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Project Updates

Newbury Friends of the Earth has teamed up with West Berkshire Council, Newbury Town Council and Hungerford Town and Manor to create three woods in the district as living memorials to the traumas of the coronavirus pandemic this year.

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About the Project

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought us all difficult times with many painful losses. Newbury Friends of the Earth is running The Lockdown Woods project which offers an opportunity to dedicate trees we’ve grown ourselves in our own back gardens in new memorial woodlands in West Berkshire; to share our feelings of mutual grief and uncertainty by making something beautiful for the future.

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We are very grateful to Newbury Town Council, Greenham Parishcouncil and other groups for generous financial support which is enabling this project to go ahead as planned this year.

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How you can get involved

We need members of the public to look for tree seedlings in our gardens and allotments, put them in pots and look after them until they’re big enough to plant in our wood. We hope this will be a fun and exciting way for our community to reconnect with nature around them, while coming to terms with such a turbulent period in our lives. 

We’ll be planting our own young trees plus saplings donated by the Woodland Trust in two small woods in Newbury this winter. We are also hoping to plant several further small areas around the district this year, and are working with other community groups and councils to make this happen.  We will be continuing to plant our home-grown trees over the next few winters.

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Our baby trees need to be at least 50cm tall before they can be planted into our woodland sites. 

This is a form for you to let us know how many you have at the moment of all heights - please measure from the top of the pot i.e from soil level! Any that are below 50 cm this year can be kept for growing in 2021!

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Tree species with *

Only if parent plant is definitely disease-free (Check with us if you are unsure).

Susan Millington, the main organiser of the project

Our sites

Goldwell Park

One acre size plot at the western side of the Park. We aim to plant
around three hundred young trees here.

Westbrook Down

Our largest site, at two acres, is next to Hungerford Marsh and is led by the Town and Manor of Hungerford with Hungerford Environmental Action Team and St Lawrence’s Church

Barn Crescent

Here, we will be planting twelve fruit trees and a further seventy native woodland trees as part of the transformation of this field into another Lockdown Wood.

One of our earliest tree guardians, Freddie Marsh, eight years old