trees are amazing
seriously trees are brilliant if you’re
ever feeling sort of down or a bit
miserable or you think but the magic has
gone out of the world just go and look
at a tree I have a look out and have a
little think about what a tree does
because a tree basically makes itself
out of air water soil and sunshine and I
think one reason trees are better than
people is if I gave you water soil and
sunshine I don’t think you’d be able to
make very much let alone replicate
yourself and bring light to the planet
the trees can do that and they’re very
cool and the natural environment of a
tree is also very amazing the forest or
the woodland and it’s not just because
of the relate not just because of the
trees themselves the individual trees
themselves because of the relationships
between those trees it’s because of the
other floor and fauna that exists around
them the bees and the birds and the bats
and the animals the understory the
flowers that grow underneath them all so
crucially the soil and the mycorrhizae
relationships beneath the soil between
the fungi and the trees and the tree
roots for create this incredible
ecosystem it’s amazing environment that
sort of just supports itself and is
absolutely wonderful this talks not
about that if you came for the woodland
talk this is the wrong talk I’m afraid I
I don’t do that sort of stuff I do I
bore a culture or urban forestry and
what that means is I take these trees
from this amazing environment we’re on a
global scale these trees are the air
conditioning of the planet there but
they mitigate climate change they cool
down the planet may provide habitat and
shelter for vast numbers of species
including our own we take them from an
environment and we put them places like
this and then we sort of say go on do
your thing bring us life and amazingly
amazingly they do they do do just that
against all odds they do deliver and
they do deliver us many many things and
I say against all odds because in an
urban environment you’ve got
you’ve got compaction you’ve got loads
of people you’ve got the competition for
space you’ve got loads of stuff going on
underground with services and utilities
and roads and all the stuff that we know
comes with the city trees are competing
against all of those things and yet they
still do it they still deliver fantastic
things for us and for many years I think
it’s fair to say the principle benefit
of trees that was understood by people
and politicians was that there were nice
things they were pretty it was an
aesthetic amenity benefit they’re green
and they’re fluffy and they look nice
and of course they are green and fluffy
and they look nice most of them and
that’s really important but when you
have an asset which only is perceived as
having amenity value as a nice thing to
have
then when financial times go bad when
the economy shrinks when cuts are made
it’s the non-essentials that lose out
it’s a non essentials to get lost before
the essentials so over the last few
years has been a lot of work done by
many people all over the world to
demonstrate all of the things that trees
do to describe those things to promote
those things and in many cases to
quantify the benefits to actually put
numbers to put monetary values on the
benefits that trees are delivering and
we say there’s environmental economic
and social benefits of trees in the
urban environment and collectively we
call these ecosystem services and
there’s many many of them and I’m not
going to go through them all but I just
wanted to spend time on a couple that I
thought quite relevant to an urban area
so this is a street in my hometown and
it shows something that trees do quite
well it’s quite an intuitive thing I
think is very important thing casting
shade cooling down the urban environment
is a lovely hot day today beneath the
shade of a tree it’s cooler it makes
sense to us this is an obvious thing you
can see the difference between where
there is no tree and where there is a
tree it’s quite an obvious image trees
don’t just cool down the urban
environment and mitigate urban heat
island effect by shade they also cool it
down through evapotranspiration so they
draw up the moisture through their roots
they send it out through the canopies
and they cool it down that way as well
so trees cooling the urban area making
urban places nicer places to live more
livable
healthier places for people to enjoy
this is also this is a sort of
predominately a residential street it’s
closed off at one end so it’s quite a
quiet thoroughfare and another one of
the benefits of trees is improves social
cohesion if you make a place nicer
people want to go there they want to
spend time there people meet each other
helps build communities they also help
reduce crime because if you make a place
nicer to go more people go there there’s
more eyes on the street and certain
types of crime are reduced as a result
of trees just as simple as planting a
few trees there this also shows there’s
publicly owned trees and there’s
privately owned trees and of course all
of them make up the urban forest all
kinds of trees within any given urban
area a part of the urban forest it’s
another picture from my hometown and
this one shows quite well I think what
trees can do in terms of storm water
management and rainfall we know you’ve
got a change in climate we know that
there’s things going on we’re seeing
different kinds of weather not only hot
days but also very very wet days lots
and lots of rainfall and that water has
