Warm thanks to Niagara Escarpment Views magazine, who published a beautiful four-page feature on Maple Leaves Forever and our founder Ken Jewett in their Fall 2020 issue. Free copies of the magazine are available from local businesses and back issues can be viewed at NEViews.ca
Excerpt: “Have you noticed how country roads are lined with big old hardwood trees about 40 feet apart? It’s as if long-ago farmers and landowners were following a landscaping style guide. Yet these trees are not just the result of fashion. There was a financial benefit to planting them. In 1883 the Ontario Tree Planting Act gave 25 cents per tree that was still alive three years after planting.
“But the subsidy applied to roadways, where wind and snow interrupted traffic,” writes Patricia Bowley in her academic paper on farm forestry, published in 2015 in Scientia Canadensis, 38.
It was an influential piece of legislation. According to the 2018 Environmental Protection Report by the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, that Act resulted in the planting of 75,000 new trees. Often, these
trees were transplanted from interior forests and given space to grow large
on the edges of properties…”
View article as slideshow:
