This fall, Replant.ca Environmental was part of a tree planting project in PEI National Park. This park is spread across multiple locations in northern Prince Edward Island. This work was made possible thanks to a sponsorship from the One Tree Planted organization. Learn more about One Tree Planted at www.onetreeplanted.org
PEI National Park is absolutely beautiful. And it's broken up into a series of different locations, as already noted. There are three main regions: Cavendish / North Rustico, Brackley / Dalvay, and Greenwich. We were working in the Greenwich part of the Park.
Here's a graphic (courtesy of Google Earth) showing the location of the park. The busier parts of the park are in the central area of PEI's north coast, while Greenwich is further to the east (but still on the north coast).
A lot of people visit PEI due to the beaches. The province certainly has no shortage of beaches! However, there are three specifically notable beaches that can be found within PEI National Park system: Cavendish Beach, Brackley Beach, and Stanhope Beach (located within the Brackley region, just east of Brackley Beach). These three beaches are special due to their Accessibility, with amenities designed for persons with limited mobility. Learn more about them from the Visitor Guide that you'll find on this page:
www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/pe/pei-ipe/visit/guides
However, there's a lot more to the PEI National Park system than just beaches. There are two main campgrounds (Cavendish Campground and Stanhope Campground, which have several hundred camping sites between them), and there are dozens of trails throughout the park system. In addition, there are attractions such as Green Gables Heritage Place, Province House in Charlottetown, and the Skmaqn/Port-la-Joye/Fort Amherst National Historic Site. Again, if you're looking for a travel destination, I highly recommend that you check out the Visitor Guide in the link above.
In 2019, Hurricane Dorian struck Atlantic Canada, and caused tens of millions of dollars in damages. Countless numbers of mature trees were also blown down throughout the region. Greenwich was hit hard, and a number of mature trees were destroyed.
This planting work was not to be the first work in the PEI National Park system. Some work was done in Cavendish in 2020. Here are a couple of news articles about that earlier planting work, which was done by Park staff:
Our
goal for September of 2021 was to work through several of the areas that suffered
hurricane damage, in order to scatter newly planted seedlings throughout
the damaged stands. This will enhance the long-term resilience of
those stands.
The Replant.ca Environmental team planted several thousand young seedlings within the park. A total of five species were planted: Northern (red) oak, sugar maple, yellow birch, red maple, and eastern white pine.
Here are a few photos of the team in action in Greenwich:
As you can see in that third photo, some of the areas that we were planting were pretty challenging! PEI National Park has a policy not to cut out or remove any trees, including blowdown, which we think is great. Although it was a real challenge to work our way through some of those areas to add seedlings, the broken trees provide a tremendous amount of beneficial habitat to the wildlife in the area.
You can see more photos of our 2021 tree planting work in our public 2021 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox.
We'd like to thank Philip and Hailey and their staff for their hospitality and support with setting up this project, and while we were on site. Prince Edward Islanders are incredibly welcoming, and we look forward to completing additional projects on PEI in 2022 and beyond!
Jonathan "Scooter" Clark
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.
