UK, partners plant 2,800 trees on reclaimed Perry County mine site

A reclaimed coal mine in Perry County added 2,800 native trees as University of Kentucky’s Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment joined Green Forests Work and partners for an Arbor Day planting aimed at restoring land once stripped for coal.

The work goes beyond ceremony. Green Forests Work says it specializes in turning reclaimed, non-native grasslands and shrublands into productive forestland, a shift that can help old mine benches hold soil better, slow storm runoff, and create habitat that returns over time instead of leaving open ground exposed. For Perry County, the question is not just whether trees survive, but what the land becomes next.

Christopher D. Barton, a UK forestry professor and the founder and president of Green Forests Work, has helped drive that model across Appalachia. Green Forests Work says it has planted more than 8 million trees on more than 15,000 acres since 2009. A recent report also said the group’s Kentucky partnership work supported the planting of about 343,000 trees across 746 acres in the past five years.

The Perry County planting fits into a longer pattern of mine-land restoration in eastern Kentucky. In 2023, an Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement Arbor Day event in Perry County was held on a 2-acre former coal mine site and included instruction on mine reclamation and the Forestry Reclamation Approach, a method designed to improve how reclaimed land supports tree growth. In Breathitt County in 2017, a UK Appalachian Center and Green Forests Work Earth Day event brought together more than 50 volunteers to plant 2,500 trees on formerly mined land.

The same partnership has also pushed into other parts of the state. In Hazard, UK students joined Green Forests Work, Suntory Global Spirits and The Nature Conservancy in a four-year reforestation collaboration aimed at rebuilding forest cover across Kentucky.

The Nature Conservancy says that work is meant to connect healthy forested areas for wildlife migration and help build climate-resilient forests. On former mine land in Perry County, that means today’s planting could shape what nearby communities see in the years ahead: more stable hillsides, more wildlife cover, and land that can be used again for something other than a reminder of what was removed.