I just wrote a post on Herbie, the champion American elm in Yarmouth, Maine, that was taken down last week after a life that spanned more than two centuries. The post, at Taking Place In The Trees, included several photos I took the day before Herbie came down. In his prime, Herbie was the largest American elm in New England — 110′ high, 120′ wide at the crown’s widest point, and 20′ in girth. When I saw him, more than half of his largest limbs had been removed, but the tree’s presence and majesty were unmistakable.
Herbie the American Elm, in his prime.
A field count of the rings on Herbie’s trunk indicated that the tree was at least 212 years old. This was a tree that largely defined the genius loci of its neighborhood. It filled the corner of a private yard and marked the intersection of two streets; it cast high shade over a wide and fortunate area.
It’s not difficult to extrapolate lessons from Herbie’s presence and longevity, lessons that might inform how landscape architects design and advocate for planting spaces. I can think of these lessons:
1. Plant trees! They provide cover, coolness, oxygen, and identifiability to a place.
2. Plan for the long term — aim to foster a tree’s growth for decades, not just for years.
3. Design for root space — bare-root transplanting of large trees shows us how trees benefit from space in which to grow, and how far from the trunk their roots need to grow to add crown growth. Push those developers, homeowners, and city agency officials to allocate more space for subgrade growth; it’ll pay off in happier, healthier trees, and broader shade canopies.
4. Remember how big trees want to get. Putting a large-scaled canopy tree in a slot of soil better used for skinny grasses won’t give you the tree you’re looking for; it’ll give you a tree that whimpers for a few years, declines, and then dies. Scale your trees to your site (aiming for as big a planting site as possible — see 2. and 3.)
5. Shoot for size. People love the giant, and are more apt to preserve and take what they love. A large tree builds its own constituency, which helps when you’re trying to keep nature from being overtaken by pavement. If you want people to engage with nature, give them something with which it’s easy to engage. (Keeping in mind 4.)
That’s for starters. What other lessons do you see in Herbie’s story?
Deborah Howe
Taking Place 
If, as in #3, “bare-root transplanting of large trees shows us how trees benefit from space in which to grow, and how far from the trunk their roots need to grow to add crown growth,” then my next thought isn’t about Elms or big trees per se, but about how bare-rooting isn’t just a utilitarian technique, it’s a different way of (literally) seeing the roots of a tree and the way they engage their environment. So you’re really doing more than dispensing recipes; you’re teaching an expanded world view. Cool.
So … planting requires considerably more foresight than is normally given to a plan. After that, the vision needs to be given to the client – which may be the hard part.
Well, actually, the plan is very thoroughly considered, as it is the roadmap of an entire project. So foresight is critical through the entire process. Really, I start this discussion carrying with me the assumption that we are stewards of this creation, and to create places that are more than temporary 10-year placeholders we need to thing about a) using elements that will last, including long-lived trees and b) designing the best conditions for those elements (including plants) to last a long time. (This post, in fact, is riddled with assumptions….) The third point is that as stewards we also need to be advocates for these places and these choices, with whatever constituencies might be involved — clients, the public, abutting businesses, etc.
The Rose Kennedy Greenway Gardens in Boston is a case in point. The gardens were designed to cover three blocks, and were installed two years ago. They add a wonderfully refreshing flavor to the Central Artery Surface Corridor down at the edge of the Financial District, and are quite popular. For some reason, the Greenway Conservancy, which has been charged with the task of maintaining the Greenway — including these gardens — is working to tear them out and add more constructed amenities — more paving, an ice rink (what happens to that in non-icy months?). And now it’s up to the gardens’ affectionate constituencies, and perhaps their original designer, to advocate for their preservation. They’re really beautiful, and no more difficult to maintain than other parts of the Greenway, so advocating for them is easy. It remains to be seen if the private Conservancy will listen to the public will, though….
Thanks for the generous digression, Deb. (The Gardens, by the way, include two Elms, one each of two of the new cultivars.)
Two more Elmy thoughts:
One reason there were so many Elms planted was that nurserymen love them. Elms grow fast, which means more units sold per year per acre, and with just a little patience, larger trees at higher prices. This market factor, which in the past contributed to the overplanting of Elms, may now be helping to get the new cultivars more widely grown.
Pardon the near pun, but I think triage is crucial. We can’t save every tree, and we can’t make every street tree-lined. Municipalities would benefit from street tree policies that put trees only where they can thrive. On streets with narrow sidewalks, that would mean fewer trees — possibly limited to “bulb-outs” where the sidewalk is widened, or to “weed trees” that receive a special regimen of inspection, pruning, and replacement to keep them in safe condition (i.e. not dropping limbs).