| • Watertown Tree News Tree People Profile: Meet Mike Micieli, Watertown's New Tree Warden Article: During the Drought, Don't Forget Watertown's Trees Article: Great Gardens are Possible in Deep Shade  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2023, 1- 3 PM  Watertown residents!  Please make time on Saturday afternoon to come hear about
our city's preparations for climate change -- and why protecting
and improving our urban forest is a vitally necessary part of
that planning.
This will be an in-person event at the
Watertown Free Public Library at 123 Main Street.
Light refreshments will be served.
All are welcome!
 SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 2021, 10 - noon a free Symposium on TREES & CLIMATE CHANGE IN WATERTOWN Did you miss the symposium? Read about it here You can watch it on YouTube here TFW, the Watertown Environment and Energy Efficiency Committee, and your friends and neighbors joined together to hear and discuss presentations on how important trees are in helping make our city liveable in a weirding climate, and practical things we can do to grow our community forest and to help our trees thrive! Click here for more information from the Symposium. Help Re-Green Watertown by requesting a public shade tree in front of your home! Click here to learn more. Held Wednesday, November 11, 2020, 6 - 7:30 pm A community welcome to Gregory Mosman, MCA Watertown's new Forestry Supervisor-Tree Warden at TFW's 2020 Annual Meeting! See the TFW Calendar for a link to the Zoom recording.
Special Community Event Saturday, March 23, 2019, 10am - noon Watertown Free Public Library TREES & CLIMATE CHANGE IN WATERTOWN How can trees help us, now and in the future? What can you do? How can Watertown assist you? Please come join the Watertown Environment and Energy Efficiency Committee, Watertown Faces Climate Change, TFW, and your friends and neighbors on March 23 at the Library for this event! 
Here's the T4T 2018 team!  The Summer 2018 program was a great experience for the teens and tremendously helpful for Watertown. Please take a look at the T4T 2018 Final Report to see what our hardworking 2018 T4T interns did and learned, and a list of the many Watertown community contributors, companies, and programs whose support made our 2018 program possible! Interested in learning more about this program, for instance how to apply, or how to support it? Click on the photo above to go to the Teens for Trees website.  February 2018: TFW is delighted to continue this paid internship opportunity for Watertown teens in Summer 2018. This is chance for students to contribute to Watertown, learning about the benefits of urban shade trees along with ways to meet the important challenges of ensuring a healthy urban forest. With input from arboricultural experts, an expanded group of teens will be helping support Watertown's urban forest in a variety of creative ways, including inventorying Watertown's public shade trees, providing watering and minor maintenance to new tree plantings, and developing creative ways to engage and educate their fellow Watertown citizens. Planning and fundraising for the 2018 program is under way. We do need financial support to expand this program! Interested in applying to this exciting program or in finding out more? Visit the TFW Teens for Trees website!
Congratulations to this year's student winners of Trees For Watertown's Big Tree Contest! November 2017: Big healthy city shade trees are good for human health, good for the environment, and good for community well-being. TFW's Big Tree Contest gives Watertown students in Grades K through 8 an opportunity to win a prize for reporting the biggest Watertown tree they can find, with a focus on six specific tree species each year. The biggest entry reported for each species wins a gift certificate to Belmont Book Store.
Lily Finton with the winning 65" diameter Linden at 24 Garfield Street Congratulations to the following four students for reporting the most impressive specimens of four contest species this year: Cameron Burke from Cuniff School found a 63" diameter maple tree at 17 Nyack Street, Lily Finton from Hosmer School found a 65" diameter linden tree at 24 Garfield Street, Liiana Ng from the 3rd grade at Hosmer School found a 58" diameter oak tree on the Hosmer playground, and Ryland Schrader from Hosmer School found a 54" diameter sycamore on Casey Playground. Three more students won Honorable Mentions for finding impressive trees that were not on this year's contest list but are nevertheless worth noting. Nairi Davidian from the Lowell School found a 49" diameter willow tree at 239 Edenfield Avenue; Caleb Kaufman from the Cuniff School found a 34" diameter spruce tree in Ridgelawn Cemetery, and Annabel Sasser from the Atrium School found a giant beech measuring 79" in diameter at 249 Common Street. Annabel also found a huge rare pignut hickory tree at 183 Common Street. Next year the Big Tree Contest will be back. Tell your kids to get ready for next year's contest by keeping an eye out for big beautiful trees in Watertown! Trees for Watertown is a non-profit volunteer citizen group dedicated to caring for our community and environment by making sure Watertown neighborhoods are beautified and protected by healthy shade trees, now and long into the future. TFW's inaugural 2017 Teen Tree Stewardship Summer Program August 