Crews are plucking tree in poor condition from a pit with giant claw. The replacement tree is a ginko. [photo] Downtown parking meter heads are bagged with white green fair hoods to keep people from parking on-street for tonight’s event, which starts at 6 p.m.
Stories indexed with the term ‘tree’
Pontiac & Argo
Hi! [smiley face rendered in snow on tree] [photo]
Tapping Ann Arbor’s Sap
Sap starts to flow from a metal spile on a sugar maple tree at County Farm Park. The hump midway along the spile provides a place to hook your bucket and collect the sap.
A brutally cold wind buffets the group huddled around a sugar maple at the Washtenaw County Farm Park. They’re looking at a small metal device that’s been gently hammered into a hole drilled in the tree. Faye Stoner, a park naturalist for the county, sounds doubtful. “It’s probably too cold,” she says.
But wait – a kid in the group cries out: “It dripped … it dripped!” And sure enough, a globule slowly rolls off the end of the spout.
The maple sap is rising, and two dozen very cold people are learning about what Stoner calls “a gift from nature.” [Full Story]
Where Are Ann Arbor’s Trees?
That stick is no ordinary ruler. It's called a Biltmore stick, and has a scale that allows the user to sight the outside limits of a tree's diameter from a single point of view.
On Thursday near 7th and Madison streets, The Chronicle noticed a guy wearing a bright yellow vest with electronic gear and some sort of measuring stick. We had a pretty good idea what it was about, having recently reported on city council’s approval of a $243,500 contract with Davey Resource Group for a GIS-based inventory of trees in the public right-of-way as well as in parks.
Marcia Higgins, one of two councilmembers for Ward 4, had cast the lone vote against the contract, and had explained at Sunday night caucus two weeks later that she would prefer to see the money for the project, which is coming out of the storm water fund, spent directly on storm water. She also wondered if the work could be completed more cost-effectively as a Boy Scout service project.
It’s not Boy Scouts who are doing the work, but rather four guys from Davey Resource Group. One of them is Wes, the guy in the yellow vest, who chatted with us as he took down a couple of trees’ vital statistics: height, trunk diameter, type (genus and species), condition, and location. [Full Story]