Tree City helps “people and trees grow together. ”
How? By engaging citizens to take an active role in their community through planting and caring for trees.
Our main campaign is now TreeKeepers, a partnership with the Environmental Youth Alliance we formed to help realize a Vancouver Greenest City 2020 Action Plan goal to grow the urban forest. To learn more about TreeKeepers, get a reduced price on a fabulous tree or learn more about how you be a Citizen Forester, check out the TreeKeepers page.
Our next public event is the First Annual TreeKeepers Day celebration of the urban forest on September 21, 2013, from 11am to 2pm in Alexandra Park on English Bay across from the inukshuk. We’ll have trees for sale, food, games, fun, advice and the inauguration of Vancouver’s PoetTree where anyone can write and attach their own verse. National Poet Laureate Fred Wah will be there to get your poetic sap running.
Some examples of our community-based tree work :
- We were honoured to be able to help at the installation of the new Medicine Wheel Healing Garden in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by donating the tree for the centre of the wheel. You can read more about the opening ceremony here.
- Grant Watson of Gourmet Gardens applied to us for a mini-grant to help plant some fruit trees for the Hastings-Sunrise Teaching Garden at Hastings Community Centre, Vancouver.
- Means of Production Community Orchard — We offered logistic support and elbow grease to a neighbourhood group staring a new community orchard on the slopes of China Creek Park in partnership with the Environmental Youth Alliance.
- Community Garden at M.O.B.Y. — This land beside the Skytrain tracks in East Van near Commercial Drive and 11th Ave. was turned from a derelict lot into a community garden. And what’s a community garden without some community fruit trees? Tree City donated some apple trees and helped train the folks who will tend the mini-orchard in the years to come.
- Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House — Kids at this vibrant community service agency in East Van got a lesson in where apples come from thanks to Neighbourhood House staffer (and Tree City board member) Mark Sobers.
We also provide public workshops to encourage and equip a city of urban forest aficionados. These include free courses on how to plant, feed, graft, prune and pick organic fruit trees.
The workshops tend to be popular and enrollment is limited so be sure to apply early.
