Arthur Plotnik - The Urban Tree Book: An Uncommon Field Guide for City and Town

In cities we are never slow to squabble, but when it comes to trees we can agree on two things:

We love having them around.

Its a shame we dont know them better.

My feelings exactly as I wrote The Urban Tree Book, a field guide to the urban forest and a human-interest approach to trees. Here youll meet scores of neighborhood species and learn their fascinating stories, past and present. The idea is to put youthe resident of city, town, or suburbin closer touch with the trees you see every day. Weekend naturalists who already know their way around the woods will find new worlds to explore in the concrete jungle.

Even as a nonnaturalist, you may already be more involved with trees than you realize. Maybe youve been watching one in your neighborhood, intrigued by its cycles. Or youve been moved by the quake of an aspen, the scent of eucalyptus, a snowfall of cottonwood seeds. The kids bring home hairy husks, gangly pods, and other treasures, asking questions: Whats this funny smell? Why is the leaf so bumpy? Can I eat this berry? Once you get to know a citys trees, those big things with the leaves take on character. Each has its ways, its stories, its foes. To know them is to discover a set of neighbors who will engage you in ways you never imagined.

Did I say neighbors? We urban dwellers are famous for avoiding even next-door residents, sometimes with reason. But treesnever a problem. Trees are giving and forgiving. Whats not to love when a tree throws shade your way on a scorcher, or gulps pollutants and spews oxygen for you even as it copes with its own troubles? Trees will find their way into your heart. Youll cheer their persistence, just as youll lament the decline or death of favorites.

Youll get plenty of tree savvy from this book, enough to make you the neighborhood guru. Some facts, such as the low survival rate for new plantings, are distressing, but they do not diminish the miracle of trees living in the city. Because for the most part the trees around you are very much alive, even if struggling. Often these trees are the oldest and most majestic life forms youll ever see. They are tough trees for tough places. When you stop to observe their vigor in the face of every conceivable strain, you witness a miracle that can thrill and inspire. It may or may not prompt you to activism, but it will reveal new ways of relating to your environment.

I came late to observation of trees, relating to them not as a naturalist but as a writer. Writers spend a lot of time staring out windows. I live in a working-class Chicago neighborhood wedged between two commercial boulevards, but my street is blessed with parkway trees. From my window, I can see mature silver maples, young and old ashes, and a horse-chestnut tree in midlife crisis.

Something terrible or something wonderful is always going on with these trees. An infestation blackens the ash blossoms. Squirrels devour the horse-chestnut buds. A road-tarring crew barbecues every lower branch. But then the chestnut jump-starts its reserve buds and explodes into spring blossom. A young ash summons the energy to shoot up three feet in a year, bugs or no bugs. A sycamore at the end of the block, down to a few curled leaves the previous summer, resurrects its luxurious foliage.

Watching these tenacious city dwellers, I could not help getting involved with their varied styles of living and coping. I was off to the libraries and arboretums to learn more. Tree savvy was something new to me. As a kid in the Bronx, I had shied from leafy things, having suffered a skin-crisping dose of poison-sumac.

My contact with woody plants during adolescence, Im ashamed to say, was tearing off branches. School studies led me elsewhere than to botany, and in editorial jobs in New York, Washington, and Chicago, I mainly contributed to the death of trees by paper consumption.

In my travels I ogled urban landscapes in every region of America, often intending to learn the names of the impressive street trees. But I was uninspired by tree-identification field guides. Most lacked heartfelt descriptions, and none focused on trees in the city. They offered brief descriptive dataleaf and twig morphology (form, measurements), subvarieties, and zonal habitat. Enough to guide field trippers, perhaps, but not to reveal a trees personality. For this nonspecialist, one description blurred into the next.