On a dreary Saturday in March, a few dozen people gathered on a small, square patch of grass in the Union-Miles neighborhood, near Inez Killingsworth Plaza. Rain the night before had left the ground wet and perfect for their mission, planting about 25 trees.
Most of the people assembled were volunteers. The event was the final stage of training for a tree steward program run by Western Reserve Land Conservancy. They gathered around Devon Range, a community forester with the conservancy. Range demonstrated the proper way to help a young tree make the transition from the pot in which it spent its life to that point to a permanent home in the soil.
One thing was clear: there is a right way to do this, and a lot of wrong ways.
As the volunteers split off into teams to get digging, Tom Schrieber, senior manager of community forestry, walked around observing and offering guidance. Frequently, he knelt to loosen compacted roots of the saplings or to assess the depth of the hole and spread wood chips so that would retain water in the soil but not cover the uppermost roots and prevent them from getting enough oxygen. This is a common mistake.
Improperly planted trees can survive, but they’re less likely to thrive — and in Cleveland that matters. The city needs every branch and leaf it can get.
In 2015, the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability worked with partners to produce Cleveland’s first modern tree plan. The plan came with a warning: The city’s tree canopy — the percentage of land covered by trees when viewed from above — had dwindled to 19%, or about half the size of Pittsburgh’s and Cincinnati’s.
A decade later, the canopy is even smaller. But that was practically inevitable — there are no quick fixes — and it’s not for lack of effort. The Cleveland Tree Plan was the rare government-sponsored report that spurred immediate and sustained action. It led to the launch of the Cleveland Tree Coalition, which now has dozens of member organizations from the public and private sectors. A few years later, City Council revived the Cleveland Tree Commission, an advisory board that had been inactive for almost two decades. (It’s since been renamed the Urban Forestry Commission.)
The problem is that all the same forces that decimated Cleveland’s tree canopy are still at play, and no amount of work or funding or need can make a tree grow faster.
People leading the effort to reforest the city know and accept that progress will be hard to see for a very long time. That this is the work of generations.
“Maybe I’m tilting at windmills,” said Schrieber in an interview. “But I’m tilting, right? Planting a tree is an act of hope.”
What happened to the Forest City?
Cleveland has clung to its moniker “The Forest City” even as it’s become harder to find the large swaths of shade and fruit trees that William Case promoted planting. The businessman and horticulturalist who served briefly as mayor in the early 1850s is credited for the nickname (though so is Timothy Smead, a newspaper editor). Nearly 80 years after Case’s death, an official count in 1940 put the number of trees growing on city property at more than 220,000.
Today there are around 90,000, according to the city’s Division of Urban Forestry.
The culprits? “Development, disease and old age,” according to the Cleveland Tree Coalition’s 2023 strategic plan. That report estimated annual losses at 99 acres of canopy. That’s the equivalent of about 10 Public Squares lost each year from a canopy that’s about the size of 705 Public Squares.
That loss might seem manageable until you come to this statement later in the report: Newly planted trees will not have “any measurable impact” until after 2040.
Why do trees matter?
The research is overwhelming: People who live where there are lots of trees tend to be happier, healthier and wealthier. Trees provide relief from heat and lower utility bills and stress levels. They also promote better drainage, safer roads, more successful business districts and higher home values.
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The 2015 tree plan estimated that the canopy in Cleveland provided city dwellers with more than $28 million in services. Those services include removing tens of thousands of tons of pollution and carbon dioxide from the air each year. That alone is a major impact in a city considered an “asthma capital.”
“We’ve looked at cities and urbanized areas all over the world,” said Rich Cochrane, president and CEO of Western Reserve Land Conservancy, in a 2015 TED Talk. “The common denominator of success happens to be a healthy tree canopy, and the common denominator of distress happens to be the lack of trees. It’s remarkably consistent all over the world.”
The solution — plant more trees and take better care of the ones we have — is both straightforward and exceedingly challenging.
Challenge: A history of unfortunate tree choices
The emerald ash borer is a shiny green beetle native to a few Asian countries. There, its larvae feast on the insides of old ash trees in poor health. But in North America they happily and efficiently chew through the vascular systems of healthy trees like writhing little Pac Men, leaving the tree unable to transport water and nutrients up from the soil. Branches dry out and break off and eventually the whole tree collapses.
Emerald ash borers were first discovered in the U.S. in Michigan in 2002, probably after hitching a ride on wooden shipping pallets. They spread to Northwest Ohio the following year and to Cuyahoga County by 2006. When Jennifer Kipp took over as Cleveland’s urban forestry manager in 2013, the emerald ash borer crisis was well under way, a slow-moving natural disaster.
Her first task was to come up with a plan to address the 7,000 ash trees that were growing on tree lawns and rights of way, she recalled in an interview.
She presented city leaders with three options: use a new, unproven and expensive treatment on all ash trees; treat some trees and remove and replace others; or remove and replace all of them. The city opted for the least expensive option, removing all the trees quickly and planning to replace them later. Some still have not been replaced. (The Urban Forestry Division is focused almost exclusively on maintenance, not planting.)
“We had streets where the whole street, both sides, was ash trees,” Kipp said. “So for those residents in those neighborhoods and communities, it was really tragic. In some areas they still have not been replaced.”
This wasn’t the first time that vast swaths of Cleveland’s urban forest were felled by contamination. Chestnut blight, a fungus, claimed many chestnut trees in the early 1900s. Many of those chestnuts were replaced with elms, which were nearly wiped out by Dutch elm disease starting in the 1930s. (Northeast Ohio was ground zero thanks to a shipment of lumber from Europe.) That culling was followed by the widespread planting of ash trees.
