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Quick facts for homeowners What could be more obvious than the fact that horticulture benefits people? Anyone making a living in the trades understand it instinctively. However, that fact is not so apparent to your customers, who live farther away from the land with each generation. Landscape Trades has prepared several factsheets to help homeowners understand the true value of you work.

Use these quick facts on the benefits of trees and the equity value of landscaping (page 51) as leave-behinds to give landscape customers food for thought. For maintenance companies, the quick facts on lawns show that grass is much more than a pretty, green backdrop and for retailers we have provided a one page handout on how homeowners can use garden center products to boost curb appeal when selling their home.

Benefits of Trees

Improve health
• Trees improve moods and emotions, and they create feeling of relaxation and well-being.
• Trees probide privacy and a sense of security.
• Foliage helps to settle out, trap and hold particulate, pollutants (dust, ash, pollen and smoker) that can damage human lungs.
• Because of their potential for long life, trees frequently are planted as living memorials. We often become personally attached to trees that we or those we love have planted.
• In cities, trees can act as buffers, absorbing a significant amount of urban noise.

Add Natural Character to our cities and towns
• Provide us with colours, flowers, and beautiful shapes, forms and textures.
• Trees add interest by changing with the seasons.
• Trees and associated plants create habitat and food for birds and animals.

Reduce Pollution
• Trees absorb carbon dioxide and other dangerous gases and, in turn, replenish the atmosphere with oxygen.
• An acre of trees produces enough breathing oxygen for 18 people every day.
• An acre of trees absorbs enough carbon monoxide over a year's time, to equal the amount you produce when you drive your car 26,000 miles.
• A single mature tree can absorb 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, and release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support two human beings.
• Over 50 years, a tree generates $31,250 worth of oxygen, provides $62,000 worth of air pollution control, recycles $37,500 worth of water, and controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion.
• City streets lined with trees show a 60 per cent reduction in street-level particulate readings.
• One 12-inch sugar maple along a roadway removes 60mg of cadmium, 140mg of chromium, 820mg of nickel and 5,200 mg of lead from the environment each growing season.

Conserve water and prevent soil erosion
• Trees reduce surface runoff from storm water, and prevent soil erosion and sedimentation of streams.
• Trees increase ground water recharge to help make up to losses in paved areas.
• Trees prevented wind from eroding soil.

Save energy
• Deciduous trees provide shade and block heat from the sun during hotter months. By dropping their leaves in the fall they admit sunlight in the winter.
• Shade from trees over hard surfaces such as driveways, patios and sidewalks minimize landscape heat load.
• Shade trees can reduce air conditioning costs up to 30 per cent.
• Evergreens planted on the north sides of buildings can intercept and slow winter winds.

Increase economic stability
• Trees enhance community economic stability by attracting businesses and tourists.
• Healthy trees can add up to 20 per cent to residential property values.