P.E.I.'s tree nursery trying to keep up with post-Fiona demand

Requests for trees from Prince Edward Island landowners, schools, and community groups have "increased a great deal" since post-tropical storm Fiona in 2022, and the J. Frank Gaudet provincial tree nursery is trying to fill that demand.

"I think there's more people wanting to fill in spaces [where] trees fell down ... so that's in addition to what we normally supply trees for," said Mary Myers, the nursery's manager.

Myers says most of the trees grown there go to P.E.I.'s forest enhancement program, which supplies trees to Island landowners.

The nursery also supplies trees to the greening spaces program, which provides trees to local communities, schools and volunteer groups.

"There's a kindergarten group that came through here today from West Royalty, and there'll be five of those classes come through just to have a little tour, and they take a tree with them," Myers said, adding she's also seen interest from various community groups this year.

'A bit of a bottleneck'

She said trees for the forest enhancement program and watershed groups across the Island are the nursery's priorities.

If those two groups need more trees, the greening spaces program may get fewer.

"It is starting to come to a bit of a bottleneck," Myers said. "We're trying to spread [the trees] around as much as we can."

She said the nursery has asked groups that had large orders filled in the last few years to consider skipping a year so first-time applicants can get their trees.

The J. Frank Gaudet nursery recently added three new greenhouses to help with the P.E.I.'s contribution to the federal government's 2 Billion Trees Program, which aims to plant two billion trees in Canada by 2031.

No such thing as a 'bulletproof tree'

Myers said the nursery tries to grow a diverse selection of trees to keep pace with the varied requests from the public, including softwoods, hardwoods and the shrubs needed by watershed groups.

Fiona knocked down a large number of white spruce trees, which have shallow roots that make them vulnerable to severe weather.

"White spruce is a fairly important part of the natural forest, and each landowner can identify what their desires are as to what they want to plant," Myers said. "There's areas where 300-year-old hemlock ... went down.

"You can't really grow a bulletproof tree."