2017: Watertown's Teen Tree Stewards put together a downloadable Tree Identification Guide to 11 common Watertown shade trees, with interesting facts about each species. Click to see the color booklet! Read this excellent August 2 Watertown News article by Charlie Breitrose about our Teen Tree Stewardship Program. And here's another excellent article about TTSP: August 11 in the Boston Sunday Globe, by Sophia Eppolito. July 2017: With grant support from the Watertown Community Foundation and Trees for Watertown, a team of six local teens are learning how trees grow and how to care for trees, are discovering the many vital benefits city trees provide, and are exploring ways to help Watertown's trees and to share what they learn with the Watertown community. For program info contact David Meshoulam: david.meshoulam@gmail.com  Above: the Team with Program Coordinator David Meshoulam (4th from left) and Nature Conservancy Presenter Rachel Holmes (holding the Team Tshirt) at the Healthy Trees, Healthy Cities training conducted by Ms. Holmes on July 13. January, 2017: Trees for Watertown has a Facebook page!  June 30, 2015: Watertown Town Council unanimously approved the following tree-protective language in Watertown's Design Guidelines: Design must allow for proposed trees to grow to their mature size. Planning documents should specify measures to ensure that there is sufficient space for water penetration and root growth and that the location is appropriate to the mature size of the proposed tree. This formal acknowledgement of the importance of trees as critical green infrastructure is a real first, a watershed moment for Watertown. Now to make sure Watertown can follow through! May, 2015: TFW planted the last three Osage Orange trees from our Grove Street tree nursery into fairly harsh street sites. This is the second phase in our experiment to see whether this hardy tree species does well as an urban street tree. This is also an experiment with bare-root street tree planting. As of May 2015 the five Osage Oranges planted in Spring 2014 were doing excellently under the care of their neighborhood tree stewards. September, 2014: Contractors for the MassDOT Trapelo Road/ Belmont Street Corridor Project continued to explicitly violate the excellent comprehensive tree protections in the MassDOT contract for this work, despite repeated alerts to MassDOT and Belmont. The result has been severe and continuing tree damage.  Crushing and tearing injuries to roots and root suffocation due to soil compaction are insidious. Loss of structural roots will destabilize the tree. Depending on the extent of loss of feeder roots and of opportunistic infection, it may take several seasons for healthy trees to show decline - long after the contractors have packed up and left. This is why protective measures are so important. CLICK HERE to go to a photo album of MassDOT Project damage to Belmont trees. On Saturday, April 5, 2014, TFW transplanted five Osage Orange trees from the Grove Street Community Garden tree nursery to street sites where neighboring citizens have volunteered to water them. Big thanks for a successful effort go to Watertown's Tree Warden Chris Hayward and Leo's Landscaping for preparing the planting sites, to our hard-working TFW transplant team, and to our volunteer neighborhood tree stewards! Here's the new Standish St. Osage Orange with two of its neighbor tree stewards.  TFW's Osage Orange saplings spent three years in TFW's tree nursery. See how tall they were in Fall 2013! These trees were transplanted to sites on Watertown streets in Spring, 2014. We'll update you on how they do.
TOPIC: WATERTOWN YOUNG-TREE SURVEY (Completed in 2014) Ready to help out by visiting a few of your neighborhood street trees with a list of items to check? Please contact TFW to learn how you can help! Here's a useful pamphlet on an easily-preventable problem for many young street-planted trees.
TOPIC: TREE PLANTING TO HONOR LONG-TIME WATERTOWN ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST JANET BUNBURY  On a sunny Saturday in October 2012, Trees for Watertown, the Church of the Good Shepherd, and several dozen friends and appreciators of Janet Bunbury joined Janet and her family on the front lawn at the Church, to plant a handsome "Valley Forge" elm in her honor. With good care and a bit of luck, this lovely shade tree will grace Mount Auburn Street for the next couple hundred years. CLICK HERE to link to a text of the wonderful Blessing of the Janet Bunbury Elm by Pastor Amy McCreath. CLICK HERE to link to an album of pictures from the event.
TOPIC: TFW GROWS A NEW TREE VARIETY TO GROW ON WATERTOWN'S STREETS In Spring, 2011, TFW and Mount Auburn Cemetary collaborated to plant "whips" of Osage Orange 'White Shield', a thornless, fruitless variety of this tough and handsome tree, in Mount Auburn Cemetery's tree nursery, to grow until they were tall enough to be planted out on the street. Look how tall and healthy these seedlings were just seven months later!
In Spring, 2012, in order to make room for construction of a new greenhouse in the Cemetary, the little trees were transplanted across the street into a bed in the new Grove Street Community Garden, where they have spent a growing season re-establishing their root systems. We are now looking for good sites for this test variety of street tree. Suggestions are welcome!
