Community Tree Planting Day for National Tree Week took place on Saturday, March 15th

At the Slieve Aughty Center, Kylebrack, Loughrea, Co. Galway, H62DX77

CELT were delighted to invite our local community to join us in celebrating National Tree Week and this years theme of - 'Planting Trees, Growing Together', was very apt for our first tree planting event of our new onsite nature restoration educational project in partnership with the Slieve Aughty Center and turning the sod on CELTS new Native Tree Nursery project. On the day we were blessed with great company, eager volunteers and glorious march sunshine, enabling us to make great headway on our first onsite hedgerow restoration work, and planting out native saplings into the newly dug nursery beds

CELTs strategic partnership and aims with the Slieve Aughty Center are to build on the ecological and biodiversity surveys of the area and the development and nature restoration potential of this site to create a new educational space and initiate an exciting nature restoration and afforestation project for the region.

Over the coming years we aim to continue to grow this site with the assistance of our local community, planting and growing together and to work with professional foresters and other specialist land management experts at the Slieve Aughty Centre, in the restoration of critical wetlands, biodiversity, hedgerows, and agroforestry, and continuing to host educational workshops and opportunities for our communities to learn vital ecoliteracy and hands on skills, as we cocreate an exemplar model and center of excellence for bioregional education and demonstration project for agroforestry and biodiversity restoration and conservation”

Following the successful planting of trees and preparing land, we stopped for a communal feast of delicious organic and local produce from the Slieve Aughty Woodlands Cafe

This event was made possible thanks to the generous support and funding from the Community Foundation Ireland, and the Irish Environmental Network through the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications.

For more information on National Tree Week please visit: https://www.nationaltreeweek.ie/

Fun Fact on the National Tree Website - Trees are part of our very identity. We are all familiar with being addressed at public events as “A Chairde Gaeil” but did you know that the Irish word for an Irish person – Gael - comes from the Welsh language Goídil. It means a person who lives in a wood!

So long ago, the Welsh people looking the 60 miles across the Irish Sea at a heavily wooded Ireland realised that we must all live in the woods. It was they who first referred to us as “A Chairde Gaeil”. Our connection with trees is as old as the Irish language itself, which is around 2,500 years old

https://www.nationaltreeweek.ie/

https://www.treecouncil.ie/national-tree-week