City of Parramatta will attempt to put 10,000 native seedlings into the ground in a single morning when National Tree Day comes to North Upjohn Park Reserve on Sunday 26 July.
The free community planting session runs from 10am to 1pm at the Dundas site, meeting opposite 18 Ronald Avenue. Registration is open now through the council website, and anyone with gloves, a hat and closed shoes is invited to help strengthen a stretch of local bushland that has been the focus of ongoing rehabilitation for several years.
National Tree Day is Australia’s largest community tree-planting event, organised by Planet Ark since 1996. The Parramatta event is part of a multi-year revegetation project at Upjohn Park, designed to restore native habitat and improve the health of surviving bushland along the Parramatta River corridor.
What sets the Parramatta event apart this year is its sheer scale. Ten thousand seedlings is not an ornamental planting — it is an industrial push to re-establish ground cover and understorey across a whole reserve. It will require a steady flow of volunteers through the morning, with families welcome and no experience needed.
The council is asking participants to bring water, sunscreen and a hat, and to wear closed shoes. Tools and seedlings will be supplied. Registration is required, and numbers may be capped if demand is high — the council recommends booking early to avoid missing out.
The seedling planting caps a year of intensive tree work in the Parramatta local government area. Between early May and late June, the council’s 2026 Street Tree Planting Program added more than 800 semi-mature trees to nature strips and verges across nine suburbs: Beecroft, Carlingford, Dundas Valley, Epping, Ermington, Northmead, Telopea, Toongabbie and Winston Hills. Most of those trees were grown in the council’s own nursery, with 14 species chosen for local conditions. Each one enters a 12-month intensive maintenance program to ensure it survives its first summer.
The street tree program works on a different logic. Those 800 trees are valued at $150 each and were planted in response to direct resident requests. The results will show up in quieter streets, cooler footpaths and better canopy cover over the next decade. The National Tree Day effort at Upjohn Park, by contrast, is about rebuilding bushland from the ground up — a collective investment in long-term ecological health, not amenity.
This year also marks the 30th anniversary of National Tree Day nationally. Across Australia, thousands of sites will be planted on the same day. Parramatta’s contribution, at 10,000 seedlings, is one of the more ambitious council-led events in Sydney.
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City of Parramatta
Local government authority responsible for the Parramatta local government area in Sydney, managing urban planning, environment, parks and community events. The council runs extensive tree-planting and bushland rehabilitation programs across its suburbs.
Dundas is accessible by train and bus, with the nearest stations within walking distance of North Upjohn Park Reserve. Standard street parking is available around Ronald Avenue and Dorahy Street, though the council suggests public transport on the day. No event shuttles are planned.
Visitors can combine the morning planting with a walk along the Parramatta River foreshore or a visit to one of the larger parks nearby. The council is not running any concurrent events at the reserve on 26 July. The planting will determine how many of the 10,000 seedlings establish before spring growth begins. A second stage of the street tree program is scheduled later in 2026, adding more mature canopy to residential streets already benefiting from the May–June planting.