to go somewhere in the conventional
drainage system that we have is often
ageing and often under pressure or trees
intercept a huge amount of rainfall
masses high percentages 60 maybe 70
percent of the rain that falls on this
tree will be retained in the canopy by
the leaves and then drawn down slowly
through the leaves onto the stem and
down into the tree pit area that slows
down the amount of time it takes to get
to the drainage system it reduces
flooding it reduces stormwater runoff
and it reduces the amount of money that
is spent on those things so trees doing
something else they’re also here this is
an old oak tree in the background you’ve
got relatively new development and it’s
good that they did that because in
development situations with with their
property sales research has shown that
well-maintained green infrastructure
trees around houses can increase the
amount of money that their house will
sell for and decrease the amount of time
it’ll be sat on the market now that
might be a good thing or a bad thing
depending on your perspective and
depending on where you are on the
housing ladder but for us as tree
managers it’s a very useful tool because
when we have developers saying we’ve got
to cut down these trees because we want
to put in more units and make more money
we can actually say well hang on if you
retain these trees if you work around
them then they’ll bring you in more
money this is a commercial benefits
there’s more commercial benefits if you
have well-maintained
green infrastructure good street trees
good trees or parked around commercial
areas shops and cafes research again has
shown that people will spend more time
in shops which have trees outside or
green infrastructure around them and
they’ll spend more money in those shops
on the same item that they would do in
another shop without the green
infrastructure and the greenery outside
so they’re not my favorite arguments the
economic ones
but they’re very very useful to us
because we can sell that you know money
talks along the time unfortunately and
we can say look trees a delivering
economic benefits all over the place
health health benefits and massive
benefits to human health and trees I
wanted to give you a few example from
sort of cradle to grave all the way
through because trees really do deliver
some serious benefits in this field so
in the lowest economic social group
pregnant women who spend time close to
green infrastructure during pregnancy
have bigger healthier babies children
exposed to green infrastructure at a
young age show less signs of allergies
healthier children it’s gotta be a
really easy sell the truth shortly
healthiest children later on in life if
you’re in hospital patients recover more
quickly in the discharge more quickly if
they have a view over green
infrastructure and if they have a view
over hard landscaping or no view at all
this gets people out of hospital beds
quicker you know this is good for the
NHS as well it’s good for everybody in
later life again the elderly have been
shown to have more chance of living in
additional five years if they live close
by to green infrastructure and another
massive benefit of trees is the mental
health aspect mental health is being
talked about a lot at the moment there
is evidence that shows that there’s a
positive relationship between tree
canopy cover an increase in tree canopy
cover and a reduction in prescriptions
for antidepressants so you may be
hearing more about prescriptions for
nature instead of just throwing pills at
a problem go and walk in the park I’m
walk in the woods spend some time around
nature obviously not everything can be
solved by that but a lot of things can
be things to get a little bit better
from doing that so there is an awful lot
of benefits of urban trees but there’s
two things as well to remember about
this one is that many of the benefits
i’ve just mentioned are positively
correlated to canopy size so the bigger
the tree you have the more benefits you
get things
like shade water attenuation kind of
makes sense the other thing I’ve
mentioned a couple of times is
well-maintained green infrastructure so
it’s gotta be well-maintained it’s got
to be looked after properly and that’s
very very important because a lot of
people I think maybe think that you get
a tree and he’s sticking in the ground
and then you walk away and you can come
back 20 or 30 years later and you’ll
find this amazing mature tree delivering
all these ecosystem services just
pumping out benefits to so all the
residents if you plan a tree walk away
and come out 20 years later you’re gonna
find either a dead tree or no tree at
all that’s not how it works between
identifying a site that is potentially
suitable for a tree and getting your
mature tree at the end there is a lot of
work involved a lot of expert specialist
work in bold and in the UK particularly
in publicly owned trees so trees like
base for a long streets or in parks or
in schools that work is done by tree
offices or tree managers local authority
employees who are under the same
pressures is all the local and local
authority employees that we know about
reductions in budgets cuts expect it to
do more with less and threated jobs but
we don’t often hear a lot about tree
offices nobody’s really lamenting the
plight of the tree officer but they’re
important and I think they’re great
people part of my job is to promote tree
offices so I’m kind of biased but
they’re great people tree offices are
custodians of the urban forest they’re
