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What is Canopy |
Canopy is the nonprofit volunteer-based center for street, park, and garden trees in Palo Alto. Canopy's mission is local, limited, | and non-political: engaging community members of all kinds in planting, preserving, and promoting appreciation of trees in Palo Alto. |
Canopy: |
* Serves as a single comprehensive information source for all Palo Alto trees, public and private. * Contracts with the City of Palo Alto to site, plant, and nurture young street trees. * Educates and motivates Palo Altans to plant and care for trees in residence and business gardens. * Instills a spirit of stewardship in Palo Altans for heritage trees, especially native oaks. |
* Provides a forum for community service and fellowship that enriches the lives of today's Palo Altans and the endowment of trees left to tomorrow's. Canopy was formed in 1996 on the recommendation of the Palo Alto's Tree Task Force. The City provided startup funding, but Canopy will be self-sufficient by 1999. |
Why is Canopy? |
The people who work with Canopy believe that trees make Palo Alto a better place to live. Not just any tree in any place. But the right trees in the right places shade us in summer, please our eyes, improve our air, and perhaps most important, give us a difficult-to -describe sense of well-being. Walk or drive down Middlefield from Hamilton to Embarcadero, and then on to Oregon, and you'll experience the difference that a canopy of trees makes to a street. Although Palo Alto obviously has many fine old trees, they are not inevitable. [Photos of Bryant/Lowell in 1904, 1976, subject to permission from CofC]. |
We live among trees that for the most part have been planted in a patchwork of private and public gardens. Even the planting strips between sidewalks and streets are narrow public gardens. Garden trees aren't like forest trees; they need planting and tending, and eventually replacing. Street trees only live about 50 years, and many of Palo Alto's are reaching this age. Before Canopy, there were lots of people in Palo Alto who liked trees, many who took care of this tree or that one, and few who really knew what they were doing. Canopy was formed to forge diverse individual interests into an effective resource and advocacy for the trees in Palo Alto's gardens. |
