Planting in Blackrock, Co Dublin, Ireland, for the Museum of Childhood Ireland Tree Week
We have ongoing children’s tree projects at the museum all year around. For Christmas 2022 and 2023 we provided native grown living Christmas trees to children’s groups we’d worked with during the year, which they decorated with ornaments that they handmade, using foraged and recycled materials. Below you will find our Tree Week projects from 2021 and 20222
Our fruit tree planting collaborative initiatives continue during 2023.
Tree Week: March 21st – 27th 2021
The Museum of Childhood Ireland will be celebrating Tree Week by hosting a Zoom event on Thursday 25th March at 3pm with Orla Farrell, Founder and Leader, Easy Treesie Project with Crann* https://crann.ie/.
In this initiative by the MoCI’s Youth Voices Team we will launch and screen our artist-in-residence, Fion Gunn’s work, ‘Plant More Trees!’ (A virtual reality work) https://museumofchildhood.ie/artist-in-residence-fion-gunn/
Failte ‘is dia daoibh
Welcome and hello from the Museum of Childhood Ireland /Musaem Óige na hÉireann an Islandwide and diaspora social history museum of children and childhood. Charity number: 20205452.
We are an unfunded voluntary museum and rely entirely on donations.
Donations to support our work kindly received on our website: museumofchildhood.ie
Some of you may be wondering what the Museum of Childhood Ireland is doing with TreeWeek, and why we have our wonderful Artist in Residence Fion Gunn launching ‘plant more trees!’ now ?
It’s simple really. We are interested in trees for all the reasons that everyone is interested in trees. For their usefullness to us, for health, positive mental health ,beauty, resources, inspiration, play and of course in the planning of the museum, both in the physical building and the garden..
But the environment and our care of it for future generations is also one of the biggest concerns of our Youth Voices Team and it is directly because of them that our collaborative initiatives have come about.
We welcome all the young and not so young from around the world joining us today in Ireland for Tree Week.
Thank you to the MoCI team:
- Sinead O’Reilly
- Alannah O’Sullivan
- Freya Feeney
- Jemi John
- Emma Azim
- Nicole Power
- Precious Benjamin
- Danny Sheehy and
- Danny Collins.
- Our Youth Voices Team (14-19), alongside our Child Voices Team (4-13) are a core element of the museum of Childhood Ireland and have been from the very start. Just as we began the museum, a consultant suggested that we’d find it easy to engage all age groups at the MoCI , EXCEPT teenagers, suggesting that the name especially would put them off! The opposite is actually our experience. From our first Event Day for HeritageWeek in 2017 where on a Sunday morning at 10am, 50 adolescents turned up for a creative workshop, planned for 15 max, around some of the items from the Museum’s collection (don’t worry we hastily booked more time in the venue and in fact the last workshop finished at 7pm that evening and over 150 teenagers in total attended as word spread ), we haven’t looked back since.
- Thank you to the team for all the insight, talent and energy they bring and the relevance they bring to the project for a museum of Childhood in Ireland.
- We are so honoured to have an International artist of Fion Gunn’s standing working with the Museum this year. From her birthplace in Ireland to her life in the UK, Fion represents our diaspora. Her art, her intelligence, her amazing facility with collaboration and her very good humour have made every moment of working alongside her a joyous experience.
- Orla Farrell from Easy Treesie for Crann, we met at the start of the Pandemic through a fundraiser for the Italian Red Cross, and I couldn’t conceive of ever not collaborating with her and her wonderful project to plant 1m trees, with Ireland’s 1M children!
- And so about children, for children, with children, here we all are today for Tree Week
- Thank you to everyone at home, and across the world joining the Museum of Childhood Ireland today in planting more trees!
England
Turkey
Co Dublin and Co Cork, Ireland
Sicily
Italy
Killarney, Ireland
England
Plant More Trees.
The structure of the event will be as follows:
• Brief welcome by Majella McAllister, The Museum of Childhood Ireland, MoCI (5mins.)
• Brief introduction by Orla Farrell, Easy Treesie Project at Crann about our collaboration. (5mins.)
• Screening of Plant More Trees by Artist-In-Residence at the MoCI, Fion Gunn. (5mins.)
• Q&A with Fion Gunn. (20mins.)Please see Fion’s work below.
• Q&A with the MoCI YV Team (10mins)
• Invitation by the MoCI, inviting our collaborators to speak about their tree planting ceremonies for Tree Week at their organisation. (5 mins each.)
This will be followed by the MoCI briefly outlining the proposal for an environmental awareness and planting project from the Museum of Childhood Ireland, which will engage our youngest citizens too! This will involve the MoCI working with creches, montessori schools and playgroups across the island: Eat, Save, Reuse, Plant and Grow. ( 5 mins)
Please note that the event duration is scheduled for up to 1 hr 30 mins.
We are delighted to confirm that collaborating with us too this year for Tree Week, and receiving seeds / trees to plant prior to the event day are:
Killarney House and Gardens, Kerry.
The Robert Emmet Community Development Project, Dublin.
Udaaya Museum, Nepal.
INACS Istituto Nazionale Arte Cultura, Italy
The Art Centre, Highland Park, Illinois.
Alex Molly.
Launching on #WorldPoetryDay and #TreeWeek2021, we are honoured to have 12 year old Irish Poet Alex Molloy as our guest. The first poem he will recite is his own original composition, Ár gCrann Dárach, and throughout the week we will upload Alex’s recitations or readings, recorded specially for the museum, of work by Irish poets with trees as their subject matter.
Tree Week 2022
Our apple seed planting project with the Community Play School in Donnybrook, Co Dublin and St Brigid’s, Tralee, Co Kerry.
We are reusing some yogurt pots
We did an experiment. A few seeds were planted on a pot that was left on a window cill. The second pot with seeds was left near a window but in the shade. The third pot was left in a dark room with no sunlight. The seeds on the window cill grew faster than the one in the shade. The seeds in the dark did not grow at all.
Wicklow, January 2023. MoCI
Wicklow, Autumn 2022, MoCI