The secret life of urban trees

Probably to most of us suburbanites it seems like trees are forever. For the few years we live in some location there's usually little change in the trees around us. Even in my house in Washington state, where I've lived for over a dozen years, the property is essentially unchanged even though a few big trees were downed in a huge windstorm a few years ago.

So it was with a small surprise that I learned it doesn't seem to be so with urban trees. Certainly one has to expect changes over 4 decades and some, such as the growth of little saplings into big shady trees, as I noted here, is to be expected.

And perhaps I should have taken warning from the street this house resides on: in my time in front of every house there stood a tall upstanding oak (which made huge leaf piles that were a joy to play in, before we burned them), so unlike western oaks and especially the sprawling every-which-way California oaks. But when we visited this street Friday all of the oaks were gone, if replaced at all replaced by a variety of trees lacking rhyme and reason.

And so it was in Midland, when we toured Saturday. Some things remained the same, some had changed a little, some had changed a lot, but the trees... were all different! Now I had expected that some would be gone, especially the giant apple tree on Ashman between Nelson and Helen that friends and I spent many hours clambering about and playing on. But I was surprised to see that every tree I could remember at all seemed to be gone. The other apple trees on the aforementioned property, for example.

And the new trees where none existed. In my time our house never had a tree out front but there's a good-sized one now. And the next-door neighbors -- not surprised the crabapples are all gone, but the nicely sized and shaped maple that stood in the middle of their lawn is replaced by a very similar maple between the sidewalk and the street. Almost as if they'd picked the tree up and moved it.

So I got to wondering about the lifetimes of trees. I didn't search too far before I found the USFS' "Urban Tree Risk Management" online. The headings alone tell a story, and suggest why I didn't see any of the old trees I remember. The life of a manicured and cared-for urban tree is very different from that of a tree loose in the wild.