City Trees

4 CityTREES President's Message Sam Oludunfe City Trees Editor Guest Message Michelle Sutton April 26, 2022 was the bicen- tennial day of Frederick Law Olmsted's birth, but the cel- ebration continues all year. I recommend olmsted200.org as a hub of excellent articles about Olmsted's work interna- tionally. So much has been writ- ten about the iconic and beloved Central Park—and for important context, we have an article by Alex Martin coming in the July/August issue of City Trees about Seneca Village, the predominantly Black village that was, devastatingly, expropriated (removed by eminent domain) from the land before Central Park construction began. Alex poses important questions about what it means to remove marginalized people from their land and asks us to reconsider our concept of the "greater good." I recently wrote an article about Olmsted's lesser-known connections in Upstate New York that Olmsted 200 fea- tured on their Shared Spaces page. Many readers will closely associate Buffalo with Olmsted, whose approach to his work there was a national first. Olmsted prepared landscape plans for Buffalo beginning in 1868 at a time when Buffalo was one of the ten largest cities in the U.S., prospering thanks to the Erie Canal and the industries that grew around it. This was Olmsted's most ambitious project to date, because when Buffalo's leading citizens present- ed him with three parcels of land to choose from for the creation of a park, Olmsted urged that all three be utilized to make a park system—connected by treed greenways. In his seminal biography of Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, Witold Rybczysnki writes: His [Olmsted's] highly original plan was a complex and refined network of parks, parkways, avenues, and public spaces that represented a degree of sophistication in city planning previously unknown in the United States. He distributed parks through- out the city to make recreation more accessible. Elsewhere, broad avenues and parkways brought trees and greenery into the congested grid of streets. In Buffalo, Olmsted showed how the burgeoning American industrial city could be made livable. He showed how to make the city livable. This is why urban foresters owe a great deal to Olmsted, his sons and other members of the Olmsted firm, and to the thousands of laborers who made the firm's plans for more than 6000 cities, parks, campuses, cemeteries, and planned communities a reality. Here at the Society of Municipal Arborists, we are all about growth. We grow trees, certainly, but as an association, we want to help members grow too. In that spirit, I want to encourage you to read a piece by Kathy Lawrence, Board Chair of the Greater Newburgh Park Conservancy, writing about her expe- rience attending the Municipal Forestry Institute last year, which is an exciting opportunity for our members to grow professionally. Kathy writes about learning from passionate and experienced teach- ers and instructors during a week-long intensive program. MFI's focus is developing a leadership approach to your work; thinking and planning strategically; working effectively with other agencies and organizations; and managing the relationship between peo- ple and trees. We offer a diversity mentorship program as well. I want to encourage you to apply, and I hope many of you will take the opportunity to attend MFI 2022, which is taking place in Bowling Green, Ohio in September. MFI offers a unique chance for professional development that can't be found elsewhere. The event brings togeth- er urban forestry professionals from big cities and small towns alike, as well as non-profit organizations and state and federal agencies. Kathy says: "The most valuable part of the entire process for me was hearing in some detail the lived experience of folks, wheth- er they were in settings similar to my own or quite different. It was particularly enlightening to learn in more depth about the trials and triumphs of arborists working at city or state levels, dealing with bureaucracies and both public interest and public misperceptions." Speaking about triumphs and collaboration, in this issue you will also learn about an innovative initiative in Schenectady that brings together various community partners to achieve a more equitable tree canopy. The program centers around environmental justice focus areas and pro- vides training and employment for youths in those areas. The program is funded through a combination of grants from federal and state sources. In this issue, we also have a story about the Arbor Day Foundation's Community Tree Recovery program, which helps areas where natural disasters, often caused or exacerbated by climate change, take place. Finally, you will hear from Providence, Rhode Island City Forester Doug Still about his quest to find tupelos–both a personal essay and natural history odyssey. I hope this issue will get you excited about growing your career and your community, as well as providing you with ideas for new initiatives. I also hope that it gets you think- ing about your own journey as municipal arborists.

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