New woodland created as a tribute to the Queen in Dinnington

In a two-year scheme Rotherham has planted more than 30,000 new trees, including hundreds of fruit trees in part of the late Queen’s Green Canopy.

Of those, 7,700 trees have been planted in Dinnington, creating the Queen Elizabeth II Community Woodland.

The woodland has already been nominated for the John Boddy Award 2023, which celebrates Yorkshire’s best new community woodland.

Councillor David Sheppard, Cabinet Member for Social Inclusion at Rotherham Council, said: “I would like to thank all of the volunteers and council teams for their hard work.

“In only a short space of time it has been possible to plant thousands of trees in Dinnington.

“We want to make Rotherham a cleaner and greener Borough for years to come and as a Council we will continue to look at where we can plant more trees, as we work towards reaching our net zero target.”

A report from April 2022 stated that the cabinet had endorsed a new Cultural Strategy three years earlier which set out the goal of “getting more people, more active, creative and outdoors, more often”.

The report also stated that “Tree Service” played a key role in delivering the promise of revitalising the neighbourhoods via the council’s “Vital Neighbourhood” aspect of the proposed strategy.

Accordingly, it was agreed that the tree planting process would be split across two financial years – the council was to plant 200 new trees in 2021/22 and 300 trees in the 2022/23 period.

However, in August 2021 a new Tree Management Protocol & Guidance was introduced and a new target was set: it committed the council to plant 500 new trees in urban settings each year, with a net gain of 250 new trees in urban settings per year accounting for tree loss throughout the year.

It was reported that in the 2021/22 period, the council exceeded its target of planting 500 new trees planted, planting a total of 22,139 new trees across both woodland and urban settings.

It was also said that in 2021/22, 398 trees were felled or lost due to storm damage or natural causes and the service estimates that around 10% of new planting (2,215) would not survive.

This gives an estimated overall net gain of 19,546 new trees.

In this meeting last April, members “welcomed” the level of tree planting during the first year of the two-year scheme.

In the second year of the programme ending in March 2023, 11,348 new trees were planted, bringing the total to 32,891 in the two-year period.