Transplanting trees – how does it work?

For Zuidasdok, we need to remove large numbers of trees for various purposes, including the widening of the A10 Zuid. Fortunately, this does not always mean that they are lost; where possible, they are given a new use somewhere else in the area. On Wednesday, 4 December, we relocated 14 trees (hornbeams) from next to Joy Jaagpad tennis club to Riekerweg on the south side of the De Nieuwe Meer junction. By doing this, the TriAX construction consortium (Besix, Dura Vermeer and Heijmans) are making space to create a ‘pile mattress structure’ on which they will build a new flyover for traffic travelling from the future S108 access road in the direction of A4 Schiphol/Rotterdam.

You can remove a tree from the ground by first digging up the soil around it and then pulling it out of the ground at the trunk. You can also position supports underneath the tree and lift it out of the ground using them. However, because of their size, a quicker and more efficient method could be applied for these trees. To do it, we used a mobile crane with a transplanting shovel attached: a kind of ice cream scoop with which you scoop out a section of soil from the ground with the tree attached.

Watch how we scoop out a hornbeam and rootball at the tennis club (video)

Watch how we plant a hornbeam in Riekerweg (video)

Back in 2017, Zuidasdok was granted a tree-felling permit to cut down 14,400 trees. This obliges us to replant some of the trees or to offset them by donating money to the Boomfonds Tree Fund. However, we prefer to focus on habitat and the living environment by giving a tree a second life elsewhere, as in this case next to Riekerweg.