Trees are not a luxury, or small matter: Study after study has shown that neighborhoods with more trees usually have higher property values, better neighborhood interaction and lower crime rates. People with trees in their environment generally experience less stress. They are happier and better able to focus and solve problems.
In public debate, the focus usually is on the ecosystem services of trees: their ability to clean the air, filter the water, soak up stormwater and lower energy bills by shading summer heat and blocking winter winds.
The city’s urban forest was estimated to supply billions of dollars’ worth of free stormwater retention and filtration and millions of dollars in energy savings per year, according to a 2012 report by a collaboration of Forest Service and University of Washington researchers.
But the more subtle, human benefits of trees can be beyond quantification.
Especially big trees have a special effect on people. Some cultures have long known and even deliberately embraced the healthful effects of trees. In Japan, the practice of so-called “forest bathing” is well understood, with walking paths designed for the pleasure of a walk in deep woods, notes Kathleen Wolf, a research social scientist at the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington.
On research trips to Japan she noticed a “reverence, appreciation and tolerance for old, misshapen, crotchety trees,” often supported with props, aflutter with prayers on notes attached.
But in Seattle big, old trees are often in the cross hairs.
Consider the case of Seattle’s Heritage Tree No. 121, a grand, old American elm just down the street from where the Mason brothers were eating that pie.
The elm that filled a front corner of Deborah O’Neal’s lot, gracing the house she grew up in, stood more than six stories high, and its crown spread 95 feet across. Its trunk was more than 4 feet around at chest height.
But O’Neal says she got tired of the tree’s roots in the sewer line and worried about branches dropping on her fence, her car, even her neighbors’ kids.
“Everyone wants to say the tree is pretty, but I have had (sewer) backup issues because of the roots, and it is a hazardous tree. It belongs in a forest, not a city,” says O’Neal, who paid a tree service to cut it down recently.
She had petitioned the city to enroll the tree in its Heritage Tree listing for extraordinary specimens in 2007, but says she was disappointed the designation came with no financial assistance to care for the tree, not even a plaque.
“I am melancholy about it, but I knew for the greater good it had to be cut,” O’Neal says. “It dropped big branches and if anyone gets hurt, I will be the Big Bad Wolf. I don’t want to have that happen.”
©2014 The Seattle Times
Distributed by MCT Information Services
