Positive News · 10 hours ago

Putting a Ring on it: the Plan to Green London’s Beloved Edges

A 200-kilometer ring of trees, hedgerows, and rewilded corridors is being woven around the edges of London - a quiet act of long-term faith in both nature and community. The London Tree Ring project, led by CPRE London, invites schools, local groups, and landowners to plant and tend green spaces over the next 25 years, restoring habitats and species - including the disease-resistant elm, nearly lost to Dutch elm disease - that have quietly disappeared from the landscape. "It's that community buy-in: working with local people with a vested interest, who get to follow the trees from seed to maturity," says project director Phil Paulo. What the project reveals, beneath its ambition, is something more intimate: the willingness of ordinary people to tend something they may never see fully grown, for the benefit of people they will never meet. That particular kind of care - patient, unglamorous, and rooted - may be exactly what a city of ten million needs most.