The Town Inventory

Phil Hendricks called in July. He said four words: "They approved the money."

The selectmen had approved a budget of eighteen thousand dollars for a town-wide street tree inventory — every tree in the public right-of-way, every tree on town property, every tree in the parks and along the sidewalks and on the greens, assessed, cataloged, mapped, and entered into a database that would allow the tree warden to manage the urban forest systematically rather than reactively, responding to problems before the problems became emergencies, identifying the co-dominant stems before the ice storms split them, identifying the decay before the storms dropped the trunks on houses, identifying the ash trees before the emerald ash borer arrived.

The money had come because of the ice storm. Wren knew this. Dale knew this. Phil knew this. The selectmen had watched the ice storm damage — the trees on the roads, the trees on the houses, the trees on the power lines, the cleanup costs, the liability, the newspaper photographs of crushed porches and blocked roads — and the selectmen had done the math that all government officials eventually did when the cost of inaction exceeded the cost of action, and the math had come out in favor of the inventory, and Phil had gotten his eighteen thousand dollars, which was not enough but was a beginning.

Wren took the contract. She would do the field work herself, walking every street in Litchfield, assessing every public tree, recording the data on a tablet with GIS software that mapped each tree's location and linked the location to the assessment data — species, diameter, height, condition, structure, risk rating, recommended action. The work would take the summer. She would do it in the mornings, before the climbing jobs started, walking the streets at six-thirty when the light was clear and the town was quiet and the trees were legible in the early morning.

She started on the green. The Litchfield green was the center of the town and the center of the tree canopy — the sugar maples and the oaks and the Yoshino cherry she had pruned and the lindens and the London planes that shaded the sidewalks and the benches and the war memorial. She walked the perimeter of the green with the tablet, stopping at each tree, entering the data.

Tree number one: Sugar maple. Acer saccharum. DBH: 22 inches. Height: 55 feet. Condition: good. Structure: co-dominant stem at 14 feet with included bark at the union. Risk rating: moderate. Recommendation: structural pruning — subordination of the secondary leader to reduce risk of failure at the union.

Tree number two: Sugar maple. Acer saccharum. DBH: 19 inches. Height: 50 feet. Condition: fair. Structure: single leader, good scaffold branching. Crown: thinning in the upper canopy, possible early decline. Root zone: sidewalk within 4 feet of trunk, root compression likely, pavement heaving at the base of the tree. Risk rating: low. Recommendation: monitor, crown cleaning, root zone assessment.

Tree number three: Yoshino cherry. Prunus x yedoensis. The cherry she had pruned. DBH: 16 inches. Height: 30 feet. Condition: good. Structure: spreading crown, well-maintained, previous pruning cuts healing cleanly. Risk rating: low. Recommendation: continued biennial pruning.

She moved to South Street. The sugar maples on South Street were the Garden Club trees, the ones planted a hundred years ago, the ones that made the street a postcard, the ones that arched over the road and turned gold and red in October and drew the tourists and the photographers. She assessed them one by one.

The pattern was immediate. Of the twenty-four sugar maples on South Street, fourteen had co-dominant stems. Fourteen out of twenty-four — fifty-eight percent — had the structural deficiency that the ice storm had exploited, the two leaders growing equally, the bark between them included, the union weak, the failure predictable. Six of the fourteen had already been damaged — the ice storm had split them, and the damaged stems had been removed by the town crew, leaving the remaining stems as single-leader trees with large wounds. Eight of the fourteen were intact — the co-dominant stems still present, still growing, still accumulating the included bark that would fail in the next ice storm or the one after that.

She noted each one. She entered the data. She photographed the unions with the tablet's camera, the photographs showing the crease of included bark at each co-dominant junction, the bark fold visible as a dark line between the two stems, the line that was not a union but was a separation, the two stems growing apart rather than together, the bark between them preventing the wood from fusing, the seam that would open under load.

She moved to North Street. She assessed the lindens — Tilia americana, the American linden, ten trees planted in the 1950s as street trees, the trees now seventy years old and showing the effects of seven decades of urban stress. The root zones were compressed by sidewalks and driveways. The trunks were scarred by lawnmower wounds at the base — repeated impacts from the homeowners' mowers hitting the bark, the wounds reopening each week during the growing season, the bark peeling, the cambium damaged, the decay entering through the wounds, the decay slowly consuming the base of the trunks that the mowers had wounded, the trees being killed at the base by the maintenance of the lawn.