TOPIC: REACTIONS AGAINST UTILITY PRUNING DAMAGE TO SHADE TREE CANOPY  Boston.com/yourtown, September 18, 2011More towns consider municipal electrical utilities after long NSTAR Irene outages Boston.com/yourtown, October 3, 2010 More NSTAR complaints south of Boston Boston.com/yourtown, August 11, 2010 NSTAR to halt pruning in Watertown - again Wicked Local Watertown, August 11, 2010 Watertown Town Council votes unanimously to halt NSTAR utility pruning Wicked Local Newton, August 10, 2010 Newton puts a hold on NSTAR pruning WCTV "Voices Near and Far" interview, August 4, 2010 Host Eileen McKlusky interviews TFW President Ruth Thomasian Watertown Tree Warden memo, August 5, 2010 Recommended changes in utility pruning protocol Wicked Local Watertown, August 2, 2010 NSTAR to continue pruning Watertown trees RELATED ARTICLE Enterprise News, Lexington, Aug 27, 2009 NStar Must Provide Real Reason for Outages Boston.com/yourtown, August 2, 2010 Arlington to residents: report NSTAR pruning to police Watertown Residents Vote 88% In Favor of Town Placing Restrictions on Pruning Watertown Tab & Press Poll, July 2010 Town of Watertown web site, July 30, 2010 NSTAR will resume pruning August 9 Boston.com/yourtown , July 21, 2010 Arlington: NSTAR suspends pruning after complaints WickedLocal.com/Maynard, July 16, 2010 Maynard: NSTAR suspends pruning after complaints Watertown Tab&Press, July 9, 2010 LTE: NSTAR gets away with more in Watertown Boston.com/news/local, July 8, 2010 NStar puts a hold on tree pruning Watertown Tab&Press, July 2, 2010 NSTAR halts tree pruning in Watertown Boston.com/yourtown, July 1, 2010 NSTAR agrees to temporary halt to tree pruning in Watertown Watertown Tab&Press, June 25, 2010 NSTAR pruning crews are damaging trees in Watertown Watertown Tab&Press, June 25, 2010 Letter from Watertown resident Joel Hencken to Lucas Trees
TOPIC: ASIAN LONG-HORNED BEETLE  Download TFW's ALB flyerBeetle FAQ's http://www.beetlebusters.info/ WGBH-TV Channel 2/HD, August 15, 2010 LURKING IN THE TREES: Special Broadcast on ALB, Sunday, August 13, 1 pm Boston.com/yourtown, July 15, 2010 No new ALB have been found in Boston, but search continues Boston.com/news, July 11, 2010 Worcester: a recovery takes root Boston.com/news, July 6, 2010 Asian Longhorned Beetle discovered near Arnold Arboretum in Boston (includes video) |
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Topic: The Arsenal Apartments Courtyard will stay!  Gilbane Development Company, Rhode Island-based manager of Watertown's Arsenal Apartments housing for senior and disabled residents, intended to convert a tree-shaded central courtyard into a parking lot. At a hearing on September 14, 2011, the Watertown Planning Board voted unanimously not to approve the project. Gilbane subsequently withdrew its petition for Zoning Board approval, which was required for the project to go forward. CLICK HERE to see the presentation from Arsenal Apartments residents to the Planning Board in defense of the Courtyard. CLICK HERE to see a slide show illustrating the value of this beautiful courtyard.
TOPIC: WHAT IS A TREE WORTH? In May, 2011, Trees for Watertown sponsored a moderated public conversation at the Watertown Public Library. Seven speakers gave 5-minute slide show presentations on the value of trees from the perspectives of their professions: energy conservation, real estate, public health, arboriculture, and religious guidance, as well as from the vantage points of a Watertown parent of young children and a Watertown town councilor. The discussion continued afterward with questions and comments from interested members of the public. You can watch the full event on YouTube. The presentations begin at about 12 minutes into Part I (of 4). Total duration: 110 minutes CLICK HERE to watch the video on YouTube CLICK HERE to download a one-page description of the event CLICK HERE to download the panelists' slides (3 MB PDF) including resources & web sites the panelists recommend |
| • Reports and Documents The Successful Tree Planting Initiative is a series of articles from the Massachusetts Urban & Community Forestry Program detailing how to improve urban shade tree survival. (Quick summary: plant them right!) Here are links to these hugely informative articles. Part I Conducting a Site Assessment Part II Tree Selection Part III Tree Establishment Occasional TFW articles in the Watertown Tab & Press give quick, easy-to-read information about best practices for urban home landscapes. You can link to published articles here: Part I What's So Bad About Leaf Blowers? Part II What's So Bad About "Mulch Volcanoes"? Part III What's So Great About a Shade Tree? Ten Major Values of Trees What a large urban street tree can do for you 22 Benefits of Urban Street Trees An illustrated brochure by Dan Burden, Senior Urban Designer. Glatting Jackson and Walkable Communities, Inc; May, 2006 |
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