Specials to Surrey County Council for funding the project through their Surrey Community Nature Recovery Grant and Guildford tree officer James-Pieter Berry for the green lights!

This year we had our final planting at Eashing Cemetery, with 14 fruit-trees completing this 60 tree planting project, as part of Eashing Cemetery Orchard Trail, with the trees planted at about 20m-spacing, over a 5-year period. This year St. Marks Primary School brought over 20 pupils and teachers to assist with the planting and Roots for the Future gave an educational curriculum-based talk on tree planting and their life-cycle.
Thank you to Jenna, Andy, Alistair, Francesca and the School team. And, of course special thanks to Kate for supporting us and Adam’s Parks Team for preparing the planting spaces. 

COPSE has had issues with stone-fruit tree survivorship on some sites, which talking with growers, is not uncommon and can arise from within nurseries as a result of rootstock incompatibility. As most of our sites have free-draining suitable soils for stone-fruit, rootstock incompatibility could be an issue with some of our stone-fruit trees. Even on the light soils of Jubilee Field and Hog’s-Back Puttenham Parish Orchards, with 38 fruit trees planted since 2019, an Opel plum tree sadly died after planting it in January 2025. We were able to replace this plum in November with a lovely Cherry Cox apple.