St. Paul marks bittersweet accomplishment in cutting down last of the ash trees

Sometime in June, a hard-working group of people at St. Paul Parks and Recreation spread a bunch of pizzas on office tables and celebrated a victory. After 15 years of thankless work, they’d finally cut down the city’s public ash trees, all 26,000 of them.

It is a bittersweet accomplishment, as felling the last tree doesn’t mark the victory of the city over the ash borer, but the end of the defeat. In the end, the small green insect ate nearly all of the city’s ash trees for lunch. Apart from some expensive exceptions, there was nothing our collective society could do about it. Like every Upper Midwestern city, St. Paul was forced into a “scorched earth” solution: cut ’em all down.

Looking back, I imagine someone at City Hall gulping in 2008 when, realizing the meaning of the emerald ash borer memo, contemplated the budget and staff implications of eliminating one-fifth of the urban canopy. Millions of dollars and years of staff time went into the project, including a unique bond-funded effort. And for what? Miles of stumps along the boulevard, and entire neighborhoods with smaller, less aesthetic and effective trees.

The process was something that, as city forestry supervisor Rachel Jongeward explained, came to be a mundane line item known as structured removal. 

“Structured removal is basically a term we came up with to describe the removal of ash trees from city streets, where you might have a monoculture of ash,” said Jongeward. “We would go in and remove the ash trees from those blocks, and then stump grinding and tree planting in those areas was expedited due to the overall loss.”

When tree cutting signs go up, or the colored stripes circle a row of trunks, there’s a melancholic realization for neighbors who have long taken long boughs for granted. It’s also a flashback to a previous generation, when the Dutch Elm Disease claimed all the city’s glorious elms, eradicating what for many people amounted to a member of the family or an extension of the porch.

Over the years of the ash removal program, Jongeward admitted that the city became more flexible about their policies. It began to deploy expensive ash borer prevention treatments on a case-by-case basis, to prolong lives of some ashes for logistical reasons. In some cases, the city also permitted property owners to treat trees on their own to preserve their mature urban forests.   

Then there’s the actual labor involved. A diseased mature ash represents hours of work for a crew, and slowly cutting it down is like disassembling a dangerous puzzle. Staff then grinds large stumps, eventually replanting the land with delicate nursery replacements. Those 26,000 trees equated to a lifetime of rather Sisyphean labor. 

I asked Rachel Jongeward if she was going to miss the removal years and was surprised when she admitted to a pleasing complexity to the work.

“With removals of trees, it can get really technical,” she said. “Sometimes planning how you’re going to do something, it takes a little bit more brain power and thinking through the process. Pruning can be sometimes monotonous, but it doesn’t discount the fact that it is essential to maintaining a healthy urban forest.”

I imagined there would be relief for the staff to shift from a depressing routine of serving as an ash tree “grim reaper” to something new and different, incubating and cultivating and planting and nursing new life to health. The vibe shift must be nice, to be taking care of something young instead of putting sick beings out of their misery. For the foresters, rather, the focus has remained on on avoiding repeating the same monoculture mistakes.  

“The biggest thing we learned from this is that diversifying from one species — elm in very large numbers — to 3-4 species isn’t diverse enough for an insect pest like this,” explained Jongeward. “It will kill off a third of the forest pretty readily. We are planting far more species now, increasing diversity down to the city block.”

If you happen across a newly planted St. Paul boulevard these days, you’re likely to find species you may not have encountered before: hackberrys, Kentucky coffee trees, or new strains of disease-resistant elms. Under power lines, where heights are limited, the most likely inhabitants are crabapples, serviceberry bushes or Japanese tree lilacs. 

Still, nature can find a way. Even bolstered by the strength of diversity, foresters remain mindful of new pests or aggressive fungi and stay up to date on Minnesota Department of Natural Resources reports. For example, sustained drought had been stressing out many of the city’s street trees — especially the young — making them more susceptible to damage from bugs like the two-line chestnut borer. 

(This year, on the other hand, rain has not been a problem. It’s welcome relief for foresters and gardeners alike.)

For the Parks tree staff, the accomplishment of overcoming an “environmental crisis” is a moment of quiet celebration. One silver lining about the process taking so long is that, on some of the first blocks to be replanted back in 2009, the replacement trees look almost fully grown.

St. Paul Parks Director Andy Rodriquez is excited about shifting some city budget priorities from ash removal to pruning and giving care to the city’s urban canopy. He’s asked for a $500,000 budget boost for pruning, improving street safety and tree health at the same time. While not everyone is happy when a limb is lopped off, at least the trees are still alive.

But with urban foresters, there’s no rest for the chainsaw. At least in Minnesota, staff can quickly move into damage-control mode. The big windstorm that swept through the metro a few weeks ago knocked out hundreds of city trees, especially along the park-like neighborhoods in the north of the city. City crews had to drop their cultivation tanks and return to the messy business of cutting down doomed arbor, something that will take a few more weeks to complete.

“That was probably the worst storm in a decade, and it reinforced Rachel’s position around tree pruning,” explained Rodriguez. “Preventive measures may have lessened some of the damage, [but] they [still] cleared trees off of 56 houses in one day.”

Such is the work of the tree people, hoping to return back to the pruning, but faced with a new set of dead-tree puzzles to solve. Life of the urban forester is a process of tree-age (if you will). When it rains, it pours.

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