For our first two years, we chose planting sites the way most volunteer groups do: wherever a stretch of bare verge looked obviously neglected, and wherever a resident happened to flag it to us directly. That approach got trees in the ground, but it also meant we occasionally planted in spots that turned out to be poor choices once the seedlings matured, too close to a drainage line, too shaded by an existing structure, or on land whose ownership turned out to be disputed. Over the past year we've replaced that ad hoc approach with a proper street-by-street survey, and it's worth explaining what that process now looks like.
What we actually score when we walk a street
A survey visit isn't a quick glance. A small team walks the full length of a candidate street or corridor and scores it against a short checklist: available soil depth and drainage, proximity to underground services and overhead cables, sun exposure across the day, existing vegetation that a new planting would need to work around, and pedestrian or vehicle traffic that might put young seedlings at risk before they've had a chance to establish. We also note who actually uses the space, whether it's a route children walk to school along, a spot where boda riders wait, or a stretch that mostly sees vehicle traffic, since that shapes both species choice and how much protective staking a seedling will need in its first year.
Soil condition gets particular attention. Some stretches of Donholm sit on heavily compacted ground left over from old construction fill, which drains poorly and can drown a young root system during heavy rain even though the same spot looks fine on a dry day. Where we find that, we either rule the site out or plan for raised planting mounds that improve drainage around the root ball.
Why this replaced our earlier approach
The shift came directly out of tracking our own survival data. When we compared outcomes across our earliest, unscored sites against the first batch chosen through a proper survey, the surveyed sites showed a clearly better one-year survival rate, and fewer cases of trees needing to be relocated after the fact because a service line or a boundary dispute surfaced only once digging had already started. Relocating an established seedling is far riskier than not planting it there in the first place, so avoiding that scenario has real value beyond just the extra planning time it costs us upfront.
It also changed how we talk to residents who flag a site to us. Instead of scheduling a planting day on the strength of a single description, we now explain that a site visit comes first, and we've found residents are generally glad to hear that, it signals the planting is being taken seriously rather than treated as a box-ticking exercise.
What the survey has turned up so far
Running this process across Donholm and, more recently, parts of Greenfields and Savannah has produced a working shortlist of roughly two dozen viable sites, ranked by priority based on visible bare cover, foot traffic and community interest. A handful of streets we'd assumed were good candidates were quietly ruled out, one because of a buried water main we hadn't known about, another because the ground turned out to be reserved for a planned drainage upgrade that would have undone any planting within a year or two.
That second case in particular was a useful reminder that a survey isn't only about soil and sun, it's also about checking with the sub-county office on any planned infrastructure work before committing seedlings to a site. We've since made that check a standard part of the process rather than something we only think to do occasionally.
How residents can help with the next round
We're currently surveying candidate sites for our next major planting season, and resident knowledge remains one of the most useful inputs into that process, people who live on a street know things a walk-through alone won't reveal, like which patch floods first in heavy rain or which spot never gets full sun because of a neighbouring building. If you have a specific stretch in mind that you think deserves a survey visit, let us know through our Contact page with the street name and what makes it a good candidate; we add every credible suggestion to the list our survey team works through.
Documenting sites for the long term
Every surveyed site now gets a short written record, not just a mental impression from the walk-through: soil notes, a rough sketch of nearby services, sun exposure across the day, and any planned infrastructure work we've confirmed with the sub-county office. That record travels with the site through planning, planting and the follow-up survival checks we run afterward, so a species that underperforms at a specific location can be traced back to a documented condition rather than guessed at after the fact.
This has turned out to matter most when a planting season is handed between different sub-committee members, without a written record, site-specific knowledge lived only in the memory of whoever did the original walk-through, which created real gaps whenever that person wasn't available for the actual planting day. A written survey record means any team member can pick up a site and plant it correctly, using the same information the survey team gathered, rather than relying on one person's recollection of a walk-through that might have happened months earlier.