Tuesday morning, around 9 a.m., a bright-orange track hoe rolled down N. 3rd Street, trailing behind it a brief pileup of cars. Abruptly, it pulled over, releasing the traffic, and dug a sewer-lid-sized hole in the grass between the sidewalk and road.
“In Harrisburg, you never know what you’re going to find,” said Dan Quinn, the plant manager of NRG Energy Center Harrisburg, whose logo was emblazoned beneath the track hoe’s cab. “Walls, old foundations.” The hoe tore up another chunk of earth, which turned out to contain some pieces of asphalt and an old brick.
It was Earth Day, and NRG had donated equipment, plus Quinn and a colleague, to a tree-planting event Uptown. The hoe had been digging since 8 o’clock, leaving a trail of holes that stretched back a block, skipping the odd extant oak before forking up Wiconisco. Beside each hole lay a scraggly tree sapling, its roots bundled in plastic, like a bagged witch’s broom.
Somewhere at the end of the trail was Jean Cutler, the vice-president for programs and development for the Covenant Community Corporation (“Motivate. Educate. Initiate!”) and the tree-planting project’s lead. Cutler had corralled the event’s volunteers, including graduates from an environmental leadership training program she helped to spearhead last year. For the moment, though, she was out of sight. “Tell her she’s lagging!” Quinn joked. “We’re way up here and haven’t seen any of her planters.”
As it turned out, Cutler was around the corner, completing a TV interview behind the headquarters of the Valley of Harrisburg. The Valley, a consistory of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, was acquiring 14 trees along its perimeter in exchange for a few man-hours of labor. As Cutler spoke on camera, Valley members shuffled a tree out of its bag and stood it in its hole. Then someone opened a leveling app on a smartphone.
“They try to make sure the trees don’t have a ‘gangsta lean,’” said James, a volunteer picking up service learning hours for a sociology class at Penn State. He pointed to a fully grown oak nearby that tilted slightly towards the street.
The volunteers checked the depth of the hole, then started refilling it with soil. Some of them took up hunks of displaced sod, stooping beside the newly planted trunk to whack the dirt free. “Don’t move,” said a mustached man in a light jacket. He leaned his shovel against a bent-over compatriot, from whence it tumbled to the ground.
Cutler, wrapping up her television spot, headed off to catch up with the track hoe. “It took a lot of organization to make this work,” she said. She put together notebooks of specifications on tree varieties and went around asking neighbors what they’d like to see planted. She also gathered cash donations, in addition to in-kind services and commitments from volunteers, to match a grant from the TreeVitalize program, a partnership of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. The grant had helped pay for the 43 trees for that day’s planting—a mix of oaks, cherries, and autumn brilliance serviceberries. (There was also one European hornbeam and one gingko.)
Back on 3rd Street, the planting had picked up. Two graduates from the environmental leadership program, Don Schwab and Pat Buckley, worked with DCNR’s Ellen Roane, who gave her title as “forest training and partnership specialist” and then whittled it down to “urban forester.” Schwab, who wore a wool sweater and a black ball cap from the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (“Got it at a garage sale,” he said), is currently in the planning phase of another tree planting for his own neighborhood, Riverside. Both he and Buckley had completed an online tree-tending course through DCNR the previous year. “Trees die,” Schwab explained. “And then you need to plant again or just have a barren lot.”
The trees had come from Schichtel’s Nursery, near Buffalo, N.Y. They were transplanted via the “bare root” method, as opposed to the “ball and burlap” method, or “B & B.” B & B involves keeping a ball of soil intact around the roots, Roane explained. It extends the length of time a tree can be kept out of the ground, but it’s more labor intensive than going bare root—for the five-foot sapling they were currently planting, the root ball could weigh perhaps 200 pounds. “For volunteers, this makes a lot more sense,” she said.
The downside of bare root was, well, the bareness of the roots. To keep them moist, the nursery applied a hydrogel, developed by researchers at Cornell University, that would buy planters two or so weeks to get the trees into the ground.
“A lot can be done to train trees when they’re young that pays off big time when they’re older,” Roane said. She snipped back a curiously vertical branch that was competing with a serviceberry’s central leader. Correct pruning, she said, mimicked nature: “When a tree is properly pruned, you can’t tell, because it looks natural.”
In 2013, the Harrisburg Authority (now Capital Region Water) partnered with DCNR, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Pennsylvania Urban and Community Forestry Council to commission a tree inventory for Harrisburg. (The project was the subject of a November feature in TheBurg.) By the time it was completed, in late July, the survey had identified more than 6,800 trees, along with 1,800 sites suitable for new plantings.
Cutler, in a press release before Tuesday’s event, had recited the benefits cities could expect from trees: they reduce storm runoff, increase property values, absorb carbon dioxide and, more loftily, may also reduce “stress, blight and criminal activity.” On Tuesday she suggested the project had another indirect benefit—bringing people together to take of their community.
