Celebrating a Tree-mendous Life

So this past Monday, Patch joined Bruce Stuart, vice-president of the Udalls Cove Preservation committee, on a dendrochronoligical expedition to the recently cut down scarlet oak tree along Douglaston Parkway, in the hopes of decoding a little bit of the area's past.

"Reading the rings of a tree, you can see all types of neat things about its environment and its life." Stuart said.

Stuart then briefly talked through the science of dendrochronology, standing over the once great oak, counting its many rings.

"Each [tree ring] results from the change in growth between one season to the next. A wider ring points out a year the tree flourished. Shorter ones indicate the years it didn't grow as well." Stuart said. 

Looking down upon the stump he continued.

"For instance, as I'm counting the rings of this tree I can tell that thick healthy rings towards the center, and there are about 100 of them, meant that for about the first hundred year this tree was flourishing," Stuart said, as he dated the tree back to 1830.

Walking 80 rings from the edge of the scarlet oak, to approximately the period of growth that occurred around 1930, Stuart also made a very interesting assumption, while pointing to a cross sections of the tree marked by stark derivation in ring development.

"About this time in local history, the area started to really be developed, the population was growing very rapidly and we can see that at this point on the tree, the rings start getting progressively smaller each year," he said.

An observation Stuart stressed was more than just mere coincidence.

"There's no doubt human development directly impacted the life of this tree. From people cutting the corner here too close with their car and running up on the curb, crushing the tree's root, to the introduction of all those salts and oils emmitted from the autos being absorbed by the trees root system," he said.

Still, Stuart acknowledged that, like all living things here on Earth, even the old scarlet oak at the corner of Douglaston Parkway and Alemeda Avenue, had only a finite number of years.

"As much as I hate to admit it, the tree was in decline and yes it was beautiful, old, and certainly a feature of the neighborhood—but had it not been cut down then sometime over the next 10 years or so it would have started dropping branches," he said.

Citing the fact that each branch could potentially weigh up to one ton, Stuart recognized the immediate safety concerns, which called for the old oaks destruction.

"One good storm and who knows what could have happened. So it obviously had to be done," Stuart said.

Even so, Stuart said he will always remember the old scarlet oak as he drives past the place it occupied all those years.