Vancouver park board introduces ‘Adopt a Tree’ program
Residents can adopt young street trees in the city to water during hot, dry weather
Reg Eddy, a Vancouver park board planner, demonstrates how to water a young tree using the bucket-with-holes method. (Submitted)
The Vancouver park board launched its “Adopt a Tree” program on Aug. 19, allowing residents to care for young street trees in the city.
The new program is inspired by a motion Commissioner Tom Digby submitted to the park board in April. It called on the board to recommit itself to developing Vancouver’s urban tree canopy, which is the measurement of ground covered by layers of leaves, branches, and stems as seen from above. At city council in June, Councillors Adriane Carr and Christine Boyle put forward a motion that included creating a tree adoption program similar to one Vancouver already offers for catch basins.
“[There] was unanimous approval of the motion to launch an ‘Adopt a Tree’ program to tackle some of our neighbourhoods with low canopy cover and basically supporting young tree growth throughout the city to deal with issues like heat and people who are dealing with heat-related illness,” says Reg Eddy, a Vancouver park board planner who works in the urban forestry department.
Vancouver residents have the opportunity to adopt trees that are less than three years old and water them from June to September during dry summer weather when it has not rained for at least four days.
“Trees between the end of September to mid-spring don’t really require as much water because they’ve gone into a dormant state, so they’re not doing as much photosynthesis and cellular respiration,” Eddy says.
The program aims to support Vancouver’s goal of achieving 30 per cent urban canopy cover by 2050. Each year, the park board plants about 2,000 new street trees, which require more watering to help them grow, according to a park board press release.
Interested residents can visit the program’s website to view a map with street trees available for adoption. While people can adopt multiple trees, the park board is providing watering bags for up to four trees. Other watering methods the board highlights on its website are using a bucket with drilled holes or watering by hand, such as with a hose.
“Young trees have difficulty. They need a little bit of a hand when they are first planted because they’re not completely equipped with all of the root system that they need to survive a droughty, hot summer,” Eddy says.
“So by watering those trees with watering bags or whatever [method], we’re essentially setting them up for success, and they can eventually establish a root system that makes them resilient to these hot, droughty summers.”
Once trees have been planted for three years, they will be removed from the program, but residents are welcome to continue watering them, he says.
Since June, Eddy says there was a lot of work needed to get the program up and running.
“However, we weren’t going to wait until next year,” he adds. “We wanted to get it going and start building a bit of a base of people, of adopters, and be ready for next year.”
Eddy hopes Vancouver residents become more connected with green spaces around their house and with the trees throughout the city.
“What I hope is that people become more aware of the trees that line our streets and how they benefit us in various ways, whether it’s sequestering carbon, cooling our streets with shade, pulling pollutants out of the air, mitigating stormwater runoff, all those types of things,” he says.
For more information about the program and to adopt a tree, visit www.vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/adopt-a-tree/.
