Oversized Christmas trees are to be replanted above two towns to help cut the risk of flooding.
The owners of Rooted, an eco Christmas tree farm, grow Norway spruces for hire for Christmas.
The trees, with roots, arrive in pots to be returned after the festivities.
But when they hit 8ft and are too big to go indoors, the spruces will go to a charity planting trees on moors above Todmorden and Hebden Bridge, West Yorks, to protect residents below from a repeat of floods in 2015 and 2020.
Rooted boss Sara Tomkins, 44, started growing the spruce on her two-acre field in 2019, fed up seeing all the dead trees after Christmas.
Rooted rented out 150 trees in 2020 and aims to eventually offer 1,000 trees a year to local residents.
Sara explained to the Mirror: “Next year some of our first trees will be heading for over 8ft, so some will be on a retirement plan.”
Hebden Bridge and Todmorden towns were hit by Storm Eva on Boxing Day, 2015, when 2,700 homes and 4,400 businesses were flooded.
The towns in the Calder Valley were also flooded after Storm Ciara struck in February 2020.
Millions of pounds has since been invested to make the area more resilient against flooding. The Rooted trees will be donated to Treesponsibility, a charity which has already planted thousands of trees around the Hebden Bridge area.
Adrian Horton from Slow the Flow, a flood prevention charity and one of Sara’s customers, said the tree scheme was “absolutely amazing”.
He said: “Sara delivers it and we use it for three weeks and she collects it again for £60. She’s fantastic.
“We can all take small measures like supporting an enterprise like this.” Sara said: “It started because I hate seeing dead trees after Christmas. We started doing it ourselves, bringing a rooted one in and replanting it and the idea grew from there.
“Children are bouncing with excitement when we deliver them. The trees do get given names by the families. We’ve had Noel, George, Spikey, John, and some kids just call it ‘Tree’.
“The trees then live on and form part of the next forest on a moorland.”
