Cheshire Tree Alliance

Cheshire Tree Alliance - 2025 round up - In this update: · Cheshire East Highways Tree Planting Pilot · Cheshire Tree Alliance Conference 2025 & 2026 · Updates from our members · Cheshire Local Nature Recovery Strategy Cheshire East Highways Tree Planting Pilot November 2025 marked the anniversary of Cheshire East Highways’ commitment to work collaboratively with the Cheshire Tree Alliance (CTA) to improve their policy on planting street trees via a pilot project in Lacey Green, Wilmslow. Our principal concern has been their interim policy restricting tree planting to a minimum of 3m from the highway. The minutes from the Highways Committee of 21/11/2024 state: “The Council welcomed the proposals and wanted to work closely with the group to deliver that proposal as quickly and as fully as possible. The collaboration would provide an opportunity to consider appropriate tree locations, the most suitable tree species, and how best to care for the saplings until they became established. It would provide real examples of how the current Council policy operated, highlight the need for any improvements, and inform officers on how best to make any necessary changes.” Despite this written commitment, the Highways team has failed to engage with the CTA. We therefore asked to speak at this November’s Highway Committee but were refused permission on the grounds that the Lacey Green Pilot was not on their agenda. Paddy Johnson, the CTA’s lead on this issue, subsequently sat down with Cllr Mark Goldsmith, Chair of the Highways Committee, on 8th December to discuss the lack of action and engagement. Paddy’s summary of their meeting is below: “We agreed that: The priority is to get the trial (actual planting) under way as soon as possible and no later than February 2026, as this acts as the way to gather information for ongoing review of process/procedure. All of the pre-work and due diligence has been done (physical surveys with Cheshire East’s arboriculturists to identify precise locations that test the principles to be used in any future process/policy; identification of best species for those locations; funding offered from Mersey Forest; agreement of residents). In order to unblock this and get it moving rapidly through the sign off process within Highways, CTA will produce a summary and re-send the information previously supplied (in July 2025). MG can then chase it through and it is hoped sign off/go-ahead can be achieved ahead of Xmas to meet our joint timescale. The trial is important as it will provide a wealth of experience on the challenges that need to be resolved in giving future go ahead to such projects. When the trial is underway though, there is then a further much bigger piece of work to resolve the issues to define Process and Policy. The first step will be to jointly set out what needs to be done, how it will be tackled and by whom and what timescale. MG is hopeful that the scope of this can be quickly drawn up in the New Year and the project could be completed by April 2026. Both agreed this is a tight timescale but MG wants this to help drive the urgency. MG proposed that we set up monthly review meetings that he will chair involving all interested parties so that best practice can be adopted. PJ offered the support of CTA in reviewing best practice etc. Both parties agreed again that if funds are not available for specific projects then Highways cannot commit to them - but that shouldn't be a reason for not agreeing what the process/policy should be.” At the time of this newsletter, there have been no further updates or actions taken by Highways. Needless to say, we will be following up in the New Year. As a parallel workstream in the Lacey Green Pilot, Transition Wilmslow and local Town Councillors engaged with Cheshire East Parks team to seek tree-planting in green spaces. Trees were planted in the grounds of Lacey Green Pavilion and the Carrs Park early in 2025 with £32k funding from Mersey Forest. During summer 2025, a collaborative effort led to creation of a draft Master Plan for Lacey Green Park, which included an arboretum. We received lots of positive feedback from local residents and Lacey Green Primary Academy. We were excited to learn that the Parks team aim to plant the first phase of the arboretum over this winter. This has been a great demonstration of collaborative working with Cheshire East. We hope that the Highways team is taking note! Cheshire Tree Alliance Conference Save the date for our 2026 conference: Sunday 11th October in Knutsford Market Hall (9am to 1pm). More details to follow in the spring. Our 2025 conference was hosted by Sandbach Town Council. We were delighted to have Birmingham TreePeople as our keynote