She photographed the mower wounds. The wounds were consistent — a band of damaged bark at the base of the trunk, on the side facing the lawn, the band extending around thirty to sixty percent of the trunk's circumference, the bark missing, the wood beneath exposed and darkened, the decay visible as soft, brown wood where the bark should have been. Seven of the ten lindens had mower wounds. Three of the seven had decay that extended into the structural wood of the lower trunk, the decay compromising the trunk's ability to support the crown, the trees standing on trunks that were being hollowed from the outside by the repeated injury of the machines that mowed the grass around them.

She added to the notes: Recommend mulch rings — three-foot radius minimum — around all street trees on North Street to prevent mower contact with trunk. Cost: minimal. Benefit: elimination of the primary cause of basal decay in the linden population.

The work continued through July and into August. She walked every street. She assessed every tree. The database grew — three hundred and twelve trees in the public right-of-way, each one numbered, each one mapped, each one assessed, the data accumulating the way the rings accumulated in the trees, one entry at a time, the inventory building toward a complete picture of the town's urban forest.

The picture was not good. Of the three hundred and twelve trees, sixty-one — nearly twenty percent — had structural defects that elevated the risk of failure. Co-dominant stems, included bark, dead branches larger than four inches in diameter, basal decay, root damage from construction, lean from root loss, the catalog of defects long and varied, each defect a vulnerability, each vulnerability a potential failure, each potential failure a potential emergency — a tree on a road, a tree on a house, a tree on a person.

Forty-three trees — fourteen percent — had active health issues. Dutch elm disease in the remaining elms, of which there were eleven, and nine of the eleven were showing symptoms. Anthracnose in the sycamores. Bacterial leaf scorch in the red oaks. Tar spot in the Norway maples, which was cosmetic but alarmed the homeowners who called Phil every September asking why the maple leaves had black spots. And the emerald ash borer, which had not yet been confirmed in Litchfield but had been confirmed in Waterbury and New Haven and was moving north at the rate of fifteen miles per year and would arrive in Litchfield within two years.

The ash trees. Wren counted them. Twenty-seven white ash trees in the public right-of-way. Twenty-seven Fraxinus americana, ranging in size from ten inches to thirty-two inches in diameter, the trees standing along the streets and in the parks and on the greens, the trees healthy, the trees showing no symptoms, the trees living on the borrowed time that every ash tree in the eastern United States was living on, the time between the present and the arrival of the beetle, the time that was measured in years now, not decades, the beetle approaching, the beetle inevitable.

She stood on West Street and looked at a row of white ash trees — five of them, planted forty years ago, the trunks twenty inches in diameter, the canopies full and green, the trees healthy and productive and beautiful, the trees doing everything a street tree should do, providing shade and beauty and oxygen and carbon storage and stormwater interception and property value and the psychological benefits that studies showed trees provided to the people who lived near them, the stress reduction and the improved mental health and the increased social cohesion that came from trees on a street, the trees providing all of this and the beetles were coming and the trees would die.

She entered the data for each ash. She added a note to each entry: Pre-EAB baseline. No symptoms. Monitor for D-shaped exit holes, bark splitting, epicormic sprouting, woodpecker activity. When EAB arrives: treatment with emamectin benzoate injection or removal. Decision point: within 2 years of confirmed EAB detection in Litchfield.

The decision would be the town's. The selectmen would have to decide — treat or remove. The treatment was expensive — two hundred dollars per tree, repeated every two years, indefinitely, the trees needing treatment for as long as the beetle was in the environment, which was forever, because the beetle was established and would not be eradicated, the beetle a permanent addition to the North American fauna, the way the Dutch elm disease fungus was a permanent addition, the way the woolly adelgid was a permanent addition, the invaders here to stay, the treatments ongoing, the costs perpetual.

Twenty-seven ash trees at two hundred dollars per tree every two years was twenty-seven hundred dollars per year. Not much, in a town budget. But the selectmen would look at the number and would ask if the money was worth it and the answer depended on how you valued a tree, and the valuation of a tree was the thing that no one agreed on, the arborists saying the tree was worth its replacement cost plus the value of its ecosystem services plus the aesthetic value plus the historical value plus the emotional value, the total running to tens of thousands of dollars per tree, and the selectmen saying the tree was worth whatever it cost to cut it down, the stump grinding included.

Wren finished the inventory in the third week of August. Three hundred and twelve trees. Forty-seven species. One database. She wrote the report in the evenings at the kitchen table, the report a document that translated the data into recommendations, the numbers into actions, the assessment into a plan.

