Carol Casperson waits until shadows cool her street in the Fairlawn neighborhood of Southeast Washington before she attaches her hose, turns on the spigot and walks out to the street to water her trees.
It takes about 10 gallons of water to twice fill the city-provided bin around the young flowering trees each week. She’s not sure what varieties of trees she has, but she thinks at least one of the five on her street is a black cherry.
More shade trees
She requested that the city plant one or two in front of her rowhouse, but then she noticed neighbors neglecting their new trees, so she extended her hose down the block and now takes care of five.
“When you’re watering a tree, you can actually see it grow,” said Casperson, a retired executive at a nonprofit agency who has lived in her home for 32 years. “You get a full, beautiful tree.”
That’s exactly the sentiment that the city’s Urban Forestry Administration wants to encourage. The District plants thousands of trees every year, often at the request of residents. But there’s not enough money or public workers to water the 140,000 existing street trees in the city, said John Thomas, the city’s arborist since 2005. Hence, the city solicits volunteers as “canopy keepers.” The job, which has been around for several years, isn’t hard, but it requires someone who is reliable and willing to sign a contract promising to water every week.
Casperson is one of a record 1,400 local residents who signed up this year, 200 more than last year. The canopy keepers promise to water newly planted trees throughout the spring, summer and fall, helping them get established in the poor, hard-packed soil between curb and sidewalk.
It’s well known that trees reduce summer temperatures in urban areas, absorb rainwater runoff, clean the air and add economic value to homes and neighborhoods.
Not all trees do well in the most public of spaces, where dry, unimproved soils, nicks and gouges from car doors, handling by passersby and polluted air are the rule.
The city chooses among the hardiest trees for the region and the particular location, said Monica Lear, the city’s deputy associate director of plant pathology. They include Chinese elm, plane trees, several varieties of cherry, hackberry, red oak, redbud and sweet gum.
Thirty-five percent of the District has tree cover, and the city hopes to increase that to 40 percent by 2035. The street trees in Washington make up about 10 percent of the whole urban tree canopy. But they are not evenly distributed, as anyone who has walked downtown streets can attest.
“The question is whether we’re maintaining that 35 percent adequately,” Thomas said, noting that the city has many old trees, a significant number of which die or are toppled by storms every year. There were years when the financially strapped District simply failed to plant replacements.
“You can’t make up for lost time,” Thomas added. “You can’t saturate an area for two years and hope it carries forward.”
The nonprofit Casey Trees’ Tree Report Card, which is billed as the only independent assessment of D.C.’s trees on both public and private lands, criticized the city last month, saying it failed to properly track whether trees planted since 2002 had survived.
Thomas said the urban forestry office is attempting to track and map its replacements. This year the department has also removed 80,000 square feet of impervious material, such as concrete, in public areas and replaced it with green space, including new trees, he said. The city says 3,953 trees have been planted in this growing season.
The key to keeping the city green, Thomas emphasized, lies in citizen action, which is why the city improved its outreach to neighborhood commissions and citizens’ associations. That resulted in a record number of volunteers for the canopy keepers program.
Why do it? Casperson, 73, grew up in St. Paul, Minn., where she remembers trees so big that in full leaf they turned West Minnehaha Avenue into a sort of green-roofed tunnel. Her street in Washington is far sunnier.
“I want the street to be pretty, and [the tree] here when I’m old, so I can sit in my chair under its shade,” Casperson said with a laugh.
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