Arbor Day: Street Trees of Seattle by Taha Ebrahimi | Trees as Cultural Landscape (at the community scale)

Arbor Day was Friday and this is Monday. I'm late.  Although many places don't necessary celebrate Arbor Day on the last Friday of April...

Street Trees of Seattle is an interesting book.  During the pandemic Ms. Ebrahimi went for long walks, began re-connecting and re-looking at the natural world, and began documenting street trees at the neighborhood scale.  

She chose to do this by drawing, and for the purposes of the book, she organized the content by neighborhood, focused on the primary type of tree "dominating" that particular neighborhood, although each section does list other significant trees that are also present.

I am fascinated by the way the book is organized because a book organized in this way could be done for most big cities, although not necessarily focusing on one type of tree within a neighborhood, as a way to help reconnect people to the "natural world" within their community.  

It's also a great way to organize walking tours, like WalkArlington's community walks or Jane's Walks the first weekend of May, exploring communities in honor of Jane Jacobs, or neighborhood history walks, etc.  

Instead of most of these kinds of tours focusing on the built environment, we can do this with trees and other elements of flora.  Obviously, arboreta do this quite a bit within their grounds, e.g., "Garden Highlights Tour" at the Morris Arboretum and Gardens at University of Pennsylvania.

Ebrahimi points out that many of our trees--especially in Seattle where 95% of the original tree cover was milled for wood soon after the founding of the city--are planted by residents--so the "natural world" is in fact not so natural, and that people bring trees from where they were before.

Images from the Ballard Neighborhood section of Street Trees of Seattle

Cherry trees in Ballard.  Photo: Joel Rogers Photography

It means that most of the trees planted in Seattle aren't native to the Pacific Northwest, which presents interesting questions, not only about appropriateness in terms of "natives," but stories about how some of these trees, like the Pacific Sequoia, thrive there, but are failing in their native habitats in response to climate change.  

Trees as place, trees as stories.  She mentioned an article in the New Yorker about apples, "Crunch: Building a Better Apple," and I was reminded of a story I read in a Toronto newspaper about an Italian immigrant who kept a fig tree going in his backyard for decades.  (If you do an Internet search it turns out Italians did this all over North America, planting fig trees as they emigrated.)

For me, I am interested in trees but more formulaically.  I think we need great tree cover in cities.  I like trees for their shade and beauty.  I like fruit trees because they help feed us.  

But from a tree leaf identification standpoint, I can identify just a few trees, maple, oak, willow oak, even though "I have been around trees forever."  I can identify more trees than that but not necessarily by leaf.

When I was a kid, my brother and I planted some maple trees from seedlings we found in our yard or others (the best one, had a "good trunk", I absconded from a neighbor's planting bed--it might have been five inches tall).  Some died and we nursed the others.

That was in the mid 1970s, and now the trees are maybe 50 feet tall--this photo is from 2018, and the trees in question are behind the garage.

But this is a "private tree" in a yard, not a "street tree" which is defined as being in the planting strip between street and sidewalk, and ostensibly is the responsibility of the local government,  

In DC, "proper tree species" are specified for each block in the city, and residents aren't supposed to plant trees in the planting strip, but they do and they aren't necessarily the authorized tree.

Trees as cultural landscape.  It is that kind of story that interests Taha.  Unlike me, she is interested in the story of the tree and its place in the landscape, who planted it and "why".  For example, one tree she learned about was planted as a barter between a family that helped a poorer one heat their house in a particularly cold winter.  The helped family planted a special tree in the neighbor's planting strip.

I realized that what she was talking about is what we might call "Trees as Cultural Landscape" at the neighborhood, district, and/or city-wide scale.  Not just the trees, or trees as objects or elements of the cultural landscape, but the stories behind them. Their historicity.  Also see "In Los Angeles, a Tree With Stories to Tell," The New York Times., which describes a community trying to save a noteworthy tree from being torn down by a developer.

The last piece in my series of articles on gaps in parks master planning is about applying the cultural landscape lens to parks planning ("Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Nine | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework").  No reason to not extend this concept to street tree planning.  

Still, even though I say I have a formulaic approach to trees, this article in the Washington Post, "Everyone should have a favorite tree. Here’s mine," makes me realize that all of us probably have favorite trees.  

The maple tree is in the back of this photo.  The willow oak was already gone.

E.g., I like flowering trees like DC's crepe myrtles or the redbuds here in Utah, and we were attracted to our DC house, because of two towering trees in our backyard, a maple and a willow oak, whose canopy combined to create a kind of outdoor room that even worked well in the rain.  

Unfortunately now both trees are gone--although I did let willow oaks reseed so we'll see what happens.

