About a hundred trees in Moscow parks are decorated with healing drawings this year

Mospriroda summed up the results of the eighth season of the annual environmental campaign for the preservation of green spaces "ParkArt". This year, more than 40 volunteer artists took part in the project, who created beautiful and touching healing drawings with acrylic paints on treated and treated trees.

As a result, from April to October 2023, more than 90 new "fairy-tale portals" appeared in the capital on 12 natural territories and urban sites. In addition, about 15 therapeutic drawings created in previous years have been restored by the authors.

Mospriroda reported this on its website.

"Of course, the main function that art carries within the framework of the ParkArt campaign is to improve and prolong the life of weakened and damaged trees in Moscow's natural territories. But at the same time, the aesthetic side is also of great importance. After all, it is so pleasant, being in nature, to contemplate not only its greatness and beauty, but also to say hello to a learned cat from the Lukomorye, admire the mouse dance, greet a bat, a turtle, a whale and other characters who have settled in therapeutic paintings," the Mosprirode noted.

Volunteer artists paint only on those trees on which frost-breaking cracks, hollows, wounds, exposed areas of the trunk have formed under the influence of external factors. Excess moisture accumulates in such wounds, fungal spores, bacteria, and pests actively develop. As a result, the tree is destroyed and may die.

Before the artists, Mospriroda specialists work with such trees: they clean the wound from the remnants of bark, lichen, moss, apply a sanitizing compound and ground. Only after special treatment of the damaged areas, artists begin to paint pictures with safe waterproof acrylic paints.

"Acrylic paints do not violate the structure of the tree, they create an additional protective layer that prevents moisture, fungi, bacteria and pests from entering the wound, therefore, they do not allow the tree to collapse further. So, the drawing becomes a healing plaster, under which the wounds of the tree are preserved, gradually tightened, and sometimes completely heal," the message says.

Most of the trees were cured this year in the natural-historical parks "Moskvoretsky" and "Tsaritsyno" – 15 in each. There are 14 rescued plants on the account of the natural-historical park "Bitsevsky Forest". In just eight years of the environmental campaign, more than 320 trees have been cured.

ParkArt also takes place in the Chelyabinsk and Sakhalin regions, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Engels and other Russian cities.