april thomas rose Executive director, treefolks
Austin’s top arborist gives us shade. B y c la y s m i t h
T
o those who didn’t experience it and have to listen to the grumblings of those of us who did, the summer of 2011 must sound like some kind of melodramatic conspiracy. It’s the topic no one wants to remember but can’t quite forget. The weather data from last summer are operatic: We lumbered through 90 days of temperatures higher than 100 degrees (to find anything remotely comparable, you have to go back to 1925, when there were 69 days higher than 100 degrees). As if experiencing the hottest summer on record wasn’t enough, it was also the driest — the months of October 2010 through September 2011 were “the driest for that 12-month period in Texas since 1895, when the state began keeping rainfall records,” according to the LCRA. The effects of last summer aren’t just physical, though — they’re cultural. If you think the summer of 2011 is over, try making it through one holiday party where you end up talking to a stranger and don’t trade war stories about what you did to survive last summer. “I feel like it was a tough year for a newbie,” says April Thomas Rose, an arborist who became the executive director of TreeFolks in January. During a year when weather forecasters would daily inform us of our meteorological woes until it became a cruel mantra, Rose and her TreeFolks staff and volunteers were quietly taking stock of the condition of our street and park trees, trying to provide watering and maintenance information to save the trees they already
had and prepare the public to start planting more of them in the fall. It’s an odd workload Rose is well accustomed to. She received her undergraduate degree from the noted forestry program at Stephen F. Austin State University and has measured canopy cover over American woodcock nests in the Angelina National Forest in East Texas; surveyed revegetation following a wildfire in the Coconino National Forest in Flagstaff, Arizona; managed endangered prairie dog habitat and treated invasive plants at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming; and inventoried street trees in Houston. Rose has kept her wits about her while the rest of us felt ineffectual in the face of the drought and heat. While acknowledging that this summer’s weather was extreme in every way, Rose points out that extremes “happen in nature and it doesn’t mean that we stop planting trees,” she says. “It means that we look around and think about what’s surviving and thriving and plant more of that. And we get smarter about how we design, build and maintain.” TreeFolks has existed since 1989, but 2011 was challenging for the nonprofit, which grows the urban forest in Central Texas by planting some 10,000 trees a year. Rose says TreeFolks did their best to handle the emails and phone calls from Austinites curious about how to help their trees survive this summer because the number of calls was overwhelming. Rose used to be an arborist for the city of Pflugerville. “Developing a forestry program
in Pflugerville was challenging because they’d never had someone on staff whose job was to plant and protect trees and interpret the value of the urban forest — there’s a lot of development pressures in eastern Travis County,” she recalls. “Here it’s like who doesn’t like trees? It’s hard to throw a rock without hitting someone who doesn’t want to protect every tree. The challenge is finding the happy medium, where the development community understands that what is best for the urban forest resource is usually also good for property values and where tree preservationists understand that occasionally, the benefits of removal might outweigh the benefits of preservation.” TreeFolks doesn’t plant just in urban parks — if you see a little blue or yellow flag planted in your front yard or around your neighborhood, someone from TreeFolks has been there, itching to deliver a free tree to your front door (if you do receive one of the flags, marked NeighborWoods, go to treefolks.org, fill out the form, and a tree will be delivered to your home). “I think the stars are pretty well lined up for us to achieve great things and to really educate Central Texans about trees and why they’re important,” Rose says. “There’s nothing greater than seeing the spark, when someone suddenly realizes that their urban forest provides so much more than shade, that it is valuable infrastructure and a resource that must be planned for, maintained and interpreted. I love getting out there and doing that work with people.” tribeza.com
december 2011
65