The other day I was lucky enough to accompany a New York City forester into the field -- which is, in this case, the city. Our first stop was Randall's Island. As we slid out of our beat-up, overloaded minivan to oversee a 7 am tree delivery, we were greeted by a friendly fellow with dark blue eyes, disarranged white hair, work boots, and a native New Yorker's accent, who saw us and called out with a grin, "Let me guess -- you're from Central Forestry." At the time it seemed like an odd remark, because my hostess struck me as rather outside the classic mold of a forester, but it passed. We watched the trees carefully unloaded (they must not be dropped, even a little, or the damage to their roots will doom them), and chatted with the trucker, who had driven them up from Maryland that morning on a huge, tarp-covered, flatbed trailer.

I remembered the remark later, though, when I went back to the central forestry office and was struck by the youth of most of the workers there. What our greeter had meant (kindly, I believe) was that we looked like a couple of kids. Apparently, where there had recently been about five city foresters, there are now closer to thirty, many of them young. PlaNYC and MillionTreesNYC have necessitated some new growth in the Parks Department as well as in the parks themselves. And while previous city foresters were often engineers who treated trees as something like lamp posts with inconvenient roots -- I was told that many current problems with city trees can be traced back to this leftover lack of understanding -- this newer generation is generally trained in forestry, horticulture, or ecology. This means they are better able to predict the forms and needs of the trees as they grow, which will hopefully mean fewer heaving sidewalks and strangled trees in the future. This seems like a promising start to a greener New York.

But there's another, less understandable (to me) side of greening New York, which I've touched on in a previous post: with the large increase in city tree plantings has come an increase in city tree complaints -- everything from the comparatively rational desire to avoid sweeping leaves (property owners are required to do so, just as they are expected to shovel snow in winter) to odd convictions about trees being detrimental to health, and even some arbitrary, blunt malevolence toward the idea of planting trees at all. I'll be helping to catalog some of these complaints in a database, which should be equal parts frustrating and enlightening (since I really can't imagine objecting to a tree, but evidently many people do). And judging from some of the stories I've heard from the foresters, it promises to be somewhat amusing, as well.