A brief recent history of Wellesley’s love/hate relationship with trees

Little white signs are popping up all over town (see map) warning that the Wellesley Department of Public Works will be spraying trees to help protect them from winter moth caterpillars through about the end of May. The DPW’s Mike Quinn has written that residents and businesses should contact arborists to deal with privately-owned trees and keep their fingers crossed that a UMass program to fight evil winter months with superhero parasitic flies will help put an end to spraying.

Of course winter storms probably took care of some of the weaker trees already.

Meanwhile, the town recently passed during Town Meeting a new set of rules to preserve/protect trees in town (here’s a draft of the bylaw from early March). The bylaw calls on property owners/developers to either replace trees they cut down to make way for construction projects or put money into a town tree bank that will fund tree plantings and tree care. The bylaw had its share of backers and opponents, many of which felt the rules infringed on owners’ property rights.

Wellesley Real Estate’s Bill FitzPatrick blogged this week about the pros and cons of the bylaw, but concluded: “Unfortunately, it’s impossible to legislate good taste and neighborliness.”

The bylaw was approved just a couple of months after the town settled for $140K in damages in the case of the tree-cutting fiasco at Boulder Brook Reservation by an abutting neighbor’s overexhuberant property management team.

Town Meeting members also okayed the tree-lined Brookside Road’s designation as a scenic road.

Wellesley Rotarians this month are  joining forces this month with the Wellesley DPW to bag tree seedlings that will be distributed to an army of school children in town in hopes they’ll celebrate Arbor Day on April 29 by planting the trees in their yards. This should keep Wellesley’s standing in the Tree City USA program strong for years to come — Wellesley is listed as having been part of the program for 27 years.

Separately,  residents earlier this month were wondering what was up at Tenacre School, which cut down a bunch of trees to make way for a new playing field along Grove Street and Benvenue Street. The head of school wrote to explain “we hope that all will be pleased with the end result— a beautiful new field, better traffic flow and improved landscaping that includes numerous new trees that will border the field.”

And over at Linden Square, work crews have been toiling away over the past month or so adding to the tree-lined-ness of the shopping district in hopes of giving it a more friendly, walkable feel. A bunch of trees were also added to the space last year.

Finally, on a recent trek across the Sudbury Trail in Wellesley, the carcasses of dead Christmas trees could be seen littering the sides of the aqueduct, not far from where some lazy people could have brought them to the RDF for recycling.

Get out and enjoy the town’s trees this spring on a series of guided walks organized by the Wellesley Trails Committee. The first heads to Boulder Brook Reservation on April 30, and walks in May and June will hit the Town Forest (view of the Esker Trail seen here), Centennial Reservation and more.

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