Tremendous Trees

If there’s one thing the recent spell of sunshine has shown me, it’s the value of a good tree. I often have people tell me how lucky I am to have an outdoor job  – and of course they’re right – but at the same time it can get pretty sweaty working outside in the heat! I don’t have any air conditioning in my outdoor office, but when the sun is beating down I can always cool down under the shade of one of Cumbernauld’s many trees.

Cumbernauld has around 23% tree cover, which is an amazing stat, almost double the average for other similar sized towns. Over the next few months the Wild Ways Well project is going to be trying to map some of these using the new Open Laboratory Treezilla app. Treezilla has the ambitious target of recording every tree in the UK – a huge task! We might not manage to record every tree but we’ll have a lot of fun going out and identifying the trees around us and adding them to the list.

This Sunday 5^th August the ‘Nature Ninja’ Sunday volunteers will be visiting the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Forestwood reserve to the South of Cumbernauld. They’ll be removing some of the plastic guards from around trees which are now mature enough to no longer need their protection. If these guards aren’t removed they’ll start to restrict the tree’s growth, preventing them from reaching their full potential.

Forestwood is an amazing reserve, one of my favourite places. I visited last week and found lots of distinctive little piles of purple coloured poo – a sure sign that Pine Martens had been around, feasting on the blaeberries! If you want to join us on Wild Ways Well or our Sunday volunteers then get in touch via our website www.cumbernauldlivinglandscape.org.uk

Paul Barclay. Community Network Officer