Mariemont’s Tree Advisory Board Completes a Tree-mendous Year!

By Kristin Van Scoy

When I joined the newly established Tree Advisory Board (TAB) in January of 2021, I thought the job was mainly going to be getting a lot of street trees planted as quickly as possible. I soon learned this was the opposite of good practice and how many hours of education, investigation, strategic thinking, and hands-on hard work go into to creating and maintaining a street tree program worthy of a place like Mariemont and its beautiful urban forest.

Over the past two years, maybe you’ve read our monthly Town Crier articles, attended one of our Arbor Day activities, or talked with us while we evaluated soil samples from the Village’s rightof-way. Maybe we haven’t connected yet. Perhaps your family is hoping (and waiting) for a tree to be planted in the right-of-way area in front of your house. Maybe you’ve seen people pruning trees on your street and asked yourself, “what are those Tree People doing anyway?”

This month, we thought it would be helpful to share everything we’ve been up to in 2022 and where we’re headed in 2023. Since many of you may not realize that there is an active TAB, let’s start with our objectives, since all our work supports them:

• Preserve and enhance Mariemont’s robust tree canopy for future generations.

• Create and implement a comprehensive Master Tree Plan that employs science-based decision making to foster street tree health and limit disease spread.

• Act as good stewards of Village resources by:

• not planting more than we can take care of (trees only pay off after they reach maturity).

• not creating financial liabilities for future Mariemont residents (when a community plants too many trees at one time they also get old and need to be removed at the same time).

Now that you know why we exist (or, for some of you, that we exist), let’s take a look at what we’ve done in 2022 (it’s a LOT). TAB members completed over 800 volunteer hours, which translates to almost $22,000 in services donated to the Village. We used our time to secure a $12,000 grant from the ODNR Division of Forestry, complete a new, Village-wide master planting plan, institute a young tree training program and raise $5,153 in 2022 for the Street Tree Planting Fund (through MPF), just to name a few accomplishments.

In October, the TAB secured the Village’s first-ever grant from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Forestry to plant and establish around 50 new trees in the northeastern part of the Village. The $12,000 grant aims to supplement Mariemont’s tree canopy and reduce the negative impact of storm water runoff that enters our Village from the steep Miami Road hillside. All work will be completed in 2023, and we will be sharing more specifics about this exciting project soon.

While the ODNR grant is the biggest feather in our cap to date, our master planning work is the foundation of our grant proposal success, and it will serve as a blueprint for Mariemont’s street tree program into the next century.