The Vancouver Park Board is giving residents an opportunity to add a little more green into their lives, and for less than the price of a movie ticket.
The spring tree sale is now underway, and the city's residents can buy up to three trees at $10 each.
More than 2,800 fruit, flowering and shading trees are available, including Victoria southern magnolias, sentinel columnar apples, celestial flowering dogwoods and inaba shidare Japanese maples.
“This is the fourth year for the tree sale and we have 28 varieties, more than ever before,” said Vancouver Park Board Chair Stuart Mackinnon. “We encourage residents to try our #Treeslationships quiz to find out which trees would be best for their yard or balcony.”
The park board says each tree becomes part of the city’s urban forest, helping to grow the forest canopy, and brings the board closer to its goal of 150,000 trees planted by 2020. In the past nine years, more than 125,000 trees have already been planted by the park board, which they say is enough to cover Stanley Park more than four times over.
The trees are meant to be planted on private properties, which the board says is the “biggest area to reverse tree loss” and rebuild the city’s arboreal canopy cover. Roughly 55 per cent of the new trees have been planted in public spaces such as streets or parks, whereas 45 per cent are now growing in private land.
The park board approved an updated Urban Forest Strategy last spring, aiming to regrow forests across 25 hectares of the city’s green space, and doubling the number of streets in the Downtown Eastside, Marpole and the False Creek Flats neighbourhoods.
All the pre-ordered trees will be ready for buyers in the parking lot at Nat Bailey Stadium on May 11 and 12, while some of the unclaimed or unpurchased trees will be up for grabs – cash only – at the stadium between 2 and 4 p.m. on May 12.
If you’re unable to buy online, the park board says you can visit some participating nurseries to get $20 off a tree valued at $50 or greater. Check out Figaro’s Garden, Hunter’s Garden Centre, or Gardenworks’ Lougheed and Mandeville locations for selections.
