Jubilee Trees

Growing Native British Trees to Celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, 2002

Introduction

The first official planting of Jubilee Trees to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee will be on St Valentine's Day, 14 February 2002. A sapling from an acorn collected from an 800 year-old oak from Windsor Great Park will be planted in a prominent site in central London - Victoria Embankment Gardens. This will be the first of hundreds of thousands of native trees which will be planted all over Britain during the year. 

Jubilee Trees is working closely with the Golden Jubilee Summer Party which has been set up to encourage community garden and street parties and the lighting of beacons across the UK and the Channel Islands on Monday 3 June. It is hoped that everyone taking part will plant a local tree or shrub, marked with a special plaque, as a lasting legacy of the celebrations: www.goldenjubileesummerparty.co.uk  

Jubilee Trees is supported by the Golden Jubilee Office www.goldenjubilee.gov.uk and is entered on their Golden Jubilee Ideas Database and also listed on their Calendar of Events. 

Co-ordination of the project is by the charity Flora for Fauna which encourages the planting of local native plants to help birds, bees, butterflies and other animals. It is supported by the RSPCA and the Natural History Museum. Later in the year there will be links with tree programmes set up by the Woodland Trust: www.woodland-trust.org.uk 

Jubilee Trees can be anything from the humble hawthorn to the mighty oak or the scented honeysuckle. The aim of the campaign is to encourage the planting of native Jubilee trees or shrubs across the British Isles - everywhere from parks, private gardens and schoolyards to streets, urban road verges, woodland and farms.

The backbone to the campaign is the website on the Natural History Museum internet pages. This contains a database on the native trees and shrubs for each postal area and town in the United Kingdom, making it simple for people to discover which trees are indigenous to their own locality. By keying in a postcode produces lists of suitable trees and shrubs. For instance if John Smith in Devizes, Wiltshire, types in "SN10", the database search engine returns a list of his local trees and shrubs - and some of the butterflies and birds they support. The Jubilee Tree Database is an offshoot of the highly successful Postcode Plants Database on the Natural History Museum's website www.nhm.ac.uk/science/projects/fff/ 

Plant-Animal Relationships

Landscape

Local native plants are the unsung heroes of any landscape. As the world becomes more and more homogenous, place names, dialects, food, architecture, and, most importantly, regional distinctiveness and the plants indigenous to an area, become more important. All reinforce the local identity of an area and the traditional character of the British landscape. Local trees especially convey a sense of place; are often a source of communal pride; they link gardens and countryside, and they let wildlife co-exist with people. Because they have evolved in certain areas over time and adapted to local conditions, local plants have the added attraction of being generally easy to grow, and are, therefore, suited to local soil and temperature profiles. They require less care and attention, are cheaper and easier to look after than many other plants and do not need the expensive maintenance and fertilisers so often demanded by imported plants.

Page last updated - December 28, 2001  

©2001-2002 Flora for Fauna