2009 Fall RNeighborWoods Planting

Submitted by Rene Jones Lafflam on Tue, 2009-10-06 12:01.

On Saturday, October 3, over 100 Slatterly Park neighbors, students, and other Rochester volunteers braved the cold and muddy conditions to plant 100 new trees in the southeast Rochester neighborhood of Slatterly Park.

A high density of open boulevard tree spaces and neighbors without the means to plant trees is one of the criteria that the RNeighborWoods group uses to determine which neighborhood they target for a community tree planting. Slatterly Park is one of Rochester’s oldest neighborhoods and planters encountered many old tree root systems as they dug holes for the new trees. Trees planted on Saturday filled 4,885 feet of boulevards and types planted included Ginkgo, Amur Maackia, and Kentucky Coffee; 866 empty boulevard spaces remain in the neighborhood.

An RNeighbors program, RNeighborWoods partners worked for months to organize this successful event and include Herring Exterior Design, Maier Forest & Tree, Olmsted County Youth Commission, Olmsted County Vital Aging Commission, Rochester City Forester, Rochester Public Utilities, and Quarry Hill Nature Center.

Sponsors stepped forward to provide the volunteers with a colorful RNeighborWoods t-shirt. Local business were generous in providing refreshments for the planters including Panera, Ted Smith Insurance, Local Kwik Trip, The Alliance for Community Trees, and the Home Depot Foundation.

Since 2006, the RNeighborWoods group has planted over 1,000 trees on Rochester boulevards. Trees for this community planting were purchased by the City of Rochester and RPU.

Urban trees are vital to the health of neighborhoods. Frances Kuo and Bill Sullivan of the University of Illinois Human-Environment Research Laboratory have studied how residents in a public housing project in Chicago lived their daily lives based on the amount of contact they had with trees. “People who live in intense poverty have to count on their neighbors for a lot of the social support that they need in their lives,” said Bill Sullivan. “We’re finding trees produce settings in which neighbors get to know each other better and violence is reduced. Therefore, trees are associated with the reduction of one of our most significant important public policy concerns of the day.”

See the photos from this planting on the RNeighbors Facebook page.

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