Creating a Master Planting Plan

By Margaret Jevic Tree Board Member

Meteorological spring is upon us! This winter season has been a particular challenge for tree pruning since there have been so few days with good enough conditions to allow TAB members to prune the many trees that need attention this year. So, you will still see us out finishing critical pruning this spring. We will also begin planning for this year’s tree planting.

Planting in District 4 is up this year and spans the north side of Wooster from Indianview, through the Square, past The Strand, around Plainville, back east on Murray all the way down to Indianview again. Planting District 4 has some unique quirks not held by any other district, and was the hardest, last to be finalized, district in our Master Planting Plan. In that spirit, I thought it would be fun to bring you along on the journey of how the TAB formed the Village Master Planting Plan now that we are ready to plant the Village’s most challenging district.

by ODNR, trees are categorized by their size at maturity and whether they can withstand certain soil conditions and pollution. What you end up with is a matrix of information to sift through to make the best overall decisions for the Village as a whole - far more than putting a tree in the ground because you’d like it there.

Step two is to select trees to go in your large, good quality sites first. That way you maximize your large at maturity trees that aren’t hardy enough to take Wooster, for sapiens but we are all genetically different). A cultivar is a clone of a single tree (e.g. Prairie Fire Blackgum) that is not genetically different from the one next to it. You can plant a cultivar (clone) of a native tree, and while they will produce a certain look that may be desirable, they will not have the strength of genetic diversity to help withstand pest or disease spread.

When you’re going to select a tree for a street, you start from the ground up. You sample the soil, determine the quality of the site (good, intermediate, or poor), you measure the size at maturity tree the site can support (large, medium, or small), you assess whether you will be limited by overhead power lines, and you calculate the road speed to determine whether or not the tree will be impacted by salt and road spray. With information provided example. For us that looked like using up our allowance of native oaks, maples, plane trees, etc. Then you move on to intermediate and poor sites that need what our ODNR mentor famously refers to as “junkyard dogs” - trees that can take any conditions and still perform. That’ll be things like your Ginkgos and Zelkovas - non-natives, but the alternative is no tree at all. In the case of District 4 in our Village, if we chose no tree for all sites we couldn’t plant our preferred natives, at least a third of the major streets would be barren. Plainville, Wooster, parts of Madisonville, and Murray would have zero trees.

When we select a species, we also consider if it is a “straight species” or a “cultivar.” Straight species trees are written in their Latin name (e.g. quercus alba is a White Oak). Each tree you plant will be genetically different from the next, but they are all in the White Oak species (just like people are all homo

TAB selects straight species whenever we can since we believe that is the highest standard to do right by our natural world. Though a straight species native is our gold standard, we can’t always meet it due to nursery practices beyond our control or in cases when a native isn’t an option. In the cases of Plainville and Wooster, they are heavily traveled roads with high levels of pollution. We had no native options left, which meant we looked at our non-native options. Non-native trees are trees that do not naturally occur here, but they have been time-tested to make sure they are not invasive (trees that would spread and cause competition problems with our native trees).

The Callery pear is one such example. It was heavily planted in the 1980s before people knew its tendency to proliferate and take over native areas. It is now illegal to sell or plant this tree in the United States. Trees like the Ginkgo and Zelkova are native to Asia but have not shown invasive tendencies so they are the next best option in certain cases where you can’t make a native work. At the end of the day, they are still trees that offer certain benefits the TAB believes outweigh having zero trees at all in an area.

We also want to maintain certain maximum percentages of each genus, family, and species of trees to keep a healthy diversity of our urban forest. For those residents who’ve been around long enough to remember the Emerald Ash Borer of the early 2000s when our entire swath of Wooster median Ash trees was decimated, you’ll understand how important this piece is. Foreign pests and diseases are a persistent threat to our native plants and trees and can cause devastating, massive loss. One of our top goals was to do what we can to protect our Village trees from becoming an easy target and a highway for these pests and diseases. After many conversations with our regional urban forester, we learned the best practices for doing so. We have no streets that intersect each other of the same tree family so that if a pest or disease strikes one street it will be more difficult for it to spread to others.

We cap any one species at 5 percent of our total canopy, families are capped at 10 percent, and any one genus cannot take up more than 15 percent of the canopy. When you throw this into the matrix, the options become more gridlocked. District 4 was an exercise in patience and perseverance to land on the plan we have.

While all of us on TAB would have liked

Village for locations where the only other option is no tree. When you walk around Graeter’s and down by Starbucks, it’s lovely to be shaded and canopied by trees in the middle of concrete. As a board we chose to maintain trees in these spots even if not native since there will always be the benefit of shade, storm water absorption, and shelter spots for birds and small animals. version of the native Chinkapin Oak planted on Chestnut St. Our hope is this tree is one we can source and plant - another challenge we have faced. Nursery stock is not always what you’d like for it to be and you’re always playing the game of figuring out what you can get.

On Plainville we needed a junkyard dog tree and chose the Ginkgo, a beautiful, ancient tree that was once proliferative here back before the time of the dinosaurs. While no longer a true native in the sense that we consider a plant that supports a multitude of life, it is a tree that can handle the difficult conditions of that site, it is a large at maturity tree to provide shade, gorgeous fall color, it absorbs massive amounts of pollutants to help clean the air, and it provides a plethora of nesting sites (go check out the Ginkgos currently there, you’ll spy many nests!).

For the TAB, this journey has involved so much learning, trial, error, replants, more replants, staking, watering, fixing the hole, fixing the mulch, learning to source, budget, and maintain. I’m so proud of what the Master Planting Plan has become, and I know so much work, thought, time, and professional input went into it. District 4, we are ready. And we hope you too can come along with us and appreciate the work it takes to get the dream of a beautiful, healthy urban forest off the ground.

Thank you, residents of Mariemont, for engaging with us and asking us questions. We love hearing from you and how pleased you are to see new trees on your street. You can always