'Urgent' plea for help to increase number of trees

Volunteer wardens are being sought "urgently" to help bring the tree cover in a town up to the national average.

According to the Woodland Trust, Swindon has an average tree cover of just 8%, compared with the urban England average of 18%.

Swindon Borough councillor Jake Chandler said Wiltshire Wildlife Trust had trained volunteer wardens to plant, monitor and maintain their neighbourhood trees, but more people are needed to address a volunteer "deficiency".

"We want Swindon to be the example [for] other local authorities, especially those urban population centres where there just isn't the room to plant millions of trees next to each other," he said.

The council and the wildlife trust have worked together on the Great Western Community Forest, which has seen nearly one million trees planted over the past five years through government-funded Trees for Climate projects.

Despite this, Chandler said the town remained "well below where we'd like to be".

"We shouldn't be below the national average for tree canopy cover, so we want to get up to the magical 18% in the next two to five years," he said.

Neil Pullen, the wildlife trust's conservation lead, said development was one reason why tree cover in the town was so low.

"In Swindon we do have these very big areas of very low tree equity; in some areas there's simply no trees at all," he said.

"Part of it is because of the development, part of it is because of where we actually are.

"I think that rush to development after the war in Swindon, that's why we're so poor with trees."

Chandler said the number of active tree wardens in Swindon was "somewhere between 50 and 100".

"We'd like to double that number; that will give us the boots on the ground to not only plant the extra trees but maintain them in the long term," he said.

At Mouldon Hill Country Park, volunteers have learnt how to survey trees where they live and report any problems they identify.

"Tree lover" and retired teacher Jan Miles, who attended the training, said: "Part of this is to look around and see that an area could do with a tree, then give the information back to the person in charge."

Haydon Wick parish councillor Ian Edwards said the training had been an eye-opening experience.

"I've come down here to see what I can learn," he said.

"I've learnt that there are maple trees growing here; I didn't know that. Maple to me means Canada.

"There are lots of chunks of land here which are never looked at that we could put lots of trees on for different reasons."

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