Loss, Clinging, Regeneration: Tree Care, the Life Cycle, and Art

Over the weekend the Oregonian online had a very interesting piece, part of a series it appears, on Oak trees in the winery and vineyard ecosystem, metaphorically and literally.

"Cho Wines in Hillsboro is looking for a few good acorn hunters" features the Willamette University acorn project, and quotes Professor David Craig.

To replace some of the white oaks lost to nearly 200 years of Willamette Valley development, Lois and David Cho are participating in a partnership between Willamette University’s student-led Oregon Oaks project..."Wineries have a special opportunity to plant oaks in places that will allow large old oaks to grow, but they’ll have a few decades of small, not very impressive trees....it will take planning on the scale of decades, like is done with the management of old vines," Craig said....Craig also stresses the importance of advocating for the trees that are still standing. "Planting acorns to promote more Oregon white oak is absolutely necessary, but the higher priority is protecting the very large, very complicated, and very old Oregon oak trees which provide unique structures for biodiversity," Craig said.

The context was rural and sub-urban agriculture and the open space of vineyard land.

Here, urban Oaks in more constrained contexts have been in the news lately.

A killer tree in happier times (2013)

Salem Reporter had a series of articles on a tree whose falling branch killed a person recently.

• "Tree branch falls on food truck in Grant area, injuring three"
• "Salem man remains in intensive care after being struck by tree branch"
• "Salem man dies after being struck by tree branch"
  

Late last month the paper had a front page brief on a new pest, which may impact both rural and urban Oaks.

September 30th

And there's an ongoing problem at the IOOF Pioneer Cemetery with trees, especially Oaks. This summer another big tree failure toppled tombstones.

Tree damage (early July)

While a tree does not intend damage the way a vandal does, the total damage to cemetery monuments in the last few years from trees is unquestionably much greater than any damage from vandalism over the same interval. A few notes here:

• An episode in August 2020
  
• Another in December 2020
• Multiple problems from the ice storm in February 2021

Here's more from January 2022.

January 2022

The culprit tree in January 2022

From that August 2020 date, that's at least five episodes with significant impact to cemetery monuments in the last four years.

While opponents of a path connection through the cemetery continue to get sidetracked in highlighting the possibility of human vandalism, at this moment the much greater threat to the cemetery and its monuments is trees.

We do not have a good systems approach to Oaks and our urban situation. Concern for them tends to use them instrumentally or employ a kind of idolatry. People try to use them as a poison pill or other way to delay or obstruct housing. We have seen this on the apartments at Doaks Ferry and Orchard Heights, and on the Meyer Farm, for example. On this view big, old trees are some absolute thing to be preserved at all cost.

This old oak in Sleepy Hollow (pictured in 2011)
was cut down in 2015

One great old tree in Sleepy Hollow was cut down in 2015, which generated outrage, but later investigation by an independent arborist confirmed the City's assessment that the tree was not healthy and had too much decay. It was a reasonable decision after all.

Collectively we don't allocate sufficient resources to caring for older trees, especially pruning out decay to minimize falling branches and trees. At least some of the falling limbs and tree failure are preventable with better tree care.

We are also still developing zoning, incentives, and cultural acceptance to stack housing vertically as a way to preserve existing trees instead of spreading horizontally and cutting trees.

On Gaiety Hill, High and Oak (streetview)

Always context, right tree, right place. I think often of the tree on High Street at the crest of Gaiety Hill. It's busting through the retaining wall. What will we do when it fails, as it seems it must some time.

Too often there's not a realistic conversation and analysis about what living in a city with trees really means, and what values we need to balance when we consider the loss of trees, and what kinds of investment in arborist care we need to make for old trees we want to keep around. At the same time, trees are finite, their decay an important part of the total life cycle, and we should have better ways to celebrate large trees and their remnant parts at the end of their lives. Nurse logs are important and a noble end! We can't preserve everything in the urban context, and we should be more intentional about quality over quantity.

The Gaiety Hollow National Register Nomination

Just down the hill, a decade ago a large Oak central to the concept of "the West Allee" in the home garden at Lord & Schryver's Gaiety Hollow had to be taken down. They managed the loss with a replacement tree, looking to duplicate the basic effect in a few generations. The new tree will be puny for a while, not to scale, but regeneration is nonetheless being absorbed into the whole.

Artist Paul Sutinen expressed loss in a different way, more by absence. "In the Shadow of the Elm" on the South Park Blocks in Portland he used granite pavers to mimic the shadow of a lost tree.

And at the Portland Convention Center, with "Host Analog" Buster Simpson installed an old growth Douglas Fir log as a nurse log and sculpture, focusing on regeneration.

Though it does not commemorate a lost tree, at least one of the new pieces at our new Public Works building features the Oak groves at Bush Park.

"Unified Realm #2" by Clair Burbridge
Oaks at Bush Park - via IG and here

It will be interesting to hear how it is received, and if its representation is a little too distant, too abstract (a little like the "Call Number Cascade" at the Library, which still seems too busy and abtract).

Some of our commissions and efforts for public art that are now expressed in abstract or difficult-to-parse creations, art from the gallery and museum rather than art for the public, might be better directed to commemorating old trees whose lives have come to an end. If we want our public art to be embraced, combining it with our love of trees might be something to think about more often.

Toppled Oak in future Fairview Park area (July)