PROJECTARBOR DAY 2022
April 29, 2022 While Tree City USA flags and a line of bright green “we love our trees” sidewalk stencils along Main Street were the most visible signs that the Village of Cold Spring celebrated Abor Day on Friday, April 29th, 2022, most passersby likely missed a secret experiment going on high above their heads! Earlier this April, Tree Advisory Board members Charles Day, Tony Bardes, Kory Riesterer and Taro Ietaka spent a day grafting four different species of flowering trees onto inconspicuous branches of several village-owned Callery pear street trees. Their mission: to find a novel way to slowly replace this beautiful but problematic tree that represents a whopping 12% of the village’s public tree inventory without stark removals that would leave gaping holes in the street canopy. It is easy to see why many Hudson Valley villages are heavily planted with Pyrus calleryana, which is often known by one of its many popular cultivar names such as “Bradford”, “Aristocrat” and “Cleveland Select”: not only does it display lovely showy white flowers in spring and deep red/purple fall foliage, but it’s fast growing, incredibly unfussy about soil conditions and is resistant to serious disease. Native to China and Vietnam, the Callery pear gained rapid popularity in the United States after its introduction in the early 20th century as part of an effort to develop fire-blight resistance for the commercial pear industry. Its ability to tolerate extremely difficult growing conditions led the Society of Municipal Arborists to name one Callery cultivar, “Chanticleer,” as Urban Tree of the Year in 2005. Its incredibly tough nature is epitomized by the lone Callery pear, charred and broken, that famously survived the horrible events of September 11th at Ground Zero and is now recovered and known as the “Survivor Tree” at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. Certainly there is much to admire in the Callery pear. However, over time, and despite efforts to develop better cultivars, the tree’s desirable traits have been overshadowed by other steep and costly characteristics, including weak structure, winter storm susceptibility, glue-like fruit covering parked cars and, most recently, evidence of the invasive spread of thorny hybrids. In the Village of Cold Spring, these traits have caused numerous headaches for the Highway Department, which responds at all hours to hazards, and the Tree Advisory Board which is in charge of advising on village tree management. Over the past 5 years for example, of the 21 Callery Pears that lined Main St, two have completely split or toppled and a half dozen more have suffered major storm damage that required emergency removal from structures and streets/sidewalks and left behind weakened and disfigured trees. In addition, though cultivated Callery pears are bred to produce sterile fruits, in Cold Spring trees from the street and from local backyards have cross-pollinated and now hybrid forms of the tree with viable seeds and large thorns have taken over the northern end of the former Marathon Battery Plant on Kemble Avenue a few blocks away. It will likely only be a matter of time before next generations of these trees populate the margins of Foundry Dock Park and Foundry Marsh, with possible negative ecological consequences for native habitats. This invasive spread is common in many parts of the country where trees can be seen colonizing forest margins, marshes, roadsides, and other undisturbed land. With these and other problems in mind, the Tree Advisory Board hopes that some Callery pear street trees can in future years be transformed, through grafting, into less problematic trees. This April’s grafting experiment represents a testing stage for this idea. The Board has also begun a program to gradually replace Callery pear street trees, starting with those that have sustained structural damage, with a diverse variety of what hopefully will be more suitable and loveable species. Mayor Kathleen Foley cut the Arbor Day ribbon last Friday at a ceremony held around just such a tree. This new disease-resistant American Elm “New Harmony,” planted on village property near the Methodist Church on Main Street, will eventually replace it’s storm-damaged Callery pear neighbor. While suddenly cutting down all the Callery pears street trees is not a tenable or desirable solution to Callery pear issues in Cold Spring, slow diversification through new plantings, gradual removal of the most damaged trees, and–quite possibly–grafting, will help in the complicated equation of replacing the financial and environmental costs of one tree with the (hopeful, but far from guaranteed) benefits of others. The story of the Callery pear, a tree once deemed an excellent choice for urban settings, reminds us of the difficulty of such calculus. If you'd like to donate a tree to be planted on public property near your business or residence please contact the village clerk (845) 265-3611 or email the Tree Advisory Board at [email protected]. |
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The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. |