A tree-lined street in Washington, DC several decades ago. The city’s Urban Forestry Administration and Casey Trees are working to return Washington to its former leafy status.
Photo courtesy of DC Dept. of Transportation, Urban Forestry Administration

Northeasterly breezes have broken the summer heat, and neighbors of Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park have come out on a Saturday evening to celebrate. Children pedal tiny twowheelers around the park’s statues of Abraham Lincoln and educator Mary McLeod Bethune. The park is filled with neighborhood dogs, many of them off-leash and exuberantly chasing one another.

Jean Godwin and Craig Steinberg, who live on opposite sides of the park, share a bench, while their dogs Buster and Mel chew on sticks at their feet. “This is where the neighborhood meets,” says Godwin. “It’s everybody’s backyard. My kids, now teenagers, learned to ride their bikes here and my son learned to play ball over there, under those trees.” She points to a grove of willow oaks across the park’s central square.

The trees in this park are, for the most part, massive and healthy. Large Japanese pagoda trees drop fragrant yellow-green flowers on the grass and sidewalk. Chinese chestnuts and the acorns of saw-toothed oaks are ripening.

You can easily picture the park in autumn with the foliage blazing, in winter with a dusting of snow on the hollies, and in early spring, when the Asian magnolias will bloom. At this moment in time, a late summer evening, the scene is stunningly idyllic.

Tree-lined streets and avenues, flanked by generous sidewalks filled with walkers and cyclists, radiate from every angle of Lincoln Park. The most impressive of these is East Capitol Street. Framed by a canopy of American elms, the white dome of the Capitol seems to float above it. The limbs of the vase-shaped elms touch in the middle of the street, forming a tunnel like the ones so many of us remember from childhood, before Dutch elm disease came calling. James R. Lyons, Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment during the Clinton administration, drives through this green tunnel on his way to his K Street office, where he currently serves as executive director of the Casey Trees Endowment Fund.

During his work day, Lyons holds the verdant image of East Capitol Street in his mind for inspiration. Because, despite appearances in and around Lincoln Park, all is not well in the “City of Trees.” Satellite images reveal that between 1973 and 1999, the District of Columbia lost roughly half its trees, according to Gary Moll, senior vice president of the Urban Forest Center at American Forests, a conservation organization.

Based on these images and other evidence of a declining canopy in the District, Maryland philanthropist Betty Brown Casey took dramatic action. By May of 2001, the nonprofit Casey Trees Endowment Fund was formed with a $50 million grant from the Eugene B. Casey Foundation. Its mission: “to restore, enhance, and protect the tree canopy of the District of Columbia in cooperation with local and federal government agencies, community groups, and individual citizens.”

Many recent studies have demonstrated that urban trees contribute far more than aesthetics. Healthy trees remove carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, and particulate matter from the air. Trees combat the so-called urban heat island effect, increase residential and commercial property values, and decrease the rate of asthma in children (DC’s rate is one of the nation’s highest). They provide food and shelter for birds and animals.

They help to protect our water systems by absorbing stormwater runoff, which overwhelms Washington’s sewage system during heavy rains and has increased dramatically due to development and resultant tree-loss. Runoff is a major factor contributing to the pollution of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers and the decline of the Chesapeake Bay.

The Casey Trees Endowment Fund and American Forests see trees as the answer, or partial answer, to many ills in Washington, DC and other cities. Barbara Deutsch, who has been with Casey Trees almost since it opened its doors and currently serves as senior director for programs and research, explains: “Our cities are in crisis and we’re not meeting our air and water quality standards.

Each municipality is looking at millions of dollars in improvements. We’re saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, there are other solutions.’ If we look at the city holistically, our ‘green infrastructure’ can work with the existing gray infrastructure to help solve our city air and water quality problems.” American Forests has taken this one step further.

“Since 1996, when we put our first software together [to map and evaluate urban trees], our focus has been to try to put a dollar value on trees for air and water and energy,” says Moll. “Trees have a tremendous value. If a city manager is balancing a budget, you’ll find that you ought to have a substantial tree canopy.” Trees have always been central to the quality of life in Washington, but the city’s trees have had something of a boom or bust history.

George Washington, founder of the nation’s capital, would probably be called a tree-hugger today, as would Thomas Jefferson and several other past American presidents. When Washington hired Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the federal city, the two made sure that it would be a verdant capital, blessed with green space and bountiful groves of trees. But their vision floundered badly in the 19th century.

Thomas Jefferson, who personally designed the city’s first street-tree planting, was forced to witness the widespread felling of trees for fuel and profit during his administration in the early 1800s. He even expressed a fleeting wish for despotic powers to “save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifices to the cupidity of their owners or the necessity of the poor,” and he remarked: “The unnecessary felling of a tree seems to me a crime little short of murder; it pains me to an unspeakable degree.”

By the mid-1800s, the haphazard cutting of trees—combined with a casual attitude toward sewage disposal— had rendered summer in Washington a life-threatening proposition.

Presidents were forced to leave the White House for fear they would fall habit of the beloved American elm. In riparian environments along the Anacostia, the city and Casey Trees have joined forces with Americorps* NCCC, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and the National Park Service to plant native trees suited to riverbanks—sycamore, green ash, swamp white oak, and sweetgum, for example.

Casey Trees sees educating and enlisting DC’s youngest citizens in the regreening of the city as another central aspect of its mission. Lyons says: “We have had high school kids from every ward of the city involved this summer.” These paid interns alternated between participating in maintenance and taking a tree inventory for the Urban Forest Effects Survey (UFORE), designed to evaluate the city’s tree canopy for its contributions to a healthy environment.

On a recent summer morning I joined one of the UFORE teams in the field. Olivia Watts, a 20-year-old forestry major at Virginia Tech, was one of three college interns Casey had hired to head up UFORE teams during the summer.

