Istanbul will flourish with 100,000 redbuds

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Minister Eroğlu (C) planted some redbuds himself at the ceremony. DAILY NEWS photo, Emrah GÜREL

With the coming of spring, 100,000 redbud trees would be given free to locals, said Turkey’s Forest and Environment Minister Veysel Eroğlu at a ceremony yesterday.

“Istanbul will be redecorated with redbuds, associated with the Bosphorus,” said Eroğlu at a ceremony in the Eyüp district of Istanbul. He said each year a specific type of tree would be chosen to be distributed free to locals to grow in their gardens. “The ministry has planted trees on a total of 2.3 million hectares of land in the last few years. We will continue to plant trees and flowers all across the city,” he said.

Eroğlu said the Golden Horn, a historic inlet of the Bosphorus dividing the city of Istanbul, had long used for dumping domestic and industrial waste in the 1980s and 1990s. “We could not stand the bad smell of this neighborhood before, now it’s all clean and we are planting redbuds with our people,” said minister Veysel Eroğlu, addressing locals.