New York City life is tough on trees. Compacted soil with high pH, low-hanging utility wires, an environment often hot and dry, and the city’s harsh winters challenge a tree’s survival and colorful foliage.
So Cornell researchers are partnering with nursery operators in a project funded by the New York Farm Viability Institute (NYFVI) to help trees thrive in harsh urban landscapes. The project will evaluate a new Cornell tree-growing technique as well as new varieties of oak and maple trees bred with the help of Cornell researchers.
Project leader Nina Bassuk of Cornell’s Urban Horticulture Institute and Cornell Ph.D. candidate Naalamle Amissah have developed a new cloning technique called clonal propagation that allows oaks to develop their own root system, rather than growers having to use the traditional and difficult grafting method. Nurseries will evaluate the new propagation method for quickly getting the new varieties into commercial production. Growers want trees that are easy to establish at nurseries and to transplant to city settings, said Bassuk.
“We have combined native cold-hardy trees with much shorter southern and desert species that can tolerate heat, drought, compacted low oxygen soil, road salt and the concrete-induced high pH soils common to cities,” Podaras said. “Smaller-sized trees require less long-term maintenance and do not interfere with power lines. We believe these new extremely vigorous hybrids have excellent potential as the ultimate street trees and for backyard landscaping.”
Also, maple clones now growing in Cornell horticultural plots are the result of crosses with a Chinese drought-tolerant variety with good color and shorter height to enable the trees to grow in urban settings with overhead utility wires. The clones will be field- and nursery-tested on Long Island and in Western and Central New York this fall.
I grew up in a New England factory town where they’d spent all the Depression-era CCC and WPA funding on city parks. They all had a wide range of deciduous and evergreen trees.
It’s pretty boring to walk through any contemporary American city and see only hybrid locust trees — and nothing else.
I’d like to see an agressively cloned tree that would at random intervals grab a New Yorker off of the sidewalk and eat them.
That would bode well for exercising New Yorkers as they would walk MUCH faster past said trees.
Then again, bulldozing Manhattan Island and turning it into a National Park would be an even better idea.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned was the watering of the trees. Side streets are not always an urban problem as usually up to half the surrounding soil is grass and takes some run off from the paved section. On main streets, that is seldom the case as the ground is paved from the buildings all the way to the street. That way the trees only get natural water from a very small source which is often polluted with oil and other contaminants.
I don’t know about other cities, but I have seen the city trucks in Montreal and Toronto actually drive around in the summer to water the trees. This is really only feasible with smaller trees. The trees, however, do make a big difference. On a very hot day, they can reduce the temperature by 10 degrees or more by shading the heat absorbing concrete. Although their CO2 absorption is minimal, every little bit helps.
does this mean that instead of a tree grows in Brooklyn, it’s now…..a tree grows in Cornell?