Removal of Broadway oaks sign of a bigger issue happening around the city, says Trees Columbus
When a tree falls on Broadway, people hear about it.
When it’s a pair of a decades-old Darlington oaks that city crews go in and take out, people don’t just notice. They raise a fuss.
That’s what happened last week in the 1000 block of Broadway: The city felled two majestic oaks, leaving broad stumps ringed by open ground.
When people saw that, Trees Columbus got complaints. Asked how folks reacted, Director Dorothy McDaniel said, “Unhappily.”
Some were disappointed. Some were angry. Some wanted to know whether the wood could be salvaged to create some memento or memorial, such as a wooden bowl or table or guitar.
But it was too late: The wood was hauled away as usual.
McDaniel was not surprised by the blowback: Those who frequent downtown love the stately trees in the median, with their overarching canopies.
“These two trees coming down on Broadway attracted a lot of attention, which is a good thing,” McDaniel said, standing by one of the stumps, each nearly five feet in diameter. “We want people in Columbus to be concerned about their trees, and we want them to have eyes on the trees.”
They will feel the loss more in the months to come: “People gather here for the trees,” she said of the once-shaded median. Come summer, those bare spots will be “hot as blazes,” she said.
But the nonprofit does not fault the city for taking the trees down. Trees Columbus would have liked to have known that was imminent, to be ready for the public reaction, but the trees had to come down, McDaniel said.
They were a hazard, their weakened limbs likely to fall on busy, public property. One oak was directly in front of the stage used for Uptown Columbus’ outdoor concerts.
Pat Biegler, Columbus’ director of public works, said the city tried to save the oaks, doing what it could for them over the past six years, as their health steadily faltered. Crews used equipment that blows air into the ground, to inject oxygen and loosen the soil so the trees could draw nutrients.
Because so many people gather in the Broadway median for downtown events, aerating the soil just doesn’t last, she said. Three days later it’s compacted again. “It kind of goes with that location,” she said.
George Barker, the consulting arborist for Trees Columbus, agreed soil compaction is a threat, but said the issue with the oaks was more up in the air than in the ground.
“These trees had a lot of decay in the upper canopy, and I know that we’ve gotten a lot of people saying, ‘These stumps look perfectly healthy. Why were these trees taken down?’”
Because they were dying at the top, he said: “That usually results from branches getting broke off during a storm, some time in the past. Maybe it was improperly pruned.”
Some might say the trees were diseased, but that’s not quite right, he said:
“They’re not really diseased. What happens is when a tree has a limb that breaks, then it opens up the tree to infections of fungus…. The tree begins to deteriorate and rot, and rot is just fungus eating away at the cell walls of the tree, to where it just doesn’t have the strength to stay up.”
McDaniel said those mourning the loss of the two 90-year-old oaks will face more grief.
“Our tree canopy is declining,” she said. “We have a lot of aging trees. We have a lot of trees that are coming down due to storms, disease, and just age in general. And we as a community are getting behind the curve on replanting.”
That’s why Trees Columbus last year started working with the city on a Canopy Restoration Project, to inventory the urban forest, put trees on a maintenance plan, and find places to plant new ones.
“We want to be planting more trees than we’re taking down, but that’s going to require some catch-up,” she said.
Once the stumps on Broadway are ground down and cleared, the city will plant fresh Darlington oaks, with trunks about six inches in diameter, Biegler said. Anything smaller might be trampled.
Those trees will need some growing time, before they can throw the kind of shade the old ones did.
Until then, people might need a hat or umbrella, to relax where the trees used to be.