Dear Bristol City Council,
We want to put on record our congratulations for the successful bid that your Parks Strategy team led for Bristol City Council to the DEFRA Urban Tree Challenge Fund (UTCF). It has been some time in the resolution, but it is great that we now know for sure that it has succeeded.
We are delighted that there will now be more funds available to plant and maintain trees in the streets and green spaces of local communities that have perhaps been been overlooked in the past.
Thanks to you and to your excellent tree planting team, the Council has built an enviable reputation for planting urban trees across the city. Long may it continue!
We look forward to helping you with the planning and consultation that will be needed for adding these UTCF trees to next winter’s tree planting season.
This will make an important contribution to doubling Bristol’s tree canopy cover over the next 25 years.
We also applaud your decision to involve us in the collaborative partnership preparing the initial bid. As the only group specialising in protecting and caring for Bristol’s urban forest, we are very pleased to have been able to:
- Survey a representative sample of some of the 1,471 sites you have identified across the city, thereby relieving overstretched BCC officers who simply didn’t have the time to undertake this work.
- Adapt our Trees of Bristol website to record the planned planting locations for both street trees and the woodland sites.
- Develop our Tree Care site which communities will be able to use for post-planting tree maintenance and care – an important part of match funding the UTCF grant.
- We have also developed a comprehensive network of ward-based tree champions who are ready to be involved both in engaging with their local communities in the planned consultation and in helping with the ongoing care of newly planted trees.
As you can imagine, it was a lot of work, but we believe that it provided the sort of detail that helped clinch the bid.
Now that the funding has been secured, we look forward to meeting with you and the other partners to help with the next important planning phase of engaging with local communities and getting trees actually planted come next winter.
When can we meet to help you take this further?
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