|
Tuesday was like Christmas morning on my street: after nearly three years, the new boulevard trees were finally planted.
Sadly, the tree directly in front of my house was not replaced. I was faked out: the workers initially delivered a tree and then took it away and, let me tell you, that was a bit of an emotional roller-coaster.
But you know what? We’re going to focus on the positives, here. I still have one lonely elm out front (hang in there, girl!) and a brand-new baby oak tree went up between me and my next-door neighbour, which is still visible from my front window. Oak trees are among my favourites, owing to their iconic leaf shape and the fact that there’s nothing cuter than an acorn. A nut wearing a little hat? Come on.
Advertisement
It’s a welcome relief to have trees in these spaces again.
As diseased elm trees fall, the landscape of Winnipeg’s older neighbourhoods, such as Wolseley, are changing. (Mike Sudoma / Winnipeg Free Press files)
We lost four of our boulevard elms at once in October 2020, an experience I wrote about at the time. There was a lot of symmetry between the loss of these neighbourhood giants and the pandemic; I was feeling a lot of anticipatory grief — grief for a loss yet to happen — for these trees: the ones obviously marked for death with a blotch of spray paint, yes, but also the ones that were still healthy. For now.
I’ve grown quite attached to the elms in my old neighbourhood. I walk past my elementary school every morning and I see the same elms I would have seen from my classroom windows 30-plus years ago. That’s a special, singular thing.
I often think of a quote by Mike Allen, the former city forester who developed the city’s pioneering Dutch Elm Disease Management Program, in an August 1989 article in the Free Press. Winnipeg was in the throes of a DED epidemic at the time, and he was taking calls from bereft residents.
“I’ve had people crying over the phone,” he said. “They say, ‘Somebody put a red mark on my tree. I’ve known that tree for 40 years.’ It’s a personal relationship they have with that tree and when it’s gone; it’s almost like a death in the family.”
Allen was one of the experts I interviewed for this June 2019 feature, which sought to answer a question that had been rattling around in my brain for some time: our elm canopy is Winnipeg’s crown jewel, but was it also the city’s biggest urban planning mistake?
It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. Planting a large monoculture of a species (in this case, American elm) that could be devastated by a disease seems like a mistake; replacing that large monoculture with another large monoculture (this time, ash), only for it to be felled by a different pest seems like another one.
But as I learned through the work on the feature, hindsight is hindsight, and the people who planted our elm canopy were trying to make this city beautiful with a safe, hardy, plentiful tree. (Plus, a century of use isn’t a bad return on investment.)
I unabashedly reshare this piece as often as I can, because the history of Winnipeg’s elm canopy is fascinating — but so is its future. The beautiful cathedral arches created by uniformly spaced boulevard elms are this city’s past. Diversity will be its future.
The future has been planted on my boulevard, which is now home to elm, yes, but also oak and maple and hackberry.
Good luck, little oak tree. I look forward to getting to know you. I hope you live a long, long time.
|
