Our City Arborist

These are flowers of the tulip poplar tree. They are starting to bloom now. My younger daughter and I discovered them a little over a year ago, when we had started walking through the woods on the way to school. And so I felt great affection when Kimberly Larson told me not long ago that the City, with the advice from the City Arborist, has obtained 400 tree seedlings, a mix of loblolly pines, redbuds and tulip poplars, that the Sustainability Commission will be giving away at the Comcast Cares event this Saturday.

Of course, the whole mention of the City Arborist raised a bunch of questions for me, especially because I had seen "the City Arborist" in various documents before. So, yes, for those who are wondering, we do have a City Arborist. Howard Koontz wears the dual hat of City Planner/City Arborist. After being graduated as a journalism major, he worked in the family landscaping business for ten years and achieved noted industry-recognized certifications. He realized that landscaping was being brought to the table by developers at the end of the process, in many cases (as Howard told me, "Landscaping and fire extiguishers were always the last things to be added.") He wanted to be able to have an impact earlier and thus decided to pursue a masters degree in city and regional planning. He has worked as a planner at the City of Roswell and the City of Norcross before joining us here in Dunwoody, where his landscaping background is being put to good use as well.

The City Arborist is responsible for the urban tree canopy in Dunwoody (trees do lots of good things for a City, by the way, including reducing the "heat island effect"). He is the chief administrator of the tree protection and tree replacement ordinance. Primarily, he consults on public trees in right-of-ways or those that are diseased or threatened, as well as the installation of new trees. (And, no, he does not offer advice about trees on private property!)

The City is currently working on a No Net Loss of Trees Policy and is pursuing Tree City USA designation, two measures from the ARC Green Community certification checklist with which the Sustainability Commission is helping (here is the City's spreadsheet indicating the order in which these measures are being pursued, plus the Q1 report of measures already achieved). I, personally, am interested in the possible inclusion of a designated fruit tree on the City list of allowable trees in public spaces, since many cities on the path to sustainability are including these in their local food system plans. Howard and I both recognize the challenge of this, since fruit trees can get diseased and can cause a mess if not managed correctly. I have much more research to do on this, but I just want you to know that other cities are doing it and it would be worth a bit of research to see if there were a way it would work on some small scale for our city as well.

If you do get a seedling Saturday, please plan to get it in the ground by Sunday morning. The window of opportunity for spring tree planting is just about closed. Oh, and in the spirit of managing expectations, these things are pretty much sticks--let's put it this way, Howard has 400 of them on ice in two coolers. Not big. But big on potential.