It’s not easy being green — especially when it comes to parking lots in Montgomery County.
Cub Scout Pack 759 from Ashton United Methodist Church teamed up with Conservation Montgomery, the Montgomery County Planning Department and Ace Tree Movers to plant eight trees Saturday at the Seminary Plaza shopping center on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring.
“This is going to show that the environmentalists and the youth can work with businesses to make the brown areas of the county green,” said South Silver Spring Neighborhood Association President Evan Glass, who also is on the board for Conservation Montgomery.
The planting project was the first in the county to use a new mapping tool to decide where to put down roots. The county Planning Department received aerial pictures of the county’s tree canopy and then used the images to find and target the areas of the county that have the least amount of tree canopy.
“This is the first, and it’s a very good thing, and it’s being done by energetic citizens,” said Katherine Nelson, a planner in the county Planning Department. ”It’s not like this is government doing this work. This is the community.”
A team at the University of Vermont that developed the mapping technology gathered the data for the planting project. Montgomery County obtained the readouts from the university early this year, Nelson said.
“There is a large section of the county that is in need of more trees and more green space,” Glass said.
Nelson said Seminary Plaza had one of the thinnest tree canopies in the county, according to the aerial images.
“The overall canopy percentages were pretty good, but there were these hot spots,” Nelson said. “We particularly focused on the shopping center. It has a very large parking lot with islands that obviously had been created for trees to be on them.”
Ace Tree Movers donated four red maples and four sugar maples for the project. Workers from the Brookeville company dug holes and placed the 12-foot trees in them Friday. The Cub Scouts and other volunteers then filled in the holes Saturday morning. Half the trees were planted in the plaza, and the other half were placed in the Montgomery Hills neighborhood behind the shopping center.
Conservation Montgomery is a nonprofit group founded last year in Silver Spring that focuses on making the county more environmentally-friendly. The group plans to continue planting more trees across the county, said Caren Madsen, chair of Conservation Montgomery’s board.
“We hope this is just a starting point for us,” Madsen said. “We wanted to get a little experience with community tree planting. This offered a nice opportunity to get started with it.”
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