Eva Rosenfeld
Disease and soil compaction mean the Plaza's canopy is in danger.
"I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree," the poet Joyce Kilmer wrote in his 1914 offering, "Trees."
While perhaps not the most original titlist in literary history, he had a gift for making the obvious sound plaintive and not quite so evident.
Take a stroll to Santa Fe's historic Plaza and gaze upward and you get Kilmer's drift. It's lovely. Despite their grand stature, though, the trees are not guaranteed to be there forever.
"All of those trees are struggling and there's infestation," says City Councilor Signe Lindell, whose district encompasses the Plaza. At a recent governing body meeting, she asked the city's program manager for integrated pest management to work up a status report.
Victor Lucero is that man.
A Santa Fe native who graduated from New Mexico State University with a degree in pest management, Lucero worked at Texas A&M for years before being drawn home like a moth to the proverbial flame. He's been here since 2015, managing the city's "natural-first" pest treatment policy (he's certified) and doing things like trapping insects and leading bug walks through the Railyard (he's a member of the Entomological Society of America). His office is filled with cuts from trees and a wood-and-glass case of bugs.
He has a bin of old prescription bottles and drops a pinned insect into one. About the size of a piece of orzo pasta, it's a honey locust borer. It kills its namesake trees, drilling through the bark to the soft layer underneath, blocking the flow of nutrients to stunt and eventually kill the tree.
"I started seeing adults on the tree trunks right around the first week of June [2017]," Lucero told the Municipal Tree Board last week. He's set out traps in four different spots around town and hopes to soon get a better sense of how aggressive the infestation is in Santa Fe.
There are five honey locusts on the Plaza. As of two years ago, the small-leafed, non-native species made up about a tenth of the trees on the city's signature gathering place. Because of the borer's infestation, they won't make it to maturity.
Matt Grubs
The problem is a city-wide issue. Honey locusts along Marcy Street and East Palace Avenue have been hit hard. The trees have been planted by both the City of Santa Fe and its residents. Of course, there's much more variety on the Plaza; some 16 species have sprouted or been planted in the hallowed square.
It's not just pests—European elm scale is another that causes die-back—that are killing Plaza trees. It's love.
Trees across the community gathering spot are being weakened by the city's passion for their patch of earth—"Everyone who comes to Santa Fe walks on that Plaza," Lindell says—and their canopy is shrinking. Despite having two and a half times the number of trees as Cathedral Park just a block away, the Plaza's canopy is smaller.
Some of that is to be expected, of course, as more trees means more competition for sunlight, but relative to the size of their trunks, the canopies of the Plaza trees don't indicate good health. The soil below them is severely compacted, which causes water to pool on the surface because it's harder to penetrate. What's more, the city's watering regimen is geared toward grass and not trees. Trees need longer watering, say 30 minutes of soaking, two hours off and repeat that cycle two more times in a single night.
Lucero is a pest manager, but he says the first line of defense against losing trees is finding a way to get them the nutrients they need. He and horticulturalist Tracy Neal, who serves on the tree board, point to something called vertimulching that creates a thin, deep cut in the ground that's then filled with organic material. It's a possible solution, though the city doesn't keep a tree expert on staff to provide a quick estimate of how much time or money it would take to implement.
"We're limited in what kind of chemicals we use," Lindell explains. That's by design in the progressive city, which has a pest management policy that requires it to assess cultural practices, nutrient delivery and natural pest predation before going the chemical route. But Lindell says there can be special circumstances.
"If in order to save those trees, we have to do some very special things we wouldn't typically do, I would consider supporting that," she tells SFR. And she knows exactly what kind of can she's opening when she does so. "Let me be clear, we're not talking about Roundup."
She continues, "It would be a terrible shame to let them die." The city has plenty of warning, and neither she nor Lucero are concerned about what's going to happen in the next couple of years.
"It's not like they die overnight, but they're not healthy," Lindell says. "I don't know what the timeframe is for when they get past saving, but I don't want to get there."
Kilmer, the early-20th century poet, was known for weaving religion and nature through his work. He pegged that very same problem of talking too much and waiting too long to appreciate what's right in front of—or above—us: "Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree."
