Concerning street trees

When we first moved to the neighbourhood, thirty-something years ago, our street and several others were graced with a dozen or so silver maples. They had reached enormous size for their species, 10 to 14 feet in girth and 50-75 feet tall. They were also near the end of their allotted span.

One by one they have come down, felled by storms or by the town when decay caught up with them. The last two stood down the block at the corner of the Avenue. A month ago today, in a fierce microburst, the Avenue tree fell, blocking the street for hours.

Photo: Katie Curley-Katzman, Patch.com

This was the death sentence for the tree around the corner. After removing the obvious obstruction, above, the Tree Department moved with (for them) unusual haste to grind the tree's stump and roots and remove all trace of it. Inevitably their attention turned to the last silver maple right around the corner. This was the largest and widest of them all. Despite obvious signs of decay, it was still standing and providing habitat for squirrels and raccoons.

The Tree Department got to work on the last tree inside of a week. At first, it looked as if they were just going to take out the deadwood, but in a day or two it was clear the tree was coming down. It did. However, once it was down our crack team of woodsmen reverted to form. The stump is still there.


It has 100 growth rings up to the rot cavity visible in the middle. Making allowance for that, the tree was 110 to 115 years old. Another large maple once stood a few feet down the street, coming down in a storm in the late 1990s. I examined that stump and found it was then around 100.

This brought me to a milestone. Our neighbourhood was first subdivided in 1881. A second subdivision followed in 1893, and a third in 1897. It seems likely that all the maples dated from the era of the third subdivision, when the property owners had visions of the area as a summer colony: a vision that was never realised.

Silver maples have few human friends. Naturalist John Kieran wrote that they are the weak sister among maples. The link above shares Kieran's scorn. Tree departments don't like them (as we found when we tried to have one planted) because of their habit of dropping limbs on streets, and because their shallow root systems raise hell with street and sidewalk pavements.

Some years back, our town's tree department was run by an old-school tree hugger, who was probably the reason some of our maples lasted as long as they did. He resisted any call to take a tree down merely for the convenience of abuttors. When it was necessary to prune trees around power lines, the job was a work of art, not the bizarre topiary one sees in some towns. He preferred native trees, at least in the older neighbourhoods. He replaced one of the maples lost on our street with an ash, a couple of others with basswoods, and kept the Norway maples at a minimum. Now, unless the abuttor makes a request, a tree that falls gets no replacement at all. Replacements are Norway maples as a rule, which my native-species spouse considers a vertical form of kudzu.

Unfortunately, abuttors around here have become the principal pest of street trees. Under the new regime, new homeowners down the street had a tree taken down because it was too close to their driveway. It seems likely that the owners of the house on the corner, abutting both of the last silver maples, were complicit in the rapid removal of the fallen tree's roots, and the sudden demise of the second.

Maybe colonising Mars isn't such a nutty idea. Difficult as it seems, it does appear easier than developing a human culture prepared to take responsibility for its actions.