Moor Trees receives grant of £478,000 from the government’s Green Recovery Challenge Fund!

Close the Gap is one of the first environmental projects awarded a grant from the government’s £80 million Green Recovery Challenge Fund. It is an 18-month programme focused on achieving bigger, healthier, better-connected hedgerows.  The Close the Gap  project received £1,834,000.

Close the Gap will help shape the future of England’s hedgerows in four ways: through hedgerow planting and ‘gapping up’; by gathering and sharing knowledge to improve hedgerow management; by ensuring good local supplies of future hedgerow trees through local seed nurseries; and by engaging the public with England’s important hedgerow heritage.

Close the Gap is a fantastic partnership project which will focus on the immense potential of our hedgerows – for biodiversity, carbon-capture, conserving our natural cultural heritage and more.  The Moor Trees element of the project will host and train 10 young apprentices, who will qualify with RHS Level 2 Horticulture; it will pay for improvements to our tree nurseries ensuring better welfare and tree growing facilities  for our staff and volunteers; it will create 2 full time jobs and 2 part time jobs in our tree nurseries meaning we can work with more volunteers and community groups; and we will help establish new community seed nurseries nationwide to create biosecure future tree supplies.  We’re grateful to National Lottery Heritage Fund for funding this partnership of leading organisations to improve the future of UK hedgerows.

The partners are: The Tree Council, Farming & Wildlife Advisory Group, People’s Trust for Endangered Species, Moor Trees, University of Reading, Future Gardeners (Worshipful Company of Gardeners) and Hedgelink.

Job opportunities

This grant is a fantastic opportunity for us, but we have to hit the ground running as we’ve a lot to achieve by march 2022.  To help us in this goal we are recruiting new staff.  Please visit our job opportunities page to find out more…