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
Toby Wolf
