Beetle, arbourists fell Welland’s oldest ash tree
250-year-old tree lifted in sections by crane over Maple Avenue home
The continuing invasion of the emerald ash borer has claimed its oldest, and largest, victim in Welland.
Last Thursday a crew of arbourists, led by former city forestry foreman Aurelio Magazzeni, closed a portion of Queen Street at the intersection of Maple Avenue to remove what the forestry expert believed to be the city’s largest and oldest ash tree.
With 31 years of tending the city’s trees, he would know. As city foreman, he witnessed the start of the invasive species’ destructive path through the city’s ash population, beginning on Trelawn Parkway in 2009. From there, it moved through the city, to 20 per cent of Welland’s tree canopy.
By the time Magazzeni retired
from the city last year, thousands of trees, roughly 80 per cent of the city’s ash trees, had been removed due to infestations of the insect that kills the trees, turning them into safety risks, prone to collapse.
“They’re beautiful trees,” said Magazzeni, explaining that on city boulevards alone ash trees numbered more than 2,800 before the ash borer moved in.
The latest victim, however, was the roughly 250-year-old ash that towered 30 metres above one of Welland’s oldest neighbourhoods. It shaded at least four backyards and dominated the skyline from where it stood behind a Maple Avenue home.
“It’s not something I wanted to do,” said Randall Forder, who, with his wife Barbara, has lived at at the home for 27 years.
With the tree’s upper reaches dying due to the insect infestation, it had become a safety risk, with the city ordering its removal at a cost of thousands of dollars to the homeowner.
Forder said he’s going to miss the shade but at least he can now rest easy knowing the mammoth tree won’t come toppling down.
“The shade is gone, but the problem is gone, too,” he said, explaining the tree is one of many in the area being lost to the borer.
Magazzeni said that tree had to be removed because the upper nine metres was completely dead.
“It’s a huge risk,” he said, noting the job had particular significance for him.
In the late 1980s he owned the home now occupied by the Forders. He remembers summer barbecues and parties underneath the shade provided by its expansive canopy.
“I remember that tree being healthy,” he said, adding, “It provided shade for at least four backyards.”
The removal turned into a bit of a spectator event as the neighbourhood turned out to take in the removal. With a crew of seven drawn from Sure Wood Tree Care, and climbers Keith Bessey and Greg Miller, area residents came to watch as a 90-tonne crane was brought in to lift portions of the tree over the house and onto the road. The two climbers removed the first dead segment before removing shorter lengths of the wider base. Just a 1.8-metre length of the two-metre-wide trunk weighed in at
2,700 kilograms.
“It’s sad to see it go. It’s a part of history,” said neighbour Jane Merzanis, whose own property fell in the shadow of the tree. She came out to watch as the removal transformed the skyline of the neighbourhood.
“It gave us all a canopy,” she said, wondering where the many squirrels who made their homes in the tree would end up.