Each of those tree types were planted widely in many cities because they can tolerate urban conditions — including pollution, salt and compacted soil — better than most other species. The effects of those decisions, all logical at the time, are still felt today.
The silver maple is another species that adapts well to cities, and it grows rapidly, and that’s why its popularity soared after World War II. Kipp calls it “the rock star of the tree world — it lives fast and dies young.” The trade-off for growing so fast is that its branches are weaker, and that’s a problem in a place that gets a lot of wind, snow and ice.
In the 1980s or ’90s, the Callery pear became “the next big tree,” Kipp said. Originating in China and Vietnam, the tree had been popular in the U.S. since the early 1900s but became a city go-to because it stands up well to adverse conditions like heat, salt and drought. (One even survived the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center.) But their branches are weak and they spread faster than native trees with help from the birds who eat the fruit. Kipp stopped planting them in 2017, and the state declared them invasive and banned them in 2023.[FL2]
Modern arborists have learned from this history of calamities and now strive for a diverse urban forest, Kipp said. The rule of thumb is no more than 10% of the same species and no more than 30% from the same family. Diversity mitigates the damage that the next invasive insect or disease can inflict.
“Maybe I’m tilting at windmills. But I’m tilting, right? Planting a tree is an act of hope.”
Tom Schrieber, senior manager of community forestry at Western Reserve Land Conservancy
Challenge: Making up for lost time
The 2015 tree plan painted a dire picture of Cleveland’s efforts up to that point. The report included an assessment of the city’s performance on 25 indicators of a sustainable urban forest. Cleveland earned the lowest grade in 18 of them.
A maintenance backlog was mentioned more than a dozen times. City workers “touched” less than 2% of the trees on city property per year, the report said.
The work of catching up continues to this day. At the April meeting of the Urban Forestry Commission, Kipp provided an update on pruning, which is important both for a tree’s health and for preventing damage or injury from falling branches.
“We would like to be ideally on a five- to seven-year pruning cycle,” Kipp said. “Right now, we’re on a 26 [year cycle].”
In addition to working through the backlog, Kipp and her team are taking steps to lighten the load on the people who will succeed them someday. That starts with young tree training, which is careful pruning in the first few years after planting to encourage the tree to grow more up than out. As it matures, a properly trained tree will better withstand storms and require less maintenance.
The city used grant funding this year to prune about 1,500 trees that were planted in 2020 and ’21. And going forward, the city’s contracts with the private companies that provide tree maintenance will include five years of young tree training, up from three. The upfront cost — a few hundred dollars per tree — will be more than offset by the future savings, Kipp said.
“It’s really important that we don’t plant a tree and walk away, that we invest for at least five years to get it established,” she said. “It’s low cost, big impact.”
Challenge: Shade is not evenly distributed
Samira Malone grew up in Central, one of the Cleveland neighborhoods with the lowest percentage of tree canopy. Even as a kid she knew this was wrong, she just didn’t know why. She got answers while studying urban planning at Cleveland State University.
One of those answers: Historically planners have not come from, lived in or sought input from residents like Malone and her neighbors. Another answer: Those communities are often the closest to factories, highways and other major sources of pollution, which affects the health of trees growing there as well as of the people living there.
“I saw this immense need for prioritization of environmental justice in communities like mine,” Malone said, “but it needed to have people who are from those communities at the helm of it.”
Malone oversees urban forestry work at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. But before that she was the first full-time director of the Cleveland Tree Coalition. She took on that role in 2022, after the city had begun to prioritize factors including health and economic demographics when deciding how to allocate resources.
“I saw this immense need for prioritization of environmental justice in communities like mine. But it needed to have people who are from those communities at the helm of it.”
Samira Malone, director of urban forestry initiatives at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network
One part of that shift included developing training programs like the Community Forestry Corps, which teaches young people how to plant and care for trees. Today, the Cleveland Tree Coalition is in the early stages of building a pipeline from programs like that to careers in green infrastructure. Aspiring arborists need three years of work experience before they can even take the certification exam, said Sara Tillie, current director of the coalition.
“Workforce development” is a priority moving forward, Tillie said.
When planting in Cleveland, Western Reserve Land Conservancy works with local partners. The event in March in Union-Miles was coordinated with the NuPoint Community Development Corp. WRLC’s tree steward program prioritizes applications from residents of the Cleveland communities it’s focusing on for planting: Slavic Village, Mount Pleasant, Union-Miles, Buckeye-Shaker, Buckeye-Woodhill, Detroit Shoreway and Cudell.
Devon Range, the WRLC forester who led the training at the Union-Miles planting, got his start in the steward program. The appeal of the work, he said, was looking around at the end of a day like that and seeing that the land “has a whole new character to it.”
“It’s a totally different space after the trees are in the ground,” he said.
Challange: A long way to go to grow the tree canopy
In 2018, the city and Cleveland Tree Coalition set a goal of enlarging the tree canopy from 18% to 30% by 2040.
To meet the goal, about 28,000 new trees would need to be planted each year. The city estimates that CTC member organizations planted or distributed (through giveaway programs) about 41,000 trees between 2015 and 2025.
The tree coalition’s current strategic plan also lays out the other progress that’s been made since 2015: increased public and grant funding; more members in the coalition and greater coordination between them; and growing awareness — across governments, industries and communities — of the importance of engaging in this unavoidably long effort.
In the meantime, Kipp celebrates the wins. Like working with other city departments and utility companies to find ways to avoid harming trees during necessary street work and convincing a nervous resident that a healthy mature tree near her house just needs some pruning, not removal.
Sometimes she visits trees she planted, some as far back as the early 2000s, long before she was the caretaker of an entire urban forest. She explained, “I like to see them thriving.”
