Chris is a great volunteer and an instinctive helper. He has a professional experience and  interest in  horticulture and in the trees we need to regulate the gasses in our atmosphere. You can see him above with a very large container of acorns and we all know that mighty oaks form little acorns grow. Chris's amazing Tree Nursery is well worth a visit and can be found at the Bike garden in Nuns Moor  Park  Newcastle West End where he has a huge variety of saplings  getting ready for homes. These include exotic Acers, fruit trees, and bonzai as well as the classic trees we need to start Miyawaki forests.

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Chris has been a tremendous help at our events and what he doesn't know about trees he will be about to learn. We are very lucky to have him in our town. He is brilliant with the kids and has great generosity of knowledge and spirit. Chris is mad keen on Akira Miyawaki, and with good reason as Akira was truly a tree luminary.

Please see the bibliography section for details of the amazing books by and about Professor Akira Miyawaki. A former President of the International Association for Ecology. His book The healing power of Forests is truly far better than most university textbooks on ecology and incredibly succinct. It is the sort of book you will want to read several times,and keep as a reference book, to make sure you havnt missed anything .

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Miyawaki invented is a very special way of creating forests, and of recruiting industry and the population to joyously participate. Whether small or large he aimed to create dense `ancient-style` forest in around 100 years with a fully functioning carbon-sinking mycorrhizal understory, that normally takes thousands of years of succession. His method demands very special deep soil preparation, careful tree choice to avoid colonisers like birch which slow down the progress of the other trees and a  minimum of 3 trees per metre and 25-30 different varieties native to the planting location. 

People really do need to study this. The tree plantings need a mantle of other plants and other intermediary devises like nets and rope to keep the leaf mould and loam building up into the understory and prevent it from blowing away. Miyawaki might well have been disappointed by some of the forests planted in his name but we should remember that most tree planting is helpful to air quality drainage etc as long as it is not monocropped which drastically reduces resistance to disease.

As Miyawaki notes in his amazing book The healing power of Forests, a forest has a total green surface area five to twenty times greater than that of an equal area of grass lawn. The multi-layered structure of forests also reduce overall wind velocity and the layers of trees act to filter out airborne particles. The trees reduce the erosive impact of rain, and retain and filter rainwater.

Trees are what we need in cities for the short and long term mitigation of the climate crisis and Christopher Oconnor can supply them.

07305838057

ronnocosirc@gmail.com 

https://www.facebook.com/christopher.oconnor.581525

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