Municipal arboriculture is a special battleground of wonder-the history of community interaction under the shade of nature. The urban forest is a suitable generalization for this community of trees and people. More specific though is the term: street tree. The loved, the hated, the punished and the sacred, the low hanging, the tangled, the hacked, the malnourished, the mistreated, and most importantly: the misunderstood. And still, they function as vehicles of life even where the odds, opinions and sometimes someone’s recyclables are stacked against them, in small spaces and poor soils, they heave sidewalks, clog gutters, and name many a cross street and avenue.

Some recent quotes that come to memory regarding street trees:

“I hope you’re taking it down!”

“I hope you’re not taking it down!”

“It’s such a mess!”

“The squirrels love it!”

“Will it fall on my house?”

“The electric company pruned it.”

“I don’t want the electric company to prune it!”

“It’s a piece of shit isn’t it?”

“Take as much as you can without killing it.”

“Please don’t take too much off of it!”

“We planted it when Bobby was born.”

“There weren’t any apples last year.”

“The flowers are beautiful.”

“It’s too big.”

Street trees are an interesting specimen, falling into a grey area that many times exists between the sidewalk and the road. It’s a strip not much wider than two feet, where permits and rules and regulations are bent and borrowed and broken. The tree lawn is the real wild west of tree care-a frontier within the urban forest. For the municipal arborist practicing on the tree lawn, you need to be hardened with history and softened by the cutting edge information of the present; a hearer of stories, a feeler of emotions, a seer of visions and a service to the public at large. The street tree arborist is the protector of the unprotected, the manager of the unmanageable, the inspector of uninspected, the doer of good and the holder of the hope that the dark gray world of the tree lawn gets a little greener everyday.

The nature of our street trees is the nature of our communities, and that should, after all, bring us closer together.