Schools Join Our Estate’s Epic Tree Planting Project
School children from across the south are joining our epic tree-planting project to create nine new woodlands on our Estate.
As part of a new educational programme, students are planting a variety of saplings in our Oxfordshire UNESCO World Heritage Site’s flagship Hordley Wood.
Our tree-planting project is a joint partnership with Morgan Sindall Group plc, the construction and regeneration group, and also includes the creation of a forest school, wildflower meadows, open spaces and more than 15km of linked public footpaths.
“Getting young people directly involved with this ground-breaking initiative is absolutely key to its long-term success,” said Graham Edgell, director of sustainability and procurement at Morgan Sindall Group.
“As well as helping to physically plant the saplings, it provides students with the opportunity to find out more about the wider goals of the project and the vital role trees and woodlands play both for the environment and our wider wellbeing,” he added.
Our woodlands will eventually consist of more than 270,000 trees and cover a total of 138 hectares.
In addition to creating a major new natural habitat for wildlife, we will sequester 25,000 tonnes of carbon as part of our 25-year programme.
“We are delighted to be welcoming the first young people to the new woodlands being planted here at Blenheim,” said our Estate’s Director Roy Cox.
“The legacy of the trees they plant is something they can all be proud of and, hopefully, they may one day be able to return to show to their own children and grandchildren,” he added.
We are committed to becoming carbon neutral on scopes 1-3 of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol across all operations by 2027 and, beyond that, to remove 230,000 tonnes CO2e from the atmosphere by 2050.