quite strange people are going to trees
for many reasons but there’s one I
mentioned now it’s because it’s quite
weird to do a job where you know you’re
never going to see the benefits of it
you’ll have quite a strange mentality to
plant a tree and try and pitch that in
50 100 200 years we know we’re not going
to see the good stuff we’re doing from
these trees but you still do them and
tree officers do a really good job as
well because they don’t have to be don’t
have to be just tree experts so of
course they do have to be tree experts
have know about trees and biomechanics
and pests and diseases but they have to
understand the soil many of them have to
understand contracts and contract
management they have to see the law they
have to understand policy there’s a lot
of stuff and they’re also ambassadors
for our borer culture tree offices often
will be the only point of contact the
general public has for the arboreal
cultural industry so there are basileus
for horticulture sometimes they’re
social workers tribal culture they’ve
got to go out there we’ve got explain to
residents why we’ve got
cut this tree down or why we’re not
gonna cut this tree down their sort of
their multi skilled experts dealing with
multifunctional assets and they do a
really really good job but they’re under
pressure so please remember that so I
guess the point of one of these talks I
think is to leave the audience thinking
about stuff they wouldn’t ordinarily
think about so what I’d ask you to do
when you next go outside and look at
your tree outside your place of work or
your home or your local park or whatever
look at that tree and I want you to
think three things I want you to think
three things number one that’s really
cool trees trees are really cool that’s
great it’s really easy to take stuff for
granted trees are amazing and they
growing in our cities in our streets in
our parks that’s really really great so
remember that trees are cool first of
all secondly it may look like that trees
not doing an awful lot it’s just kind of
sitting there lazy tree it’s not too
much but it’s really busy that trees
doing loads and loads of stuff than you
can see and it’s doing stuff to benefit
you and your friends and your family and
your communities and that tree is busy
doing that all the time but then thirdly
please also remember that it’s not doing
it all by itself there are people who
have devoted their careers and their
lives to looking after these trees to
deliver those benefits to you your
friends your family in your communities
so give a little thought as well as well
as seeing how great the trees are think
a little bit about the people who manage
them and who are looking after them on your behalf thank you very much
seriously trees are brilliant if you’re
ever feeling sort of down or a bit
miserable or you think but the magic has
gone out of the world just go and look
at a tree I have a look out and have a
little think about what a tree does
because a tree basically makes itself
out of air water soil and sunshine and I
think one reason trees are better than
people is if I gave you water soil and
sunshine I don’t think you’d be able to
make very much let alone replicate
yourself and bring light to the planet
the trees can do that and they’re very
cool and the natural environment of a
tree is also very amazing the forest or
the woodland and it’s not just because
of the relate not just because of the
trees themselves the individual trees
themselves because of the relationships
between those trees it’s because of the
other floor and fauna that exists around
them the bees and the birds and the bats
and the animals the understory the
flowers that grow underneath them all so
crucially the soil and the mycorrhizae
relationships beneath the soil between
the fungi and the trees and the tree
roots for create this incredible
ecosystem it’s amazing environment that
sort of just supports itself and is
absolutely wonderful this talks not
about that if you came for the woodland
talk this is the wrong talk I’m afraid I
I don’t do that sort of stuff I do I
bore a culture or urban forestry and
what that means is I take these trees
from this amazing environment we’re on a
global scale these trees are the air
conditioning of the planet there but
they mitigate climate change they cool
down the planet may provide habitat and
shelter for vast numbers of species
including our own we take them from an
environment and we put them places like
this and then we sort of say go on do
your thing bring us life and amazingly
amazingly they do they do do just that
against all odds they do deliver and
they do deliver us many many things and
I say against all odds because in an
urban environment you’ve got
you’ve got compaction you’ve got loads
of people you’ve got the competition for
space you’ve got loads of stuff going on
underground with services and utilities
and roads and all the stuff that we know
comes with the city trees are competing
against all of those things and yet they
still do it they still deliver fantastic
things for us and for many years I think
it’s fair to say the principle benefit
of trees that was understood by people
and politicians was that there were nice
things they were pretty it was an
aesthetic amenity benefit they’re green
and they’re fluffy and they look nice
and of course they are green and fluffy
and they look nice most of them and
that’s really important but when you
have an asset which only is perceived as
having amenity value as a nice thing to
