Following a recent pre-development survey, I was just doing a bit of my normal “google research” and came across what, in my opinion, is a very stark image between an urban public park and adjacent residential areas – the large sterile park with (brown) grass clipped to a millimetre of its life and the tree rich, lush green, private gardens.
Now I would be the first to support the claim that the issue of reduced public tree planting has come by way of cuts in council budgets but, as with a lot of government decisions, could this cause problems in the medium/long term?
Just some of the known benefits of trees, i.e. air cleaners, shade providers, influencers of air temperature, habitat providers, water managers (filtration & retention), should be enough to make us all realise that we need to be planting more trees to increase the canopy cover of our living areas.
That’s why at DAA we encourage our clients to plant more trees as part of their proposed schemes and persuade them that trees, like the development they are hoping to build, can be defined as an asset.