How to have leafy boulevards in the city
Expert shares experiences at Kitchener forestry talk
KITCHENER — It’s the vision seen in every architectural drawing of a new development: gleaming glass buildings, with wide sidewalks out front, and people strolling happily along leafy, tree-lined streets.
Peter Simon knows it’s possible: the evidence is there, in all the gorgeous shady boulevards of Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam, shaded by venerable lindens, lime trees and chestnuts.
He sees it in his own Toronto neighbourhood, where huge silver maples tower over the houses, thriving even though they grow in a small area wedged between the street and the sidewalk.
But there’s no question that achieving that vision, of tall gracious trees in an urban environment, is a very tough thing to do, Simon told an audience at Kitchener city hall Thursday.
Simon, who specializes in urban tree planning at the City of Toronto, gave the public talk as part of Kitchener’s efforts to develop an urban forest strategy.
He recalled the discouraging efforts to put in what was supposed to be a showcase for city trees along Bloor Street, where the city went to great expense putting in a sophisticated system beneath its sidewalk designed to provide rich, uncompacted soil to support the growth of large trees. The trees thrived the first two years when they were equipped with green watering bags. The third year, all 31 trees along the street died.
It turned out the architect’s design for the tree planters had trapped salty water and prevented tree roots from getting to the good soil contained in the costly cell system the city had installed.
It was a tough lesson that reinforced the challenges of growing trees in what is essentially an alien environment of concrete and stone. “It’s definitely pretty complicated,” Simon said. “It’s not easy work, trying to get a tree to grow in a city sidewalk.”
City trees grow in a middle zone between the buildings and the road, where “a kind of chaos thrives,” with gas lines and other utilities competing for space with tree roots.
The key, he says, is good coordination between all the competing interests, and making
sure the trees are planned for early on, and not just squeezed in as an afterthought once the roads and sidewalks are in.
Most important of all is that trees need access to good soil, and plenty of it — at least 30 cubic metres a tree. The reason those European cities have such leafy treed boulevards is that the trees, and the good-quality topsoil needed to support them, were there long before the pavement.
David Schmitt, who is working on Kitchener’s plan to manage its urban forest, said Kitchener is in the very early stages of developing specifications for the planting of trees in places like downtown or where there’s going to be a lot of intensification.
“People want trees in those kinds of environments,” Schmitt said. “But there’s the whole issue of competing for space.”
The city is rolling out public consultation on its forest strategy, with pop-up events all summer, a website where people can post stories about favourite trees or check out the map of the city’s tree canopy, and answer a survey about what they want the city’s forest to look like.
At least two more free talks on trees are planned, at the main branch of Kitchener public library in October and early in 2018, as well as a couple of community workshops this fall, at Forest Heights Community Centre on Sept. 23, and at Victoria Park Pavilion on Sept. 28. You can learn more about Kitchener’s urban forest strategy at www.kitchener.ca/trees