have
then when financial times go bad when
the economy shrinks when cuts are made
it’s the non-essentials that lose out
it’s a non essentials to get lost before
the essentials so over the last few
years has been a lot of work done by
many people all over the world to
demonstrate all of the things that trees
do to describe those things to promote
those things and in many cases to
quantify the benefits to actually put
numbers to put monetary values on the
benefits that trees are delivering and
we say there’s environmental economic
and social benefits of trees in the
urban environment and collectively we
call these ecosystem services and
there’s many many of them and I’m not
going to go through them all but I just
wanted to spend time on a couple that I
thought quite relevant to an urban area
so this is a street in my hometown and
it shows something that trees do quite
well it’s quite an intuitive thing I
think is very important thing casting
shade cooling down the urban environment
is a lovely hot day today beneath the
shade of a tree it’s cooler it makes
sense to us this is an obvious thing you
can see the difference between where
there is no tree and where there is a
tree it’s quite an obvious image trees
don’t just cool down the urban
environment and mitigate urban heat
island effect by shade they also cool it
down through evapotranspiration so they
draw up the moisture through their roots
they send it out through the canopies
and they cool it down that way as well
so trees cooling the urban area making
urban places nicer places to live more
livable
healthier places for people to enjoy
this is also this is a sort of
predominately a residential street it’s
closed off at one end so it’s quite a
quiet thoroughfare and another one of
the benefits of trees is improves social
cohesion if you make a place nicer
people want to go there they want to
spend time there people meet each other
helps build communities they also help
reduce crime because if you make a place
nicer to go more people go there there’s
more eyes on the street and certain
types of crime are reduced as a result
of trees just as simple as planting a
few trees there this also shows there’s
publicly owned trees and there’s
privately owned trees and of course all
of them make up the urban forest all
kinds of trees within any given urban
area a part of the urban forest it’s
another picture from my hometown and
this one shows quite well I think what
trees can do in terms of storm water
management and rainfall we know you’ve
got a change in climate we know that
there’s things going on we’re seeing
different kinds of weather not only hot
days but also very very wet days lots
and lots of rainfall and that water has
to go somewhere in the conventional
drainage system that we have is often
ageing and often under pressure or trees
intercept a huge amount of rainfall
masses high percentages 60 maybe 70
percent of the rain that falls on this
tree will be retained in the canopy by
the leaves and then drawn down slowly
through the leaves onto the stem and
down into the tree pit area that slows
down the amount of time it takes to get
to the drainage system it reduces
flooding it reduces stormwater runoff
and it reduces the amount of money that
is spent on those things so trees doing
something else they’re also here this is
an old oak tree in the background you’ve
got relatively new development and it’s
good that they did that because in
development situations with with their
property sales research has shown that
well-maintained green infrastructure
trees around houses can increase the
amount of money that their house will
sell for and decrease the amount of time
it’ll be sat on the market now that
might be a good thing or a bad thing
depending on your perspective and
depending on where you are on the
housing ladder but for us as tree
managers it’s a very useful tool because
when we have developers saying we’ve got
to cut down these trees because we want
to put in more units and make more money
we can actually say well hang on if you
retain these trees if you work around
them then they’ll bring you in more
money this is a commercial benefits
there’s more commercial benefits if you
have well-maintained
green infrastructure good street trees
good trees or parked around commercial
areas shops and cafes research again has
shown that people will spend more time
in shops which have trees outside or
green infrastructure around them and
they’ll spend more money in those shops
on the same item that they would do in
another shop without the green
infrastructure and the greenery outside
so they’re not my favorite arguments the
economic ones
but they’re very very useful to us
because we can sell that you know money
talks along the time unfortunately and
we can say look trees a delivering
economic benefits all over the place
health health benefits and massive
benefits to human health and trees I
wanted to give you a few example from
sort of cradle to grave all the way
through because trees really do deliver
some serious benefits in this field so
in the lowest economic social group
pregnant women who spend time close to
green infrastructure during pregnancy
have bigger healthier babies children
exposed to green infrastructure at a
young age show less signs of allergies
healthier children it’s gotta be a
really easy sell the truth shortly
healthiest children later on in life if
you’re in hospital patients recover more
quickly in the discharge more quickly if
they have a view over green