speakers, offering us inspiration on what can be achieved by a small group of determined volunteers. We heard updates on our Highways campaign and from a range of members of the CTA. We welcomed delegates from Cheshire West as well as Cheshire East. End of year updates from our members Our alliance is made up of tree groups, town and parish councils and charitable organisations mainly in Cheshire East. Here are updates from just a few of them, showing the range of activities across our network. Mersey Forest Mersey Forest has shared their interim statistics with us for the current financial year. Working with Cheshire East Council and their other partners across the sector (both public bodies and private landowners), they have successfully planted (to date) over 73 hectares of new woodland. This represents a minimum investment of around £1M in green infrastructure across the area. That’s at least £50 for every £1 invested by Cheshire East Council as part of their wider partnership this year. These plantings contribute to biodiversity and carbon storage targets, resulting in an estimated minimum of 1500t CO2e of sequestered carbon over the trees’ lifetime. Trees for Congleton The original aim of Trees for Congleton (T4C), back in 2019, was to plant one tree for each resident, to help combat climate change and enhance local biodiversity whilst engaging the local community. The group learnt many lessons over the six years: finding funding both locally and nationally; engaging with school children, sports groups, businesses and residents; communicating; getting planning permission when planting on public land; and being flexible. Thousands of hours and hundreds of volunteers later, this ambitious target was surpassed by planting almost 31,000 trees by April 2025 in and around Congleton. A special celebration was held for volunteers in May, and in September, the group was delighted to receive the Green Award in BBC Radio Stoke’s annual 'Make a difference' awards. This season in Congleton has mostly been maintenance. A few new hedgerows at the local hospital and leisure centre are planned. The tree nursery still has some trees available for planting. The tiny forest (~600 trees, 35 species) planted mostly by local school children in March 2025 has grown! Crewe The challenge of managing trees squeezed between the densely packed houses and streets of Crewe continues. The vigilance of Crewe Clean Team and the advice of the council arboriculturist have saved some of Crewe’s best trees. On her advice the grand lakeside willow in Queens Park was cut at head height after it blew down in a storm. Not only is it regenerating vigorously, all the wands taken from it have magically survived! Goostrees Goostrees are halfway through planting new hedgerows for their Village Playing Fields and surrounds. They have planted approximately 200m of hedgerow with 3 x young people’s sessions (about 60 youngsters participated in total) and one for all age groups (about 20 people attended). They have one more session to plant another 100m in January. Transition Wilmslow Tree Group TW Tree Group activities led to almost 1000 trees being planted in green spaces around Wilmslow over the past 12 months. The group published a Strategic Framework for Trees and Woodlands in Wilmslow for 2025-2050. This can be downloaded (in full or in summary) from: https://www.transitionwilmslow.org/tree-group Cheshire Wildlife Trust (CWT) Cheshire Wildlife Trust’s Dan Nash provided on-site training for CTA members at their tree nursery in Malpas, as well as giving an excellent presentation on Tree Propagation at our 2025 conference. Both Dan and his colleague Andy Stubbs have now left CWT – we will miss them. We look forward to welcoming new representatives from CWT soon, hopefully early in 2026. Cheshire Local Nature Recovery Strategy The Cheshire Local Nature Partnership published Cheshire and Warrington’s first ever Local Nature Recovery Strategy. The strategy is a fully comprehensive, holistic, collaborative document that looks to reverse decades of nature’s decline within Cheshire and Warrington. To spare you from reading all 106 pages, the following pages may be of special interest to tree groups: Page 7 "Plant and maintain more urban trees to create a continuous Tree Canopy" P32 W3 - Urban trees; P41 Orchards; P50 Peatland; P54 Lindow Moss; P66 Farmland https://cheshirelnp.co.uk/local-nature-recovery-strategy/ Cheshire Tree Alliance Facebook If you have any news about trees from your local area, please do share with us on Facebook at any time: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cheshiretreealliance Wishing you all great success with your local tree projects for 2026 Elaine Evans For Cheshire Tree Alliance