  In 2016, about eleven thousand hectares were seeded throughout the province (this figure is not included in the planting totals).

Quebec
I have 2016 data for Quebec.  Quebec harvested 205,859 Ha and planted 36% of that (73,344 ha).  Incidentally, Quebec is the only province that harvests a greater land base annually than BC.  Let's again assume an average planting density of 1800 stems/Ha (this number based upon feedback from several long-time Quebec tree planters).  That gives us about 132 million trees planted annually in Quebec.

The Atlantic Provinces
There's a surprising amount of planting in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Not as much in Newfoundland, and practically none in Prince Edward Island.  It's hard to tell how much planting actually takes place, because a very large percentage of blocks in the Atlantic provinces are left for natural regen.  Despite this, I know that several hundred planters work in the very fragmented industry each year.  Perhaps the best indicator would be to get a census on total sowing at all the forest nurseries in those provinces.  I'm going to have to guess for now, in lieu of any sort of reasonable data, and say that 40 million trees are planted each year in these four provinces combined.  I did find that New Brunswick planted 17,625 Ha in 2016, Nova Scotia planted 5,024 Ha in 2016, PEI planted 317 Ha, and Newfoundland planted 3,721 Ha, for a four-province total of 22,167 hectares.
Source:  https://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/statsprofile


Totals:
308m  British Columbia
  86m  Alberta
  13m  Saskatchewan
    8m  Manitoba
101m  Ontario
132m  Quebec
  40m  Atlantic Provinces
688m  Canada-Wide

Well there you have it.  There are probably several inaccurate numbers in there, but hopefully the mistakes balance each other out to some extent so that the overall total is reasonably close.

Incidentally, I found data from Natural Resources Canada which states that 410,221 Ha were planted in 2016, Canada-wide.  Too bad that they didn't give the number of trees.  Anyway, if our estimate of 688 million trees is correct, then that would suggest that the average planting density across the country is approximately 1677 stems/Ha.  This seems reasonable based upon personal experience.


- Jonathan Clark
www.replant-environmental.ca

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.

The Eastern White Pine tree (Pinus strobus)

This post will talk about one of our favorite tree species of the east coast, the Eastern white pine.  The Latin name for this species is Pinus strobus.  Here's a famous photo of a giant Eastern white pine tree in Virginia:

Eastern white pine (which is also referred to by some people in the Unites States as the northern white pine), is a beautiful species.  It grows all over eastern Canada and around the Great Lakes, and also throughout the northeastern seaboard of the United States.  Ironically, even though it is sometimes called the northern white, it doesn't really grow well north of New Brunswick, central Newfoundland, or southern Ontario.  Here's a map showing the typical range, thanks to Wikipedia:

Eastern white pine is a powerful species.  In mature forests, it is typically the largest tree that might be found, and often towers well above other species around it.  This tree can very easily grow to be more than forty meters tall (130 feet), and some historical specimens were reported to exceed sixty meters.  Even forty meters is very tall for the east coast!  There are a number of old eastern whites on our Charles Clark Forest Reserve property in Nova Scotia, and I'm going to try to get an accurate measurement of their height soon.  Thanks to the use of drone technology, it will be very quick and easy to get a measurement that should be accurate to within one meter.  A few of these old giants were blown down several years ago by Hurricane Juan, but a number of them survived and still thrive today.  Thankfully, they recently survived the impact of Hurricane Dorian too.

Although height is everyone's favorite metric when it comes to talking about big trees, let's not forget about DBH, which stands for "diameter at breast height."  A mature eastern white can measure between 1.0 and 1.5 meters across (that's about three to five feet, for our American followers).  Stand beside one, or try to wrap your arms around it, and you'll be humbled. What's even more impressive about this species is its lifespan.  Mature trees often live 200-250 years, and can sometimes live for more than four centuries.  Some native Americans referred to this type of tree as the "Tree of Peace," and Henry David Thoreau remarked, "There is no finer tree."

There's a great historical story about eastern white pines.  In the 1700's, these trees were often used as masts for ships.  Government representatives (early day timber cruisers) would search for the best specimens in the forests and etch a special mark (a broad arrow) into the bark of the tree.  These trees were then designated as property of the crown, and anyone who cut one down (and got caught doing so) was ostensibly given a fine for "stealing" the tree.  This lead to a backlash in the American colonies that was arguably even more significant than the tea tax or the Stamp Act, and eventually led to the Pine Tree Riot of 1772.  This incident was significant in the lead-up to the American Revolution.  You can learn more about the Pine Tree Riot at this wiki link:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Tree_Riot

The eastern white pine is the provincial tree of Ontario.  Despite its majesty, it doesn't always grow symmetrically.  If growing in an area exposed to heavy winds, the tree will often have very short branches on the side exposed most chronically to the wind, and large drooping branches on the leeward side of the trunk.  This happens to other species too, but eastern white is probably more noted for it because these trees tower above other species, so this characteristic is more common in eastern whites.  Many of you probably know of Tom Thomson's famous painting, called "The Jack Pine."  You may not know that his first famous Canadian outdoor painting, entitled, "Byng Inlet, Georgian Bay," features three eastern white pine trees.  I won't post the image here due to potential copyright issues, but you can find it easily with a google search.

When young eastern white pines are growing, they can survive in any kind of soil, although they generally prefer sandy soils.  However, they're versatile, and can still survive in moist receiving zones.  They grow best when exposed to significant amounts of sunlight, but they're also very shade tolerant when young.  This lets seedlings become established as juvenile trees in understory plantations.  For this reason, eastern white pine seedlings do best when planted in open ground or in mature canopies with some open space (two extremes), but generally don't do well when planted in dense young stands with thick juvenile brush.

Different pine species tend to have different numbers of needles in their clusters, consistent to each species.  Some pines are two-needle, some are three-needle, and some are five-needle.  The eastern white, like most other white pines around the world, is a five-needle pine.  These needles grow to be as long as fifteen centimeters on mature trees, and stay on the tree for between one and four years before they fall off and are replaced with new growth.

For those of you who are more intimately familiar with forestry and arboriculture, two of the main diseases that hit eastern whites are Amillaria root rot and white pine blister rust.  The biggest insect pest that causes problems for this species is the white pine weevil.  The white pine weevil attacks eastern white pine in eastern North America, but tends to target spruce trees in western North America.

Here's a photo of one of the large eastern white pines on our Charles Clark Forest Reserve project in Nova Scotia.  It towers above the surrounding canopy!  Thankfully, Hurricane Dorian didn't blow it over.

Now you know a lot about one of our favorite tree species.  We'll leave you with this photo of some of the thousands of eastern white pine seedlings that we planted in 2019!  They're a very important part of our species mix when we're building our community forests and creating forest reserves for carbon capture.  You can learn more by going to our website and looking at our progress report page.

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark
www.replant-environmental.ca



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!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

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.