Last year, the “City of Trees” project was launched with the bold aim of planting 3 million trees in Greater Manchester over the next 20 years. At the launch of the project last November, the Manchester Evening News reported that
“Tony Hothersall from Red Rose Forest said: “City of Trees is a long term movement looking to achieve mass tree planting over the next 20 years. It has momentum right now with a planned 40,000 new trees going into the ground in the autumn/winter planting season and we plan to create 15ha of new woodland.”
Last week, the City of Trees project launched a new website. On the website, they proudly announce that
“We look back on a successful tree planting season, which saw partners come together to plant over 6,000 trees from November 2015 – March 2016.”
And more specifically 6,364 trees were planted in the season. In other words, they planted less than a sixth of the trees that they aimed to plant. That’s hardly a success.
Assuming that City of Trees plant half their trees each year in the autumn/winter season, it’s going to take them 236 years to plant 3 million trees in Greater Manchester.
By staff correspondent Ann Onymous
manchester climate monthly 
In the meantime 3 million trees have planted themselves on our SBIs, nature reserves, bits of wasteland etc. They don’t know what they’re doing of course – they’ve only been at it for a few hundred thousand years! I wonder if anyone’s told them that they should be conforming to a policy now?
I am sure we can cut down a few trees and turn them into paper for some pointless glossy policy to be written. It will keep a bunch of otherwise unemployable bureaucrats busy…
Marc