Thinking about the trees of the future
By Kathryn Ross, pictured is Main Street Wellsboro, Pennsylvania
I don’t want to linger on the trees that were so surreptitiously removed from Main Street a couple of weeks ago, but I do want to discuss trees, or the lack of them.
Over the last decade or so trees have disappeared from our downtown landscape. I imagine that it is difficult to have trees on a downtown street. I imagine they wreak havoc with the sidewalks and depending on the kind of trees, the foliage may prove difficult to deal with especially when you consider drainage and clean up.
But trees also contribute to the streetscape, and you can always have a public bonfire and then everyone can get rid of their leaves.
I’m not sure of the decade, but sometime in the ‘60s or ‘70s there was an attempt to plant flowering trees, crab apple trees I believe, on Main Street and throughout the village. The idea was to carve out a niche or an identity, for the village, similar to the Lilac Festival in Rochester and the Dogwood Festival in Dansville, to draw tourists. For a while the streetscape bloomed with the bright pink blossoms, but over the years the small flowering trees disappeared leaving the landscape gray. Then the trend became concrete everywhere. You know the thought – “Pave Paradise, Put up a parking lot.”
Why do the sidewalks downtown have to be so wide? When an event is held that draws people to downtown, we close off Main Street and everyone walks in the street. When is downtown so crowded that it requires such wide sidewalks?
I don’t care how you pour it, concrete isn’t pretty. The only time it’s nice is when the rest of the street is buried under snow. Then a strip of bare concrete is a welcome site to the pedestrian.
Would it be so awful to narrow the sidewalks and plant a strip of grass along the curb and plant a few more trees. Or narrow the wide sidewalks and plant small (maybe flowering) trees down the center of Main Street?
It would make Main Street a little more pretty. It would provide shade for people visiting our street events. Have you ever noticed how hot Main Street can’t get when you are attempting to walk it from one end to the other during the Main Street Festival in July. You need a hat and sunglasses and maybe even an umbrella to make that trek.
Remember when we had the Pocket Parks along Main St.? That might be something to bring back. As I get older and it’s harder to walk I think more benches on Main Street would be nice, especially if they were under trees and sans vagrants, but that is a problem to be addressed at another time.
For the last several years we have been trying to make the village more attractive with flags, hanging baskets and giant urns overflowing with flowers. I’m not a big fan of the giant urns. To me they seem a little too urban for our rural town, but I do love the teeming flowers reaching into the sky and trailing over the edges of the urns. I applaud the WDC for their effort.
But I also liked the flower baskets hanging from the light posts and I loved seeing the student interns going from pole to pole with their tractor and trailer watering them.
My whole feeling is that we need to make Main Street a little more hospitable. You come into the village from the north along a tree shaded street and from the south past rolling hills and verdant fields. When you get to Main Street it’s a desert. Trees would help that.
Wellsville is a Tree City USA and has been for decades. We have an active tree board which yearly celebrates Arbor Day, a movement to replant trees in areas where the western movement had cut them down in the name of progress.
One of my favorite literary works is the trilogy, “The Trees,” “The Fields,” and “The Town” by Conrad Richter. It is about the nearly impenetrable forests that once covered the northeast and how pioneers slowly cut down the “big butts” denuding the land for farming and towns. The interesting part of the story is in the end, (spoiler alert) when the descendants of those pioneers replanted trees.
As those descendants, we need to plant more trees in Wellsville and take guardianship of the ones we still have.
Kathryn Ross is a lifetime Wellsville resident and longtime local writer who pens a weekly opinion column for the Wellsville Sun. You can reach her anytime, kathr_2002@yahoo.com
