Urban Forests describe trees lining streets, shading parks and buildings, and growing all across our cities. Each of these trees provide shade, capture rain-water, filter pollution, and add to a city’s character. Additionally, properties that have healthy, mature trees show an average increase of 10% to their property values and businesses that have greenscapes in front of their storefront attract more shoppers. In short: Trees are Amazing!


Here at PCD, we are taking this to heart. Over the past two years we have hosted an Urban Tree Sale, providing large landscape trees at discounted prices for city folks to plant in their landscaping or as a street tree. This year we distributed over 250 trees to over 100 properties. This year we also led two large school tree plantings. You may remember Holy Rosary Church and School being Depaved this past summer. That made space for 70 landscape trees that were planted by volunteers and students on Make a Difference Day, October 28th.

We also helped install 58 large trees at Reed Elementary School in Tacoma. This one project raised the canopy cover at the school from 5% to nearly 20% and will help reduce the amount of air and noise pollution coming from I5. We continue looking for opportunities to plant trees in our urban spaces. If you know of a space in need of trees, or is paved over but can be Depaved to make way for trees, let us know! Your project may be next. melissab@piercecd.org