Streets/street trees as linear parks.  I first heard this concept expressed by David Barth at a presentation in 2004.

North Columbus Avenue, Galion, Ohio, c. 1920s

Most cities have urban forestry units.  Most cities, at least the big cities, address street tree planning very seriously.  DC does.  And it has the nonprofit Casey Trees planting trees throughout the city, in public spaces and in conjunction with property owners and utility companies, on private property.   And the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments just set a goal of 50% tree cover for the region ("New tree canopy goal for D.C. area calls on Arlington to get greener," Arlington Now).  

But a city or county tree plan--like the point I made about parks plans and architecture--is formulaic too.  It doesn't get into the stories of how and why of what trees are where and how they contribute to place and the stories of how they became to be planted.

Tree planting initiatives as entry points into greater community involvement.  In Utah, TreeUtah operates similarly to Casey Trees, but they tend to be more focused on planting trees in association with park systems, not just Sugar House Park for which I am on the board, but in city parks like Fairmont--in fact participating in a TreeUtah event there for Earth Day a couple years ago is how I got involved with Friends of Fairmont Park.

Separately, Wasatch Community Gardens is creating an urban orchard in Salt Lake City's westside.

Although one criticism of tree planting initiatives is that it is perhaps even more important to take care of the trees and forests we already have, a point made in today's Los Angeles Times, "Is planting trees on Arbor Day one way we can all fight climate change? Not so much."

Still, I think tree planting initiatives are an important way to get people involved, and has the potential to move them from planting to tree to advocating for forests, for their city to declare their tree cover "a community arboretum" (see below).  To get people beyond the single event of planting a tree, it has to be built into the programming--greening beyond Earth Day.

US Forest Service community involvement and educational publications. Less so now, the US Forest Service had a massive publication program, including items focused on K-12 education and adult learning.

I mention from time to time that I collect ephemera related to urban planning and what I am involved in.  

Earlier this year I acquired an amazing set of materials, developed in the 1950s, although this set was from 1960, promoting advocacy and conservation, produced by the US Forest Service.

Trees can work for the beauty and security of your neighborhood, state, and nation, 

Page 2, Page 3, Page 4

At that time, when women mostly didn't work, the Forest Service had an active communications program with women's and garden clubs that at the time were active across the country.

Page 1, Pages 2-3. Pages 4-5, Pages 6-7, Pages 8-9, Pages 10-11

The NPS History website does have a collection of scans of USFS publications.  But generally not the ones before 1960, which can be pretty cool.  Some of the older ones are findable online.  A good source is the University of Pennsylvania, such as for Forestry Activities: A guide for youth group leaders.

Community/municipal arboreta.  Perhaps the largest city participating as a "community/municipal arboretum" is Newport, Rhode Island ("As city’s first generation of exotic trees die out, Newport Tree Conservancy works to replace them," Newport Daily News).  The program is run by the ArbNet accreditation program, sponsored by Morton Arboretum in Illinois.

Yalecrest, Salt Lake City.

I think more cities should do this as a way to set higher expectations and standards in how they address their tree cover.  Apparently, Bexley, Ohio was the first ("Bexley could be first U.S. city to be declared arboretum," Columbus Dispatch).  A municipal arboretum only includes trees in public spaces.

What about accredited neighborhood arboreta?  I also think it would be neat for neighborhoods, especially in big cities, to consider getting designated as a "neighborhood arboretum," because it is less likely to happen at the scale of the whole city.  

This came up when I was on a walking tour In Salt Lake's  Yalecrest neighborhood a couple years ago.  The guy was talking about the tree cover and he said "you know, we live in a forest,. "  And I started talking to him about the already designated a historic district, would be a great candidate.  

Unlike a community arboretum, depending on the interest of property owners, a neighborhood arboretum could include both public and private trees.

An idea to expand tree identification markers in arboreta.  Street Trees of Seattle has a nice set of references.  But something I haven't seen before is a separate set of references by tree.

It would be neat to include those kinds of references in a QR code as part of the signage markers for individual trees.

Conclusion: Street Trees of Seattle.  For me the key concepts are:

• a great book if you live in Seattle, a great way to learn about the city and its neighborhoods in a new way
• the concept of the cultural landscape -- a (tree and trees) not just as an object, but an element of place, with historicity--a story to tell
• Fascinating way to organize the content by neighborhood
• as a book its extendable to other cities, especially organized by neighborhood
• the neighborhood focus is a good way to organize tours to better expose people to flora in the "natural world" of their communities
• organizing references by tree is a step forward too, and could be incorporated by arboreta into tree identification markers through QR codes