About Easter Trees

Easter Trees began with a simple question: why doesn't Britain have a blossom season?

Japan has sakura — a few weeks each spring when the whole country comes alive with blossom, families gather under the trees, and cities are transformed. There's no reason Britain couldn't have the same. We have the climate. We have the trees. We just need to plant them.

Easter Trees is a community initiative to create a new annual tradition: planting a blossom tree at Easter. The idea is that over time, as millions of families each plant a tree, Britain's towns, villages, and cities will be gradually transformed by blossom every spring.

Why Easter

Easter is the festival of resurrection — the most hopeful weekend in the Christian year, marking new life out of dark ground. Blossom is the natural emblem of that. Buds opening on bare branches, a tree pushing flowers into cold air. We want this campaign to honour Easter's meaning, not borrow its name. The first planting weekend opens on Good Friday 26 March 2027, with planting traditionally on Easter Sunday 28 March — but the act of planting can happen whenever in the weekend, or the week after, suits you and your community. Sit with the spirit of the days, then put a living thing in the soil.

Easter Trees is open to people of every faith and none. It's a community campaign in the broadest sense. But where it's hosted by a church, school, or other community of belief, we want it to feel like an extension of what's already there — not a marketing peg.

How it works

The tradition is simple. Buy a small potted blossom tree. Bring it into your home for Easter weekend and decorate it with edible ornaments — suet blossom, seed-filled eggs, bird-food baubles — like a Christmas tree for spring. Then plant it — at whatever point over Easter (or the week after) suits you — in your garden, your school, your local park, or a community space.

Some species blossom even when small. Others take a few springs to show. Either way, the decoration carries the first Easter — and every Easter after, the tree carries a little more.

Where we sit alongside other tree organisations

Easter Trees is not woodland creation, and it is not trying to be. The Woodland Trust and organisations like it do the hard, serious work of getting trees into the ground at scale. Nothing we do competes with that.

What we do is smaller and sits alongside it: single trees in gardens, churchyards, school grounds, verges, parks and community spaces. Trees outside woods. Our job is appetite - giving families a reason to want a tree at a fixed moment in the year, one that comes round again every spring - and then pointing them at the people who already know what belongs in the ground where they live. For schools and community groups, the Woodland Trust’s free sapling packs are often the best way in, and we will happily help you apply.

Our planting guidance has been reviewed and endorsed by Professor David Hill CBE, Founder and President of Foundation For Nature, who confirmed it “rightly recommends trees of local provenance that you would expect to find in the ecosystem, in preference to non-natives.” Read the planting guide →