The cutting edge (a resilient plant procurement strategy supporting HS2’s Green Corridor)

High Speed Two (HS2) is a catalyst for growth across the UK. Along with this comes not just environmentally responsible landscape and ecological design but, offers a once in a generation opportunity to secure a green corridor that fuses the railway with its contextual landscape. Central to delivering this is HS2’s Plant Procurement Strategy.

This paper captures how the Plant Procurement Strategy was conceived and developed in collaboration with stakeholders. It sets out the Plant Procurement Strategy’s primary purpose, application and its centrality to fulfilling HS2’s environmental commitments across the project’s one-hundred-and-twenty-year design life.

An insight is also provided into the uniqueness of the strategy amongst mega-infrastructure projects in terms of its scale and vision and its innovative, sustainable and resilience planning credentials as core guidance for decision makers, designers and project managers in procuring, planning, designing and delivering up to 7 million trees. The Plant Procurement Strategy also supports HS2’s Green Corridor project with its two parallel goals, to minimise and compensate for the environmental impact of HS2 and, to support neighbouring communities to further improve the local environment alongside the railway.

This paper reveals how the strategy sets the framework designers can follow to fully mitigate the landscape character and visual effects Environmental Minimum Requirements contained in the HS2 Environmental Statement as well as how it will inform integrated landscape design solutions, planting typologies and species selection. These collective requirements consistently applied by different contractors across the Phase 1 route will establish a legacy railway landscape.

Tree and shrub stock will be required at various times in the overall construction programme from early landscape and ecological mitigation planting through main construction works to the end of the construction programme. The paper provides a unique insight into such challenges and solutions of procuring this volume of living material as trees and shrubs and the inherent complexity due to a combination of legal, programme , biosecurity, quality, and environmental considerations.

Also explored are lessons learned outlining the importance of effective project programming that considers the seasonal nature of planting, the criticality of soil resources as well as innovation using innovative technologies around the whole life management of data. The reader will see how supplying plants of the right provenance, at the right time of the right quality to their intended location along the one hundred- and thirty-five-mile route of HS2 Phase 1 required a strategy with a degree of built-in pragmatic flexibility to take account of the many vagaries of large-scale construction such as logistics, weather conditions and programme changes.

The HS2 Plant Procurement Strategy can be considered a whole life project guide to aid design and delivery, to help plan a future, well designed, resilient landscape infrastructure, one that conserves, enhances, restores, and transforms all the various locations and different scales of landscape the railway encounters.