infrastructure and if they have a view
over hard landscaping or no view at all
this gets people out of hospital beds
quicker you know this is good for the
NHS as well it’s good for everybody in
later life again the elderly have been
shown to have more chance of living in
additional five years if they live close
by to green infrastructure and another
massive benefit of trees is the mental
health aspect mental health is being
talked about a lot at the moment there
is evidence that shows that there’s a
positive relationship between tree
canopy cover an increase in tree canopy
cover and a reduction in prescriptions
for antidepressants so you may be
hearing more about prescriptions for
nature instead of just throwing pills at
a problem go and walk in the park I’m
walk in the woods spend some time around
nature obviously not everything can be
solved by that but a lot of things can
be things to get a little bit better
from doing that so there is an awful lot
of benefits of urban trees but there’s
two things as well to remember about
this one is that many of the benefits
i’ve just mentioned are positively
correlated to canopy size so the bigger
the tree you have the more benefits you
get things
like shade water attenuation kind of
makes sense the other thing I’ve
mentioned a couple of times is
well-maintained green infrastructure so
it’s gotta be well-maintained it’s got
to be looked after properly and that’s
very very important because a lot of
people I think maybe think that you get
a tree and he’s sticking in the ground
and then you walk away and you can come
back 20 or 30 years later and you’ll
find this amazing mature tree delivering
all these ecosystem services just
pumping out benefits to so all the
residents if you plan a tree walk away
and come out 20 years later you’re gonna
find either a dead tree or no tree at
all that’s not how it works between
identifying a site that is potentially
suitable for a tree and getting your
mature tree at the end there is a lot of
work involved a lot of expert specialist
work in bold and in the UK particularly
in publicly owned trees so trees like
base for a long streets or in parks or
in schools that work is done by tree
offices or tree managers local authority
employees who are under the same
pressures is all the local and local
authority employees that we know about
reductions in budgets cuts expect it to
do more with less and threated jobs but
we don’t often hear a lot about tree
offices nobody’s really lamenting the
plight of the tree officer but they’re
important and I think they’re great
people part of my job is to promote tree
offices so I’m kind of biased but
they’re great people tree offices are
custodians of the urban forest they’re
quite strange people are going to trees
for many reasons but there’s one I
mentioned now it’s because it’s quite
weird to do a job where you know you’re
never going to see the benefits of it
you’ll have quite a strange mentality to
plant a tree and try and pitch that in
50 100 200 years we know we’re not going
to see the good stuff we’re doing from
these trees but you still do them and
tree officers do a really good job as
well because they don’t have to be don’t
have to be just tree experts so of
course they do have to be tree experts
have know about trees and biomechanics
and pests and diseases but they have to
understand the soil many of them have to
understand contracts and contract
management they have to see the law they
have to understand policy there’s a lot
of stuff and they’re also ambassadors
for our borer culture tree offices often
will be the only point of contact the
general public has for the arboreal
cultural industry so there are basileus
for horticulture sometimes they’re
social workers tribal culture they’ve
got to go out there we’ve got explain to
residents why we’ve got
cut this tree down or why we’re not
gonna cut this tree down their sort of
their multi skilled experts dealing with
multifunctional assets and they do a
really really good job but they’re under
pressure so please remember that so I
guess the point of one of these talks I
think is to leave the audience thinking
about stuff they wouldn’t ordinarily
think about so what I’d ask you to do
when you next go outside and look at
your tree outside your place of work or
your home or your local park or whatever
look at that tree and I want you to
think three things I want you to think
three things number one that’s really
cool trees trees are really cool that’s
great it’s really easy to take stuff for
granted trees are amazing and they
growing in our cities in our streets in
our parks that’s really really great so
remember that trees are cool first of
all secondly it may look like that trees
not doing an awful lot it’s just kind of
sitting there lazy tree it’s not too
much but it’s really busy that trees
doing loads and loads of stuff than you
can see and it’s doing stuff to benefit
you and your friends and your family and
your communities and that tree is busy
doing that all the time but then thirdly
please also remember that it’s not doing
it all by itself there are people who
have devoted their careers and their
lives to looking after these trees to
deliver those benefits to you your
friends your family in your communities
so give a little thought as well as well
as seeing how great the trees are think
a little bit about the people who manage
them and who are looking after them on your behalf thank you very much
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