We’ve Got Our Work Cut Out For Us

Yesterday, GM discussed the success story that is the sycamore down his block. But today he’s here with some more depressing news: we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to restore the canopy.

Above is an aerial photo of GM’s block today. You can see it’s got a decent canopy of trees on it and the connecting blocks. But compare it with this aerial photo of the same block taken in 1951 (curtesy of the fascinating historicaerials.com):

Just look at those trees! It’s like a rain forest compared with today. Browse other blocks on the site, you’ll see it’s mostly the same story: there were simply way more trees back then.

There are some possible reasons for why it was so great back then and not so great now. First of all, much of Georgetown (particularly north Georgetown like this block) didn’t get built out until the 1880s to 1890s. By the 1950s, the original generation of trees planted along the new houses would all be mature and quite big. It’s sort of like the first blooms of a rose bush in the spring: they all burst at once. Eventually this generation of trees gets sick and dies off at different points. Either they get replaced with new trees, or they don’t get replaced at all. Either way, it leaves gaps in the canopy.

Add to this natural process the rise of climate change, with its higher temperatures and blights, and the collapse of city services in the 60s and 70s (which meant far fewer trees getting planted to replace the fallen) and we’re left with much more barren streets.

Can we ever get back to the canopy of the 1950s? Hard to say. We probably won’t get there using the same trees they did back then. For instance, maples just can’t take the higher temperatures we have now and are dying off (which is a double whammy since they were planted in great numbers due to their great canopies and fall colors). We’ve had some success planting strains of American elm resistant to Dutch elms disease, but they still won’t get planted at the rate they were back in the early 20th century.

But like the sycamore down the street from GM, some varieties are much more acclimated to hotter weather and can grow just as gigantic as the old elms on Q St. If we pitch in and commit to caring for our newly planted trees we can have a chance at rebuilding the street Eden we lost.