The plan had four tiers. Tier one: immediate action — thirteen trees that were high-risk hazards, trees with structural defects or decay that could result in failure at any time, trees that should be removed or pruned within sixty days. Tier two: short-term action — forty-eight trees that needed structural pruning, crown cleaning, or monitoring within twelve months. Tier three: preventive action — the twenty-seven ash trees, the treatment protocol, the pre-emptive response to the approaching beetle. Tier four: ongoing maintenance — the remaining two hundred and twenty-four trees, the pruning cycles, the mulching, the monitoring, the sustained care that an urban forest required to remain healthy and safe.

She delivered the report to Phil on a Friday afternoon in September. They sat in Phil's office in the town hall, a small room with a metal desk and a filing cabinet and a window that looked out on the green and the cherry tree that Wren had pruned, the cherry visible from the desk, the tree in its early fall color, the leaves turning bronze, the tree healthy and well-maintained, the tree an example of what the rest of the town's trees could be if the inventory's recommendations were followed.

Phil read the report. He read it slowly, the way he did everything — carefully, completely, the pages turning at the pace of a man who understood that the words on the pages represented trees and the trees represented lives and the lives represented the town's identity, the town's history, the town's future.

"Twenty percent with structural defects," he said.

"It's consistent with the national average for un-managed urban tree populations. The trees have not been assessed systematically before. The defects have been accumulating uncorrected. The co-dominant stems have been growing for decades without structural pruning. The mower wounds have been inflicted weekly for years without mulch rings. The deadwood has been building without crown cleaning. The result is a population of trees that looks healthy from the road and has significant hidden risks."

"How much to implement the recommendations?"

"Tier one — the immediate hazards — about forty thousand. That's mostly removals. Tier two — the structural pruning — about twenty-five thousand over twelve months. Tier three — the ash treatment — twenty-seven hundred per year, ongoing. Tier four — the maintenance program — about fifteen thousand per year, ongoing."

Phil looked at the numbers. The numbers were not large by municipal standards — the town's road paving budget was three hundred thousand per year, the police budget was two million, the school budget was eighteen million. The tree budget — the total of all four tiers — was about eighty-three thousand in the first year and forty-three thousand per year thereafter. Less than the cost of one paving project. Less than one police cruiser. Less than the liability from one tree falling on one person.

"I'll take it to the selectmen," Phil said.

"The ice storm damage cost the town ninety thousand dollars in cleanup and repairs," Wren said. "The inventory and the recommended work would have prevented most of that damage. The thirteen high-risk trees I've identified include four of the trees that failed in the ice storm. If those trees had been removed or pruned before the storm, the cleanup cost would have been fifty thousand dollars lower."

"You're saying the inventory pays for itself."

"I'm saying the inventory is cheaper than the damage. The trees are going to fail. The ice storms are going to come. The question is whether the failures are managed or unmanaged. Managed failure is a pruning cut. Unmanaged failure is a tree on a house."

Phil closed the report. He put it on his desk. He looked out the window at the green and the cherry tree and the sugar maples and the oaks, the trees that were his responsibility, the trees that the town had elected him to care for, the trees that the selectmen funded or did not fund, the trees that stood or fell, the trees that were the town's identity and the town's liability and the town's history and the town's future.

"Thank you, Wren," he said.

"Thank you for getting the money."

She drove home. The September light was golden on the hills, the first color in the maples, the red beginning, the growing season ending, the trees preparing for dormancy, the rings for 2028 nearly complete, the records for the year almost sealed. Three hundred and twelve trees in Litchfield had been assessed for the first time. Three hundred and twelve trees had been seen — truly seen, the structure examined, the condition evaluated, the risk rated, the trees no longer invisible, the trees no longer background, the trees brought into the foreground by the inventory, the trees made visible by the act of looking.

Wren had looked. She had walked every street and looked at every tree and recorded what she saw. The recording was the act that mattered — not the walking, not the looking, but the recording, the data entered into the database, the assessment made permanent, the tree's condition captured at this moment in time, the way a ring captured the tree's growth at a moment in time, the inventory a human ring, a record of the human attention given to the trees in this year, in this town, by this arborist.

The trees did not know they had been assessed. The trees did not know they were in a database. The trees did not know that a woman had walked past them with a tablet and had looked at their trunks and their crowns and their root zones and had entered numbers that described their condition and their risk and their future. The trees grew. The trees added cells. The trees did what they did. The knowing was Wren's part. The recording was Wren's part. The meaning was Wren's part.

She drove home through the trees, through the canopy that was beginning to thin, through the landscape that she had measured and mapped and recorded, the landscape that was now in two places — on the hillsides where the trees stood and in the database where the data lived, the physical and the digital, the tree and the record, the organism and the information, the two versions of the same thing, the tree itself and the description of the tree, the thing and the word for the thing, the living forest and the catalog of the living forest, both necessary, both incomplete, each needing the other to be fully understood.