Conservation Volunteers' trees need your help!
1 November 2007
Are you thinking of planting trees this winter? Conservation Volunteers’ tree nursery has a plentiful supply of native trees and shrubs looking for new homes.
Biodiversity is not only the variety of different life forms on Earth, but also the differences between individuals of the same species. In the same way that each person is different, so each oak tree, each birch tree is different from the next. These differences have evolved over thousands of years.
At the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, plants moved back on to the bare soils left by the retreating ice. They brought with them the animals that ate the plants and the animals that preyed on the plant eaters. So our landscape soon became a rich and diverse patchwork of woodland and wetland, mountain and coast.
The plants and animals, whose descendents still populate our shores today, have adapted to our mild, damp climate and the animals that depend on them have adapted to the seasonal cycles that our native plants – trees and wildflowers – follow.
This has led to distinct differences between plants growing in, say, the Glens of Antrim, and the exact same species growing in Northern France. This is genetic diversity. Some scientists believe that it is important to protect our own plants’ genetic diversity by using local plants, known as ‘local provenance’, when replanting. Even the Habitat Action Plans for woodland in Northern Ireland aim to “encourage planting of local provenance native trees and encourage their planting in the restoration and expansion” of those woodlands.
Conservation Volunteers Northern Ireland’s tree nursery, based in the walled garden in the Clandeboye Estate near Bangor, supplies native trees and shrubs of ‘local provenance’. It produces over 100,000 trees a year from seed collected from all around Northern Ireland by volunteers from all around the world. These trees are available to buy from the nursery between November and March.
| Relevant links |
|---|
| Tree Nursery |
| External links |
|---|
| EHS Biodiversity |