Fence-eating tree is on our conscience . . .
After last week’s column, city cuts down intriguing trunk along Avoca Avenue
Donald Trunk has been chopped instead of fired, and we’re not feeling so hot about leaking the information that brought him down.
Our Jan. 28 column, about a tree that was growing ever so slowly around a fence rail on Avoca Ave., included a photo that made it look like the trunk was putting the bite on the rail.
We sent the photo to Jason Doyle, who is Toronto’s director of urban forestry, and asked him if it was a safety issue.
We thought he might say it was OK to leave it for now; the rail was surrounded by no more than a quarter of the trunk.
But Doyle, who knows his business, identified it as a hazard and said it needed to come down.
He wasn’t fooling. The reader who first told us about it sent us a photo on Friday of a stump, all that remains of a tree that had defied the conventional order.
The reader wrote a caption for the photo: “Donald Trunk, now at rest.”
The photo that ran with the first column intrigued our readers, many of whom sent us notes pleading that it be spared. Hanoch (Hank) Bordan, who many years ago was a member of the Star’s superbly talented rewrite team, asked: “Why can’t they move the fence?”
“Why not cut the top railing on either side?” Lorne Lemick asked. “It would allow that piece to just move forward as the tree grows.”
Ken Brown sent us old photos revealing a little-known fact: The iron fence rail is a remnant of a bridge that spanned the Avoca Vale ravine before a bridge was built just to the north on St. Clair Ave. in the 1920s.
“There was a bridge that ran from the end of Pleasant Blvd. (which is now neither a boulevard nor pleasant) that joined St. Clair on the east side of the vale,” Brown said.
Bernd Mueller wrote that “it looks like the metal fence rail is acting like a conical saw blade, but in fact the tree is growing around the fence and incorporating it into its own structure.
“The fence is not aggressively moving into the tree, the tree is growing through the fence. A fusion of fence and tree.
“The tree looks healthy because it is not being lacerated and severed. It’s entertaining to observe how living things react to resistance and encountered obstructions. “Keep an eye on it, just for fun.” We’d love to be keeping an eye on it, but we ran our mouth when we could have shut up. And that makes us SAD! What’s broken in your neighbourhood? Wherever you are in Greater Toronto, we want to know. Send an email to jlakey@thestar.ca . Report problems and follow us on Twitter @TOStarFixer.