Three trees suffice for a constant stretch in minor-free graphs

Abstract

In this short note, we show that $H$-minor-free graphs have a tree cover with $3$ trees and constant stretch for any fixed graph $H$. The number of trees matches the recent lower bound by Chen, Tan, and Xu who showed that a toroidal grid requires at least $3$ trees for constant stretch. Our result is obtained by establishing a connection between tree covers and Assouad--Nagata dimension and then invoking the recent dimension bound for minor-free metrics by Liu.