6,500 native trees planted at RNAS Culdrose in collaboration with VIVO

Our Gavin Jones Grounds Maintenance team, as VIVO’s tier 1 supply chain partner, has supported the Royal Navy Air Service contract by planting 6,500 native trees around the perimeter of one of Europe’s largest helicopter bases in Cornwall.

Sustainable Tree Planting Project Underway Replacing Nine Miles of Fencing by Autumn 2024

The project to plant the trees started when nine miles of fencing around the site needed to be replaced. Captain Stuart Irwin, the commanding officer of Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Culdrose, said he wanted to plant “as many trees as possible”, with sustainability at the heart of the planning. 

This is part of the ongoing project at Helston Air Station to replace nine miles of perimeter fencing, which began earlier this year and is scheduled for completion in autumn 2024.

The trees being planted are single shoots, referred to as whips in forestry, and are of native species. Although not all the trees are expected to reach maturity due to natural attrition, enough will grow to effectively screen the base and create wildlife habitats.

The Gavin Jones Grounds Maintenance team began with planting 3,000 trees alongside the football pitch, and an extra 1,500 at the north of the airfield and 2,000 by the main road alongside the workshops and aircraft hangars (W site).

A mixture of native tree types have been planted and species include the wild service tree, hornbeam, hazel, birch, grey alder, field maple, rowan, tilia cordata, bird cherry, sea buckthorn and wild pear.

The project is a collaboration between the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, Navy Command Infrastructure, VIVO Defence Services Ltd and the RNAS Culdrose Infrastructure Team, with the Gavin Jones Grounds Maintenance undertaking the planting.

Thank you to the team’s involvement; Jed Finn, Brad Finn, Bruce Norman, Simon Bourne, William Bourne, Sam Dawes, and all those involved from VIVO defence and RNAS Culdrose.