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:
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.
