Koerth: The city cut branches off my favorite climbing tree, so I asked why

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I don’t like your favorite tree. Look, it’s nothing personal. You just have bad taste. The ideal tree, obviously, is one that facilitates climbing. It has thick branches stretching out long and low to the ground. The ideal tree is also tall, because it’s fun to scramble up high, and it has enough branches to bring your friends up behind you. All of this means the ideal tree, of course, is a pine.

Now you may disagree. Perhaps you are one of the many people who erroneously believe falling pine needles kill grass by making the soil too acidic. (If the grass is dead under a pine, the real culprit is likely those luxuriant branches that are a touch too effective at creating shelter against both sun and rain.) Or maybe you’re just a weirdo who has a problem with sap.

But whatever the reason, you’re wrong. And I’m right. But I am not without humility. I know everyone loves their favorite tree and could praise it and defend it just as faithfully and earnestly as I do my own. Each person’s favorite tree is the best — to them. Even the cottonwood fans have honest hearts. “I love how their leaves rustle in the wind,” said Danielle Schumerth, forestry outreach coordinator for the Minneapolis parks department. “I understand it can be an issue for a lot of people, but I even love seeing the cotton fly. Like it’s snowing in summertime.”

Yes, trees are necessary, solid, respectable and sometimes even beloved. But they are not free from controversy. And in the city, they don’t just happen to grow by luck or by chance. Every tree planted in an urban forest represents a choice that somebody made, a goal they had in mind, or a feature they liked and wanted to have around. When those trees are watered, trimmed and cared for … those actions are also steeped in deliberate choices and specific desires. And every decision has the potential to be a hot take.

That’s because all those individual choices and desires — the trees we want, and what we want from them — are frequently in conflict. Even something as simple as shade can be a sticking point. Construction workers and city arborists often butt heads over this, Schumerth told me, when the workers want to park equipment under a tree’s canopy and lean their tools against its trunk. The benefit to the crew is obvious — a shady spot on a hot summer day. But the arborists have to constantly be the buzzkill because their primary concern is making sure the dirt around the tree’s base doesn’t become so compacted that the roots beneath starve to death.

The tensions about trees — and how best to use them — become even more fraught when you have to set public policy somewhere between a trunk and a hard place. Everybody has an opinion. Only one group gets to set the rules.

I learned this not long ago when I went to North Commons Park to visit my favorite Tree Friend and found its lower branches lopped off, the round wounds oozing coagulated sap. When I think of a specific best pine for my own specific climbing, this was it. The Tree Friend had one long, low branch that skimmed the ground and then curled back up again, a cozy arm to lean into while I watched my kids hoist themselves up the ladder of branches into the canopy.

This tree had carried us through COVID distance-learning recess, directionless summer days and quiet evening walks. And now it was disarmed. In fact, the same thing had happened to all the trees in the park. In one fell swoop, they’d been turned into a herd of shaved cats — long naked bodies with a poof at the top. Undignified.

But it’s all very by-the-book. Minneapolis Park Board forestry policy is to keep trees in areas where people run and play pruned high so the trees grow a canopy over open parkland, said Jeremy Barrick, assistant superintendent of environmental stewardship. That way, trees don’t get in the way of people and people are less likely to damage trees. With fewer than 75 arborists and 55,000 park trees, that often means an efficient process of trimming all the trees in one park at the same time.

Of course, trimming trees into high branch canopies makes them a lot harder to shimmy up. Barrick described this as an “added benefit.” All things considered, the city would really rather you not recreationally climb trees.

Now, I’m opposed to that. Personally, I think climbing is one of the things trees are for. I have been going up them my whole life to sit, to read, to think. I’m 43 years old and still, on occasion, find myself leaning into the branches of some tree and lifting my feet off the ground, however ungracefully. I see the trees as a friend I want to hang out with. The arborists, on the other hand, tend to see them more as patients. “You notice when something isn’t quite right when you pass them on the road, [like the] injuries our poor boulevard trees get from lawn mowers and cars,” Schumerth said. “Once you learn about those things you can’t unsee them.”

These are two different ways of loving nature, two different sets of values about how people and trees ought to interact. Where I see freedom and joy and a connection to the sky, the Park Board arborists see a safety hazard to humans — and a risk to the delicate flesh of the tree just below the bark, the only part of it that is truly alive. To be honest, I’m not totally sure how to characterize this conflict. Is it a battle between overly cautious bureaucracy and pagan joy? Or does tree climbing pit caring shepherds against the equivalent of drunk teenagers daring each other to tip a cow? Am I the baddie?

Probably not completely. As evidence, I present the fact that this same Park Board also hosts climbing workshops for kids at public school festivals. This is a tame sort of tree climbing, with helmets and harnesses, and ropes that are carefully cushioned from rubbing too much against the tree. But I think it’s also a bit of an admission that important relationships are born when people and trees hold each other and take a few risks; that we need to find ways to simultaneously protect physical bodies and nourish souls. And if we can do that, maybe there are other arboreal conflicts we can solve, too. Who knows? Maybe there’s even a way to balance the practical demands of allergy sufferers with the beauty of a summer snowfall.