Middletown Tree Uproar

November 27th, 2012

   Did you hear about the latest spat from Middletown?

A former Middletown tree. (By Chris Knight, www.pennlive.com)

   A dozen trees got chainsawed along South Union Street last week, and the president of the local weekly newspaper got arrested for chaining herself to a tree in an effort to save it.   Tempers flared on both sides (not too surprising given today’s general interpersonal trend), but the dispute highlighted just how earnestly some people take trees. (Read more about it here.) 

  The trees came down after the Dauphin County borough’s Shade Tree Commission deemed them a safety hazard. That followed a lawsuit in which Middletown was named as a co-defendant in a case where someone tripped on a sidewalk elevated by tree roots.

   Lawsuits seem to be the driving force behind so many of our actions, decisions and policies these days, don’t they?

   But some businesses also didn’t like the fact that the trees (mostly flowering pears, I believe) had grown big enough to obscure signs and buildings.

   Borough officials say they plan to replace the trees with more suitable species – ones that ideally won’t push up sidewalks any time soon and ones that aren’t as dense and obscuring.

   That’s not a bad idea… assuming it happens.

   Middletown is cash-strapped worse than most municipalities, so it’ll likely take grants and/or donations to cover new-tree costs.

   I wish the planners good luck because no matter what they do, people are going to be ticked.

   On the one hand, some people really dislike trees. They believe no tree is a good tree. Read the Pennlive.com comments on the tree removal and you’ll find remarks about how trees belong in forests, not towns.

   Some people see trees only as liabilities. They see them as needless objects that fall over onto our power lines or as little more than dirty nuisances that drop leaves and fruits onto our walks. In other words, nature’s trash.

   Still others who view the world primarily through dollared lenses object to governments spending even a dime of tax money on trees or their maintenance.

   Even if you get to the middle ground of, “OK, let’s consider street trees,” then you get into disagreements over what to plant where.

   Hardly anybody agrees on that.

   I run into people who specifically prefer fruit-producing trees because of their value to wildlife.

   But I also run into people who despise fruit-producers because they’re “messy,” i.e. the anonymous Harrisburger who once proudly emailed me that she had Round-upped to death a city-owned Cornelian cherry dogwood (Cornus mas) that was messing up her sidewalk with dropping berries.

   The truth is that all trees have pros and cons. And those vary depending on site, the goals behind the planting and personal preference.

   I can see the Shade Tree Commission’s decision on pears. They crack apart easily in storms, and their swelling roots and suckering can wreak havoc on sidewalks.

   Planting more suitable trees is actually a good idea, although in this case it would’ve been helpful for borough officials to communicate the intentions ahead of time, give residents a chance to air their views and spell out a concrete replacement plan.

   Losing a dozen key trees like that in one sudden, fell swoop can be a bit of a shock. It certainly makes things look bare in a hurry.

   Street trees do much for any downtown, which explains why major cities such as New York and Philadelphia invest so much in trees.

   Aesthetics is only part of it.

   Trees filter air pollution, lock up carbon, produce oxygen and give shade to mitigate the extra heat that downtowns trap from all of the asphalt and concrete. That, in turn, can reduce air-conditioning costs (measurable) and produce healthier urban living conditions (harder to measure and widely discounted by tree-haters).

   Real-estate studies show that tree-rich environments also increase property values.

   So here’s hoping Middletowners can get beyond the yelling and pull together for a newly treed South Union Street… maybe with some nice Japanese tree lilacs or stewartias or columnar hornbeams or American smoketrees…