Commencing at 10:30 on Sunday the 2 December 2012, the Friends of Rawcliffe Meadows will be holding a practical session to plant twenty elm trees in order to mark:

• Twenty years of the Friends of Rawcliffe Meadow (plus a little bit more)
•  National Tree Week
•  An attempt to create habitat for the endangered White-letter Hairstreak butterfly
•  And the disappearance of native elm trees from the landscape

The Friends of Rawcliffe Meadows and York Natural Environment Trust, in cooperation with the Environment Agency, the Conservation Foundation (who have sourced the trees) and Butterfly Conservation are marking National Tree Week by returning elm trees to a site where they were seriously affected by Dutch Elm Disease more than two decades earlier. The Friends of Rawcliffe Meadows  are working with the Great British Elm Experiment in planting, along with the future monitoring of the trees.

The event will start in the copse at the north of the site (and to the west of the Rawcliffe Bar Park & Ride and Country Park), before moving slightly south to plant on the edge of the reservoir basin near the entrance from Shipton Road, Rawcliffe.