Getting new planting through its first three years
What this summer’s tree losses show about establishment, and the aftercare that prevents them
This summer produced the clearest evidence in years of how much can go wrong in the gap between planting a tree and that tree becoming self-sufficient. Councils recorded a loss rate of 15.6% on their recently planted trees, according to figures gathered under freedom of information and published in August. In the worst affected authorities around a third of the young stock died, and one council confirmed roughly 80 deaths out of 1,000 trees planted across the 2025 to 2026 season.
The weather behind those numbers was severe. England received around 3% of its average July rainfall in the first three weeks of the month, and that dry spell arrived on soils already short of moisture after a warm spring. Conditions like these do most of their damage to the youngest planting, because a tree that went into the ground the previous winter has not yet grown the root system it would need to find water for itself.
None of this is unprecedented. Forest Research, in written evidence submitted to Parliament, estimated that more than 60% of newly planted trees on the most badly affected sites were severely damaged by the drought and heatwave of 2022. Two events four years apart producing much the same outcome looks less like misfortune and more like a pattern.
What that pattern exposes is a gap in how planting is handled rather than a fault in the plants. A scheme is designed, specified, supplied, delivered and planted, and every one of those stages is contracted, costed and inspected. The three years that follow, which are the years that actually decide whether the planting survives, frequently belong to nobody in particular.
What establishment actually means
Establishment is the period between planting and the point at which a tree can support itself from the soil around it. A tree arrives on site with its roots confined to the root ball or container it was grown in, and those roots have to extend outwards into the surrounding ground before the tree can draw on any wider reserve of moisture. Until that happens, the volume of growing medium the tree came in is the only water supply it has.
The practical consequence of this catches a lot of people out. A root ball dries faster than the ground around it, because it is a small, distinct volume of material supporting a full crown of leaves in active growth. A young tree can therefore be seriously short of water while standing in soil that looks and feels perfectly damp a few inches away from the pit. Water spread across the general area around a newly planted tree, rather than delivered directly over the root ball itself, may never reach the roots that need it at all.
This is also why the first two to three summers matter so much more than anything that follows. Once roots have extended properly into the surrounding soil, the tree has access to a far larger volume of moisture and its tolerance of a dry spell improves sharply. Before that point, a fortnight of hot weather without water can be enough.
How much water, and for how long
The Arboricultural Association gives a figure that is easy to hold on to and easy to write into a maintenance schedule: around 50 litres of water a week through the summer months, for the first three years after planting. May through to August is the critical window.
Splitting that volume across the week does more good than delivering it in one soaking, because a large single application tends to run off or drain past the root zone before it can be taken up. Ten litres a day is more useful to the tree than 50 litres on a Friday, and where visits have to be less frequent, an application of at least 20 litres at a time gives the water a chance to penetrate properly. Watering early in the morning or in the evening, slowly enough that it soaks in rather than running across the surface, makes a measurable difference to how much of it the tree actually receives.
The three-year figure is a sensible default rather than a fixed rule. Larger stock carries more crown relative to its root system and takes correspondingly longer to become independent, so semi-mature and specimen trees should be assumed to need support for longer than a light standard planted alongside them. Irrigation bags and buried watering pipes both help where access is difficult, but neither removes the need for someone to check that the root ball is genuinely wet rather than simply assuming that it is.
The ground around the tree
Turf growing right up to the stem competes directly for water in the top layer of soil, which is precisely where a young root system sits. The RHS recommends keeping a circle at least 1.2m across free of vegetation for the first three years after planting, maintained by hoeing, mulching or other non-chemical means. On amenity and highway planting this single measure often separates the trees that come through a dry summer from the ones that do not.
Mulch does several jobs at once. A layer around 7.5cm deep spread over the root area holds moisture in the soil, moderates soil temperature, and suppresses the grasses and weeds that would otherwise take the water first. The detail that matters is the gap: mulch should stop 10cm to 15cm short of the trunk rather than being piled against it, because bark held permanently wet is bark that rots. Mulch volcanoes heaped around stems are common on new schemes and they cause the problem they were meant to prevent.
Ground conditions at planting deserve the same attention. Compacted subsoil on a construction site restricts root extension no matter how well the tree is watered afterwards, and a pit dug into ground that drains poorly can hold water around the root ball through winter and then bake hard in summer. Relieving compaction and checking drainage before anything goes in the ground costs very little compared with replacing failed stock two years later.
Writing aftercare into the job
BS 8545, the published standard covering trees from nursery to independence in the landscape, was updated this year. It sets out good practice across the whole sequence, from policy and site evaluation through species selection, nursery production, handling, planting and post-planting management, treating maintenance as part of the same process rather than as something that happens once the real work is finished.
The standard exists and is widely referenced. What tends to be missing on individual schemes is the allocation: a named party responsible for watering, an agreed frequency, a defined period, a budget line that covers it, and a clear position on who replaces what if trees fail. Where those five points are settled before planting begins, survival rates look very different from schemes where aftercare is assumed to be somebody’s problem without being anybody’s contract.
It is worth being honest about cost at the specification stage too. Three summers of watering on a scheme of any size is a real figure, and pretending otherwise produces a maintenance plan that nobody funds and nobody follows. A smaller number of trees, properly supported through establishment, delivers far more canopy in ten years than a larger number planted and abandoned.
Choosing stock that starts well
Species selection and stock size both change how much aftercare a scheme demands. Smaller stock establishes faster and needs support for less time, which is why a light standard can often overtake a semi-mature tree planted at the same moment on a difficult site. Matching species to the actual soil, exposure and drainage of the location, rather than to the drawing, removes a whole category of avoidable failure.
The quality of the root system at the point of supply matters just as much, and it is the part buyers can least easily inspect. Stock that has been grown properly, handled carefully and kept from drying out between lifting and planting starts with a real advantage. Greenwood grows and supplies to that standard because establishment problems on site tend to begin long before the planting team arrives, and because a plant that fails in year two is a cost to everybody involved in getting it there.
A dry summer tests decisions that were made months or years earlier. The schemes that came through this one in good condition were generally not the luckiest ones, but the ones where somebody had settled who was watering, how often, and for how long, before the first tree went in the ground.
For more information about planting stock and establishment, speak to the G Team today.