Terry Flanagan: It’s Time to Kiss My Sorry White Ash Goodbye

When we moved to Geneva in 1990, we looked at homes in the then-new sub-division of Randall Square. The homes were new, but so were the trees. Not much more than saplings. You could stand directly under one of these trees and not get any shade. These poor twigs barely even cast a shadow.

I suppose we could have bought in Randall Square and waited for those tiny trees to grow. But I wanted a house with mature trees, and so we looked in the older neighborhoods of Geneva. We settled on a house in Pepper Valley that had six trees, all of which, except one, were as tall as or taller than the house. Growing up in the city, trees were a luxury usually limited to parks and parkways and larger homes. We didn’t have a tree in the yard of the apartment building where we lived, so I did my tree climbing a block away in the parkway. We were fortunate to have a parkway that close.

I’ve been fond of trees all of my life. As kids, the parkway was our Sherwood Forest where we played Robin Hood. Sometimes it was a jungle where we played Tarzan or Bomba the Jungle Boy. In the autumn we’d build up a huge pile of leaves beneath our favorite climbing tree and hang from a branch above the pile and drop into it. In the weeks before Christmas, we would play in neighborhood Christmas tree lots, pretending we were lost in a deep, dark forest. At least until the lot operators would see us and chase us out.

Obviously, I no longer play Bomba the Jungle Boy, at least not while the neighbors are watching. But I still have a fondness for trees. Sometimes I’ll lie back in the summer and just look up through the tops of the trees and catch a glimpse of the bright, blue summer sky through the branches as the trees gently sway in the wind. They seem to be so much taller looking up at them that way.

Sometimes I catch sight of a nest of one of the many birds that take shelter in the trees. Occasionally whole flocks of birds will perch on one of the trees outside our bedroom window and chatter away while the cat attempts to “talk” to them in strange guttural sounds. Then as quickly as they came, they’ll all fly away at once.

This time of year is probably when I like trees the most. Over the next few weeks, the trees will slowly transform into a dazzling array of red, yellow, gold, and all of the colors in between. I know that eventually those brilliantly colored leaves will turn brown and fall to the ground for me to rake up. But I really don’t mind raking so much, considering all we get from the trees—shade, shelter from the elements, homes for the birds, fragrant white and yellow blossoms in the spring, brilliant colors in the autumn, and piles of leaves for kids to play in before the icy blasts of winter arrive.

So it’s sad to have to say good-bye to two of our trees this year. The apple tree has been in decline for a number of years and no longer bears any edible fruit. The leaves start to fall earlier each year. Apples fall before ever ripening, and we find half-eaten apples lying all over the yard, attracting yellow jackets and probably the neighborhood skunk, as well. We could do expensive deep-root treatments every year, but there are no guarantees that it would help. So we’ve finally decided that the apple tree must go.

The white ash out front is not doing too well, either. Although we haven’t seen any definite evidence of the emerald ash borer, it does exhibit some of the signs, including two large dead limbs, dying leaves, and sprouts near the trunk. One of the neighbors did have an infestation, and our tree is well within the flight range of the borer. We could try treatments, but results have been mixed and don’t seem to be as effective for larger trees. The emerald ash borer infestation is a tragedy on so many levels.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that 8 billion trees with a compensatory value of $282 billion have potentially been infested. As of 2009, federal and state agencies were spending $29.5 million annually to manage the ash borer population.

For now, management has been pretty much limited to establishing quarantine areas, including our own Kane County. Treatment with pesticide has not been proven to be effective in all cases, even under similar circumstances. And even the reduced risk insecticides recommended for treatment of EAB, such as imidacloprid, used in some flea- and tick-control products for pets, are mildly toxic to mammals. Scientists are working on biological controls using three forms of parasites that attack EAB eggs in Asian ash trees, where the borer is native. Tests with these parasites appear promising. However, it takes a great deal of time and manpower to cultivate these parasites. Hopefully, they’ll have it figured out before we lose all of our ash trees.

So this year we will have two less trees to rake up after. We’ll look for replacements like the little saplings we saw growing in Randall Square many years ago. I don’t expect we’ll be around to see those trees reach full maturity.

But they’ll be here when the next young family comes along looking for a place with tall trees, a place where they can raise their kids and watch them jump in the leaf piles on bright, sunny autumn days.