Each year, city Arborist Susan French measures thousands of trees across Virginia Beach with the help of a long pole and a co-worker.
Her measuring stick reaches as high as many of the city’s wooden giants, so high that French needs the other worker to stand back several yards to take the readings. It can take hours to measure a neighborhood, some of which have “hundreds and hundreds of trees,” she said.
The city’s two arborists record them all, from Pungo to Bayside, taking notes along the way.
When they’re done, the arborists begin asking each other questions. Which neighborhoods have the most trees? How old are they? Are any hiding street lights or stop signs? Encroaching on sidewalks? Power-lines? What are the branches like? How many requests for pruning came from this area vs. that one?
The answers help them create a prioritized list, which goes to a contractor, who heads out with pruners and chainsaws to hundreds of targets. This year they’ve trimmed more than 1,500 trees in city right of ways as part of the program, with the Lago Mar neighborhood next up, according to French.
The initiative, called the Cyclical Residential Tree Maintenance program, costs about $50,000 annually. It began in 2015 and marks the city’s first effort to proactively protect Virginia Beach’s urban forest. Previously, all efforts had been reactive, such as removing fallen limbs, according to city documents and French.
Regular pruning can prevent problems by stopping tree limbs from creeping in front of signs, blocking paths or cloaking street lights, said Symsi Houser, operations coordinator for the city’s Landscape Management Division.
“Trees can get unruly without training,” Houser said. “Kinda like my kids.”
Empsy Munden, president of the Cape Story by the Sea Civic League, said that was the case in her neck of the woods before French sent contractors over. Her neighborhood was “kinda scraggly looking” before the city chopped some limbs away, she said.
The only time the live oak or pine trees there were pruned before was after a big storm knocked branches into bike paths or took down electrical wires.
Munden’s neighborhood was one of eight that were targeted by the program this year.
“I didn’t hear any complaints when they were done,” Munden said. “And in our neighborhood, if you don’t get any complaints, you’ve done a good job.”
Contractors can spend weeks pruning a neighborhood depending on its trees, French said. The largest neighborhood to go under the chainsaw this year was Courthouse Estates. It had more than 700 trees that needed cutting, French said by email.
Ideally, the trees would be pruned each year. But doing that citywide would require an expensive and mammoth effort, and the funding just isn’t there such an undertaking, French said. So the arborists pick the neighborhoods they think need to be pruned the most and cut their trees’ branches back extra far, knowing they don’t have the money to return for a decade or longer.
If that’s too long a wait for anyone whose neighborhood has younger and smaller trees, the city offers free pruning classes for those who want to take matters into their own hands, Houser said.
Meanwhile, you might spot French out with her pole this summer. It’s her season for measuring up the next neighborhoods that’ll get a visit from the professional pruners come winter.
Have a story idea or news tip? Contact City Hall reporter Judah Taylor at Judah@wydaily.com or 757-490-2750.
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