Trees for GP surgeries to celebrate 70 years of best practice

Publication date: 07 September 2022

RCGP Faculties, in partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare, invite our members to plant a tree* in the grounds of your GP surgeries. As we celebrate our 70th anniversary this year, we hope to make the next 70 years a lot greener and better for our communities.

The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare (CSH) is growing the NHS Forest. This initiative supports healthcare sites to improve their natural environment and encourage staff, patients and wider community to engage with green space to benefit their health.

CSH has kindly offered RCGP 1000 cherry trees to distribute to members to enrich local GP surgeries.

The ideal time to plant these trees is over the winter and into early spring, and so we will be distributing tree saplings from December to March. RCGP Faculties will be hosting collection events around the UK for those that have completed the registration process and relevant permissions. Here you will have the chance to meet with members from your local Faculty, including our Climate and Sustainability Leads who can talk to you about other greener practice initiatives.

We hope you will join us in this venture to make the future of general practice greener.

About the writers

This post is written by the RCGP Faculties team

*About the tree species

Bird cherry (Prunus padus) is a tree native from western Europe and now found as far east as Japan. It is extremely hardy and copes equally well with wet, dry, cold and warm conditions. In the spring, its almond-scented blossom provides a delightful splash of colour, whereas in autumn its leaves range from yellow through to a deep orange. It occurs naturally in open spaces and forest edges and reaches a maximum height of around 10m at maturity. It is very easy to care for so long as the saplings get plenty of water in the first couple of years after planting – it is almost impossible to over water saplings, so err on the side of more is better! The saplings provided are one year old and will be between 40 and 80 cm tall.