The UFORE survey involved two hundred 37½-foot-radius plots throughout the city, including both public and private land of every sort of land use. Each plot was visited by a UFORE team that studied the overall health of the and measured each tree so it could be documented for its contribution to air quality and cooling. The data collected goes into a USDA Forest Service computer model so that researchers can measure and evaluate DC’s urban forest for temperature reduction, removal of air pollutants, energy effects, and stormwater runoff.

On this particular day, Watts was working with 16-year-old Alicia Thomas, a rising sophomore at Eastern Senior High School in northeast DC, and 18-year- old Sujey Chopin, who was born in El Salvador and will be a senior at Roosevelt Senior High in northwest DC The internship was the first real job for both high school girls and they said it was hard work, particularly on the non-UFORE days when they would go out with the maintenance crews to water, stake and mulch Casey’s young trees.

We rode a Metro train and bus to northwest DC and then walked to Jenifer Street, where the trio would survey the first plot of the day. A German shepherd barked when Watts knocked on a townhouse door, but prior written permission from the property owners had already been obtained, and the team was soon through the wooden gates and into the two backyards and alleyway that made up the survey plot.

After putting a central yellow stake in the ground, Watts and the girls began determining the radius and circumference of the plot. They then estimated areas of shrub cover, impervious surface, herbaceous plant and woody vine cover, and duff/ mulch. “Remember that one percent of the plot is about the size of a queen size mattress,” prompted Watts.

The lion’s share of the work involved measuring each tree in the townhouse backyards and along the alley. Watts easily identified the species, which included a tulip tree and a black locust. She then helped the girls use the tools of the trade: a large tape measure to determine DBH (diameter at breast height), crown width, and distance of each tree from residences; a hand-held range finder; and a clinometer for determining the trees’ bole height (height of the trunk) and total height. When the electronic range finder failed, as it often did, the team relied on the old-fashioned clinometer. Watts entered all the information into her hand-held computer.

Many tree plantings in the city are accomplished with the help of a Citizen Forester program, initiated by Casey Trees and supported by Mayor Williams and the Urban Forestry Administration, the National Park Service, University of the District of Columbia, the USDA Forest Service, and the National Arboretum. Citizen foresters participate in three training modules and put in a specified number of volunteer hours. During the first module they learn about tree identification and biology, and how to measure trees and evaluate their health. The second module teaches citizen foresters how to plant and care for trees. Casey Trees has begun planting trees in earnest, and during spring and fall tree-planting sessions the foresters work with other local volunteers who come out on tree planting days to help plant and learn about tree care in their communities.

The third module teaches urban ecology, environmental stewardship, and community outreach.

Citizen foresters have helped plant more than 1,000 trees, and they have been vital contributors to three major tree inventories: the 2002 summer street tree inventory; a 2003- 2004 survey of National Park lands around the Mall and some city parks—a Casey Trees collaboration with the National Park Service; and this past summer’s “Urban Forest Effects” (UFORE) survey—a joint project with Casey Trees, the National Park Service and the USDA Forest Service.

Claudine Lebeau is a citizen forester, one of 45 who have been trained in all three modules (in effect, Casey Trees’ first graduating class). Born and raised in France, a mother 7 of two who is employed by GEICO, Lebeau volunteers for Casey Trees whenever she can. Her favorite aspect of volunteering involves the inventories. “I joined to understand trees and to be closer to trees,” she says. “When you spend 15-20 minutes with each tree, you feel like you are discovering nature.” She also says, “I am impressed with the technology [for measuring trees and recording data].

Using it properly takes a lot of experience.” Lebeau participates in planting sessions two Saturdays a month during spring and fall. “Planting is a festive event,” she says. “Volunteers come from all over the city and we have coffee and bagels. It’s great for people in the neighborhoods who are gregarious. They are paired with experienced planters.” She also describes it as hard work, “especially when digging in compacted soil,” a job young Americorps volunteers often assist with. Newly planted trees are mulched and watered.

“Getting water can be quite a challenge,” she says. It is often hauled in buckets from residential faucets by the citizen foresters and other volunteers. As I explore the streets and parks of Washington myself, preparing to write a new edition of City of Trees, I see many streets with dead and dying trees, and I know that the capital is not as green as it was just 27 years ago when I first moved to the city.

But my heart is lightened by the high-tech career and volunteer arborists of the 21st century, and their passion to restore the urban canopy. Not far from the leafy elm tunnel of East Capitol Street lies 8th Street, SE or “Barracks Row,” a newly refurbished historic business district near Eastern Market with wide brick sidewalks and young Princeton American elms planted by Mayor Williams, District business and community leaders, Casey Trees and its volunteers, during a snowfall last December. I look into the future and imagine the vase-shaped branches of these disease-resistant American elms touching in the middle of the street, forming a green tunnel that will cool a hot summer day.

As the Casey Trees Endowment Fund opined in a recent report titled The State of Our Trees: The Status and Health of the Street Trees of Washington DC: “Trees…reduce stress, add character and peace to neighborhoods…They are the front-line buffer between the harsh, hot pavement of city streets and the spaces where we walk, play, live and work.”

As long as current trends continue, and the trees of Washington have the ongoing support of the District and federal governments, organizations such as Casey Trees and American Forests, and the committed green thumbs of its citizens, the forecast looks promising.

Free–lance writer Melanie Choukas-Bradley is at work on a revision of City of Trees: The Complete Field Guide to the Trees of Washington, DC, illustrated by Polly Alexander. She is also the author of two books about Sugarloaf Mountain, illustrated by Tina Thième Brown and published by the University of Virginia Press, as well as a number of articles published in The Washington Post. Melanie and Tina will lead an ANS field trip to Sugarloaf on November 13th .

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