“There is a magic machine that sucks carbon out of the air, costs very little, and builds itself.
It’s called a tree.”
-- George Monbiot, British writer and activist
Heading into the 2025 Planting Season
Thank you to everyone who helped nurture the trees through the summer of 2024, got the word out to the community about our project, visited tree adopters and helped transplant the trees to their permanent homes in the fall!
Unity’s Canopy Connectors continue to partner with our friends at Frogtown Green -- without whom this project would not be possible. In 2024, through a collaboration with the US Forest Service, AmeriCorps, Tree Trust and Great River Greening, Frogtown Green facilitated the planting of 216 trees in the area, including the fifty trees the Canopy Connectors planted in our Summit-University neighborhood.
2024 was the Canopy Connectors’ fourth year of this longterm initiative. So far, we have planted almost 200 trees on private property and made many new friends along the way!
Forty-five fruit and shade trees will be planted in Unity’s gravel bed in May 2025 and cared for through the summer. Volunteers will again be needed throughout the season to distribute flyers and conduct site visits, and in the fall to transplant the trees. Please join us! Contact Lisa Burke at [email protected] for more information.
Unity’s Canopy Connectors continue to partner with our friends at Frogtown Green -- without whom this project would not be possible. In 2024, through a collaboration with the US Forest Service, AmeriCorps, Tree Trust and Great River Greening, Frogtown Green facilitated the planting of 216 trees in the area, including the fifty trees the Canopy Connectors planted in our Summit-University neighborhood.
2024 was the Canopy Connectors’ fourth year of this longterm initiative. So far, we have planted almost 200 trees on private property and made many new friends along the way!
Forty-five fruit and shade trees will be planted in Unity’s gravel bed in May 2025 and cared for through the summer. Volunteers will again be needed throughout the season to distribute flyers and conduct site visits, and in the fall to transplant the trees. Please join us! Contact Lisa Burke at [email protected] for more information.
2023 Tree Planting
Canopy Connectors:
Connecting Trees and People
Unity Church-Unitarian is located in the Summit-University neighborhood. In an effort to respond to the negative effects of climate change and the loss of ash trees in our area, Unity’s “Canopy Connectors” built a gravel bed in May 2021 to serve as a nursery for bare root trees destined for the Summit-University-Rondo neighborhood. Twenty-five trees were planted in the bed that first year; by fall these trees had strong, healthy root systems that increased their chance of survival after transplantation to their permanent homes. Buoyed by the success of their first year, the Canopy Connectors decided to increase the number of trees offered in 2022, to sixty-five.
According to the Metropolitan Council’s “Growing Shade Report for Summit University” in 2021 our neighborhood had an existing tree canopy cover of 27.7% of land area. This is well below the city’s average of 34.5%. According to a University of Minnesota analysis, 66.2% of Saint Paul is suitable for tree canopy cover, with residential and single family properties offering the best potential for increasing canopy.
Trees are beautiful, but they are also critical to our health and the health of our environment. They help reduce air pollution, enhance our water quality, and improve energy savings in both summer and winter. Most importantly, perhaps, trees remove carbon from the air, and are critical to efforts to lessen the effects of carbon emissions on climate change. And trees have been shown to increase property values.
Over 20% of the Summit-University neighborhood’s street trees are ash. The Emerald Ash Borer infestation, and the subsequent loss of these trees, is devastating. Helping to replace them with a diversity of trees is a step we can take together.
According to the Metropolitan Council’s “Growing Shade Report for Summit University” in 2021 our neighborhood had an existing tree canopy cover of 27.7% of land area. This is well below the city’s average of 34.5%. According to a University of Minnesota analysis, 66.2% of Saint Paul is suitable for tree canopy cover, with residential and single family properties offering the best potential for increasing canopy.
Trees are beautiful, but they are also critical to our health and the health of our environment. They help reduce air pollution, enhance our water quality, and improve energy savings in both summer and winter. Most importantly, perhaps, trees remove carbon from the air, and are critical to efforts to lessen the effects of carbon emissions on climate change. And trees have been shown to increase property values.
Over 20% of the Summit-University neighborhood’s street trees are ash. The Emerald Ash Borer infestation, and the subsequent loss of these trees, is devastating. Helping to replace them with a diversity of trees is a step we can take together.
Media |
Resources |
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Mississippi Park Connection: Community Forestry Corps Members Work Together to Plant Trees Across St. Paul
Fox 9: Group works to plant more trees in St. Paul neighborhoods in need Met Council: Growing Equitable Shade and Fighting Climate Change, One Tree at a Time MinnPost: Shady practices: New mapping tool shows inequity of tree coverage in the metro Kare 11: Volunteers plant more trees to tackle extreme heat disparities in different neighborhoods |
The Met Council's Growing Shade Mapping Tool is interactive and allows users to look closely at the tree canopy of specific Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhoods
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2021 Tree planting
