Tree Planting in Victoria Park, Truro, Nova Scotia

Our organization did quite a bit of tree planting work in Truro's Victoria Park in September 2024.  This work was completely funded by Forests Canada, which was the lead organization on this project.  Forests Canada (formerly Forests Ontario) is a wonderful organization that fundraises and supports the planting of trees all over our country.

 

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.  However, we've worked in this park every year since 2020.  Hurricane Fiona caused major damage to the park in 2022, so for 2023 and 2024, our focus was on adding trees to areas where the forests had been flattened by the hurricane.

Our work in 2024 focused on three main areas.  We planted in the Gorge area first.  That area had a couple of sections which were almost completely destroyed in the storm, so we planted high density to help bring those bare areas back to future forest cover.  However, we also planted some additional seedlings (at much lower density) throughout parts of the Gorge area which were not heavily damaged, to enhance species diversity throughout the Gorge, and to improve long-term forest health.

In addition, there were two other large areas within the park that suffered major destruction, near the Wishing Well and the Vibert Trail.  We were able to fill each of these areas with trees, and also plant in a small storm patch to the south of these two areas.

The blue shaded areas in the graphic below show the ground that was planted in the Fall of 2024 (green areas are sections that we planted in past years):

 

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. Our team planted 50,971 trees in Victoria Park in 2024 alone, thanks to the funding from Forests Canada!

Here are a few photos from our work in 2024:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 "2024 Planting Photos" folder, then into the "Victoria Park" sub-folder.  Start here:

    www.replant-environmental.ca/photos

 

We'd like to thank Scott Holman and the park staff for having us, Don Cameron from the Department of Lands & Forests for helping with logistics coordination, and especially Forests Canada for being the Sponsor that made this project happen.

Edit:  Here are links to blog posts talking about some of our earlier work in this area, in case you want to review the earlier projects that we completed:

replant-environmental.blogspot.com/2021/10/tree-planting-project-in-victoria-park.html

replant-environmental.blogspot.com/2023/02/tree-planting-project-in-victoria-park.html

If you'd like to learn more about Truro's Victoria Park, visit their website:

www.victoriaparktruro.ca

Victoria Park is the #1 rated attraction in Truro, and has over fifteen hundred very positive reviews on Google.

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!

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.

 

 

Tree Planting Project in Victoria Park, 2023 (Truro, Nova Scotia)

Our organization did quite a bit of tree planting work in Truro's Victoria Park in 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, and then a much larger phase in 2024 which was sponsored by Forests Ontario / Forest Recovery Canada, but the rest of this blog post will talk about the 2022 phase.  For a link to the more recent work, read this post:

www.replant-environmental.blogspot.com/2024/11/tree-planting-in-victoria-park-truro.html

Let's continue reviewing our work in 2022:

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!!

The shaded areas in the graphic below illustrate some of the ground that was covered in the Fall of 2022:

 

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:

www.victoriaparktruro.ca

Victoria Park is the #1 rated attraction in Truro, and has over fifteen hundred very positive reviews on Google.

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!

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.

 

 

Tree Planting Project in Victoria Park, Truro NS (2021)

Our organization did quite a bit of tree planting work in Truro's Victoria Park this past September (2021).  This work was funded by the One Tree Planted organization.  You can learn more about them from their website at:  www.onetreeplanted.org

 

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 thanks to the strong support 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.

The support that we received from One Tree Planted allowed us to more than double our impact in 2021, planting an additional 35,000 trees!!

The shaded areas in the graphic below illustrate the ground that was covered in the fall of 2021:

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).

Phase Three of this project (in 2022) is intended to further increase the species diversity.  We plan to do some in-fill work, adding at least six more species of hardwoods to the areas that have already been planted.  In addition, we have additional areas that need to be tackled, including some work in the Gorge and other sensitive areas of the park that need to be fortified with additional young seedlings.

Here are a couple of photos from our work in 2021:

 

You can see more photos of our 2021 tree planting work in our public 2021 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox.

 

If you'd like to learn more about Truro's Victoria Park, visit their website:

www.victoriaparktruro.ca

Victoria Park is the #1 rated attraction in Truro, and has over fifteen hundred very positive reviews on Google.

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!

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.

 

Victoria Park, Tree Planting Project in Nova Scotia (2020)

Our organization did quite a bit of tree planting work in Truro this past September (2020).  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 also has an extensive trail network.

Here's an overview graphic of eastern Canada, showing the location of Victoria Park:

When we contacted Victoria Park to discuss the possibility of planting some trees there, we soon discovered 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.

Here's a photo of the truck and trailer, loaded and ready to go for a day of planting:

After meeting with the park forester, and taking a tour, it appeared that there could be as much as fifty to sixty acres of open ground that was suitable for afforestation efforts.  The majority of that area was at the old landfill site, but there was still a significant amount of ground near the head of some of the main recreational trails.  We decided to initially target most of the recreational trailhead areas in 2020, taking account of the realization that this project would obviously require a multi-year approach spread out over two or perhaps even three years.

We spent several days working on-site.  For phase one, in September of 2020, we planted approximately fifteen thousand trees, which was sufficient to cover the majority of the trailhead area.  Here's an overview of that section of the park.  I've circled the areas that the Replant.ca Environmental organization has covered so far:

Those fifteen thousand trees reflected a fairly diverse mix, including four types of conifers (red 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).  Our goal was to ensure that the planted sections grow up looking like a real forest, rather than just a straight pine or spruce monoculture.

We also planted a smaller number of trees in the landfill area, although those were mostly just conifers.  Here's a photo showing the location of those trees:

When we return to continue our work in the fall of 2021, our first priority will be to finish planting the remaining areas within the west side of the trailhead area.  After that, we'll start to tackle the larger landfill areas (and the open patch to the north of those areas) with a similar diverse mix of at least ten or twelve different species.  In addition to the species that we planted in 2020, we expect that we'll be able to add eastern white pine, eastern hemlock, and several additional new deciduous species.

Here's a photo of Dee, finishing up some survey work a day before we started planting the seedlings:

The first phase of planting on this project went very smoothly.  We typically get a number of curious passersby any time we're working in any sort of a park, but the pedestrian and cyclist traffic on this project was incredible.  We got to talk to dozens of people each day about the work that we were doing.  We're really looking forward to going back to this project in 2021.

If you'd like to learn more about Truro's Victoria Park, visit their website:

www.victoriaparktruro.ca

Victoria Park is the #1 rated attraction in Truro, and has over fifteen hundred very positive reviews on Google.

Update for 2021:  If you're looking for information about Phase 2 of this project, planted in 2021, visit this link:

replant-environmental.blogspot.com/2021/10/tree-planting-project-in-victoria-park.html

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!

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.