GREEN LAWN
To replace some of the state’s oldest trees, which are near the end of their life cycle, the cemetery has set aside an annual budget of $15,000 to plant 150 to 200 native trees each year. Rogers has just wrapped up the emergency canopy restoration project’s third spring planting season.
Across the cemetery grounds, 60 to 70 percent of the original oaks and maples are beginning to succumb to hundreds of years of insects, disease, lightning strikes and the loss of branches and limbs to extreme weather. When they were just acorns and saplings, Ohio was not yet a state.
“At some point, the tree is so old and has so many accumulated ills that it just dies or falls over,” said Rogers, who volunteers at the cemetery at least five days a week. “There’s nothing coming up behind to replace them.”
Many of Green Lawn’s guests visit the space to study the historical grave markers, jog, picnic or walk their dogs. The nonprofit association that operates the grounds provides free self-guided and fullservice historic tours. And the cemetery is often used as a teaching tool and urban arboretum for forestry educators.
“If you don’t plan for the future by back-planting some new stuff … all of a sudden, that leafy green canopy goes away,” said Kathy Smith, director of Ohio State University’s Forestry Extension. “In an urban setting, you’re almost trying to re-create what happens in the woods, and that has to be up to the human side.”
Green Lawn also is a popular destination for animals that also stand to benefit from the tree-replenishment effort. For example, during the first weeks of May and September, the site is a green oasis for migratory songbirds flying to and from Canada’s boreal forests.
“It takes a lot of food and endurance to make the flight. Green Lawn is like a roadside rest stop on an avian highway,” said Jim McCormac, a retired Ohio Department of Natural Resources biologist and former member of the Green Lawn Cemetery board. “These places take on more and more weight and significance all the time as we reduce habitat at a remarkable clip.”
Rogers, who first visited Green Lawn as a bird-watcher, keeps birds in mind as he maps and plants the area’s newest generation of trees. Using a palette of about 30 core species, Rogers spreads out trees of differing height, flowering season and aesthetics across the grounds.
“My process is 70 percent science and 30 percent art,” Rogers said.
He placed witch hazel, which has medicinal properties, near the tomb of Lincoln Goodale, the city’s first doctor. Soon, Rogers will take seeds from trees at Frederick Douglass’ gravesite at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, and plant them at Green Lawn near the headstone of local civil-rights legend the Rev. James Poindexter’s headstone.
“That’s what we want to see our communities do: periodically do these plantings so you have all-different-age trees phased in over time,” said Lisa Bowers, ODNR’s urban forester for central Ohio.
Diligent planting also helps protect urban trees from invasive plants, pests and disease, Bowers said.
The canopy-restoration project kicked off three years ago when a team measured, identified and mapped the 4,343 trees in the cemetery. By this year’s end, Rogers hopes to bring that count up to 4,600 trees.
And by the end of the seven-year effort, the hope is to extend the life of the cemetery’s mixed oak forest by another 200 years.
Today, Green Lawn has about 11 trees per acre — a far cry from the site’s arboreal peak around 1880, when about 15 trees graced each acre.
“That’s what we want to get back to,” Rogers said.