This past Saturday we finished our Newton Tree Conservancy spring Community Tree Plantings, with a total of 69 trees planted by homeowners and volunteers in four groups: Canterbury Road area, Evelyn Road, lower Chestnut Street area, and Woodcliff -Oakdale-Parker Ave. We were blessed with perfect weather for people on each planting day (perfect weather for trees would be rain), and everything went great, with help from Marc Welch and the tree crew, and Nate Cenis of Cedarlawn division of Bartlett, who is a regular volunteer with Newton Tree Conservancy. Participants included a
Checking planting depth on a bare root tree. (Photo/Julia Malakie)
large contingent of V14 bloggers (Andreae Downs, Chris Steele, Sallee Lipshutz in the Chestnut group) and Adam Peller helping out at Woodcliff. And new people like Ari, the boy in the photo above, who was helping on his fifth tree by the time I caught up with him on Woodcliff Road, and was already expert at poking out air holes, and keeping mulch away from the trunks.
I count 18 different species that we planted, including three kinds of oak, two kinds of cherry, serviceberry, crabapple, Amur Maackia, and American linden, which we regularly plant; some that aren’t always available like hophornbeam and yellowwood, and a couple that I think are new for street tree planting in Newton, ‘Emerald City’ tuliptree and Osage orange. So, further progress in reducing the monoculture of Norway maples as they die and are removed.
We’re now looking for applications from groups of neighbors interested in planting trees this fall. (Planting day will be Saturday morning, November 14.) We like to do groups of at least five houses and at least eight trees, but there’s not an upper limit. We’re asking for applications by June 1, and you can get more info and application forms at newtontreeconservancy.org (click on the Programs drop-down menu to Community Tree Plantings).
I was thrilled to see all of the new trees planted along Cheesecake Brook along Albemarle Rd earlier today!
Wow that is a lot of trees!
I honestly could not imagine planting so many. In the past couple of years I have planted 4 of them in my yard – and all 4 never survived winter.
Do you really plant that many without power gadgets, and then look forward to fall?
If you are around Newton Ctr in the fall sign me up, maybe I can learn a thing or two!
It’s a wonderful thing you are doing for the community, and it’s great to see people nurturing the “garden city”.
This is terrific Julia… thank you so much for your commitment to speaking for the trees.
Hah, I guess I should get that Lorax book sometime. I’ve never read it, but I particularly like “It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.” All the amazing big trees we have in parks and yards (and occasionally on berms, although that’s a tougher environment for long-term survival) were little trees once that someone planted for the future even though they would not be around to enjoy them 50 or 80 years later.
Simon, you volunteering to help plant? It is not really so hard to plant at lot at once (actually in about two hours) if you have enough people. No power gadgets needed to plant bare root trees. (Perhaps you are thinking of those giant soil augers used to dig holes for balled & burlap trees?) We are usually digging wide shallow holes, just deep enough to accommodate the roots of the new tree, because you don’t want it to settle, which would be like planting too deep — tree will not grow.
Janet, if you mean the 10 trees along the east bank around Brookside, those were actually planted spring 2014, so they are on their second year of watering with the TreeGators.
There is more good news for city trees, we learned at our April Urban Tree Commission meeting. The FY16 budget as proposed includes funds for planting 240 trees by the city, and three additional tree crew people in addition to the three we now have (Dick, Eric and Jordan). The new people probably won’t be on board until fall, but the plan is for the first two to mainly work on the backlog of about 1,000 stumps to grind. Then they will be able to keep up with 500 or 600 stumps from new removals each year, and ramp up the city planting volume to the targeted 800 trees per year, at which point we will finally be planting more than we’re losing.