Buckingham Garden Centre Christmas tree sell out helps boost Ripple Africa’s 'Plant A Tree' scheme

The Garden Centre saw an early boom with fresh Christmas trees being snapped up fast with a result that all of their hugely popular cut and potted trees had sold out 10 days before the big day.

Chris Day, the Garden Centre’s publicity manager said: “The demand for Christmas trees this December has been unprecedented. It’s great that our customers have truly been embracing the festive spirit and we know anecdotally many of our customers have been buying a real tree for the very first time or purchasing a second tree for decorating outside to help bring some much welcome Christmas cheer to the neighbourhood.”

Recently the Garden Centre has been working with a local UK charity, Ripple Africa, to help raise money and awareness for tree planting in Malawi.

The Garden Centre pledged 50p to the charity for every Christmas tree sold, so they are delighted to be donating funds for the ongoing projects of the Ripple Africa charity. For every 50p donated this way, two trees will be planted in Malawi, and the cut Christmas Tree sold will be replaced by another young Christmas Tree.

Geoffrey Furber, Founder, Ripple Africa said: “A huge thank you from Ripple Africa and the farmers growing trees in Malawi to Buckingham Garden Centre and their customers for supporting our tree planting project in Malawi. Not only does each 50p enable people to plant two trees, it also contributes to our community forest conservation work both of which help the local communities and their environment.”

To donate to our plant a tree campaign you can visit the ripple Africa website www.rippleafrica.org/xmastreeAlternatively, you can text one of the following numbers:

To donate £3 text XMASTREE to 70331 and plant 12 trees

To donate £5 text XMASTREE to 70970 and plant 20 trees

To donate £10 text XMASTREE to 70191 and plant 40 trees

Over the years Ripple Africa has developed its environmental projects – they aim to plant 50,000 trees from this year’s Christmas campaign.

As a result of deforestation in Malawi their first environmental project was community tree planting which continues to be a very successful project with about three million trees planted each year.

To date Ripple Africa have planted over 15 million trees with the help of families in Malawi.

To find out more about Ripple Africa please visit their website www.rippleafrica.org or contact Chris Day, Plant Publicity Manager on 01280 827910 [email protected]