LAST week I helped a group of children from Chatburn School to plant trees which will demonstrate a wonderful friendship with the children of Chernobyl.

Each year local man Brian Davies organises a visit of around 20 children from the Chernobyl district in Belarus, which was blighted by a nuclear disaster in the 1980s. They spend a month with the children of Chatburn and medical opinion shows that each month spent in the clean atmosphere of the Clitheroe area adds a full year to their life expectancy.

With funding from Castle Cement, a nursery of trees has been planted. The species are oak, which is a tree typical of Britain, and birch, which is the national tree of Belarus.

Next June the Chernobyl children return to our area. Each will plant an oak and a birch and the name of the planter will be attached to the tree. It is helpful that a similar tree twinning project will be carried out by the young Belarussians.

I love doing conservation work with young people who show such energy and enthusiasm. On a very pleasant day they worked hard to bed the trees in heavy soil produced by a period of heavy rain over the previous couple of days.

The planting has been carried out in the school's own nature reserve created by the experts of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust and the funding provided by Castle. Environmental progress works well when industry and volunteer labour combine their strengths instead of being at loggerheads. Partnerships such as this provide signposts to the future for our environment.