City Trees

November/December 2015

City Trees is a premier publication focused on urban + community forestry. In each issue, you’ll learn how to best manage the trees in your community and more!

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20 City Trees New York City Parks is exemplifying what strong, informed municipal work in the public inter- est should look like. I had the distinct pleasure of spending time with members of the New York City Parks Department, digging into the nuts and bolts of how this work gets done. I also had the opportunity to compare both the wild side of the "back woods" of New York with its street side counterpart. This arborist exchange was professionally exhilarating and left me craving more knowledge. The first stop on my tour of the greener side of NYC was the Alley Pond Park natural area at the outskirts of the borough of Queens. Most of my visits to New York land me towards the center of the city, so getting to explore a vast natural area at the city's edge gave me a fresh perspective of the Big Apple. My guides for the day were Christina Pedros and Kip Arborist Exchange to the Wilds and Streets of NYC By Marty Frye, Arborist for Residential Plantings, Casey Trees Stein, who were both excited to share their work with me. Christina and Kip are foresters with the Department of Parks responsible for the ecological restoration of degraded lands. With them, I got the chance to walk through part of the many-hundred acres of Alley Pond and see the NYC Parks restoration regime in three dif- ferent stages of progress. The three different phases were roughly 10 acres (4 ha) each. Most notable in their process was the com- mitment to site preparation. Two years of mowing and herbicide application comes before a seed or tree is even put in the ground. I was also excited to see very successful seeding of native wildflowers, which gave an excellent cover to the soil between the roughly four- foot-tall (1.2 m) trees planted four feet on center. Such dense planting combined with the wildflower seeding seemed to be doing a great job, and invasive vine pres- ence was little to absent. Entrance to the Alley Pond natural area and Christina Pedros, one of Marty's superb hosts during the exchange.

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