Thomas Breen photos
Ra Hashim and crew plant on Fairmont.
Seven green-thumbed colleagues from across the city — and the state, country, and world, for that matter — gathered in the Annex on a frigid fall morning with one shared goal: To beautify a concrete stretch of Fairmont Avenue with seven newly planted trees.
That arboreal barrage began Wednesday at 8 a.m. outside of Yumbla Trucking at 205 Fairmont.
Gathering in the crystalline, below-freezing sunshine beside the single-story industrial building, four workers from EMERGE Connecticut, two from the Urban Resources Initiative (URI), and one intern from Yale set about planting four amur maackia and three chokecherry trees where there was previously only concrete sidewalk, granite curb, and pebble-strewn dirt.
“It looks plain here right now, but when we put the trees in, it will look totally different,” said URI Field Crew Representative William Tisdale (pictured).
Trees provide shade and oxygen and food for wildlife, he noted.
And they make somewhat vacant stretches like this Fairmont Avenue block more pedestrian-friendly for people who work and live nearby, added URI GreenSkills Program Manager Caroline Scanlan (pictured).
They also discourage cars from speeding by creating a canopied streetscape in place of open air and windowless walls.
“They’re cooling. They’re beautiful. And they add to a sense of neighborhood.”
Wednesday morning’s tree-planting push was the latest effort by URI and EMERGE to get trees in the ground before they stop work for the season next Monday. They will resume planting trees in March, Scanlan said. During the winter, they transition to pruning already-planted trees citywide.
URI, which is affiliated with the Yale School for the Environment, manages the city’s tree-planting program. They do that work in partnership with EMERGE Connecticut, a nonprofit that provides job training to ex-offenders and helps them transition from prison back into the workforce.
Gabe LePage wheels a tree to its new home.
Typically, the tree-planting crew installs one tree at a time outside of the home of a city resident who has requested a bit of arboreal beauty and has agreed to water the tree at least once a week for the next three years.
Wednesday’s planting was different.
Instead of putting just one tree in the ground, the URI-EMERGE crew planted seven side by side. And instead of standing outside of a house in a residential part of town, these trees would adorn a light-industrial side of the street previously barren of any greenery. The idea was to make a big difference at once in a traditionally tree-neglected area.
The crew tasked with digging new holes, planting the trees, shoveling compost, pouring buckets of water, and stabilizing the saplings with arbor tape hailed from across the country and the globe.
Tisdale, a New Haven native who grew up in the Hill, has been planting trees with EMERGE and URI since 2015.
Myron Mullins, an 18-year-old who grew up in San Bernadino, California, was on only his second day on the job beautifying the Elm City.
That was one day longer than Wilkins Guadalupe (pictured), a 37-year-old who grew up in Hartford, currently lives in New Britain, and was on his first tree-planting outing Wednesday morning after signing up with EMERGE five days ago.
Yale Divinity School student Gabe LePage, meanwhile, was born in Montana and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. This fall marked his fourth season planting trees with the crew across the city.
“Icing On The Cake”
Wednesday’s work began just before 8 a.m. The trees had not yet arrived on the back of a URI truck. Tisdale instructed Mullins, Guadalupe, and fellow EMERGE workers Ra Hashim (originally from North Carolina) and Steve Neary (from Meriden) on where and how to dig the holes that would ultimately hold the new trees.
“If you go straight down, you can dig even deeper,” Tisdale told Mullins, adjusting the young man’s shovel to a 90-degree angle as the latter plunged his tool into the craggy soil.
“That’s Big Steve right there,” he said with a smile as Neary heaved a mattock above his head and buried it into the earth, defining the circumference of the new hole and breaking down some stubborn roots found within.
A stray root found in a newly dug hole.
Hashim said you never know what you’re going to find when you start digging a new tree hole. “Stumps, rocks, roots, bottles,” he listed. The hard work is worth it, he added. “I think it brings just a better energy,” he said about new trees on a city block. “It makes it a more walkable environment.”
At around 8:15, Scanlan and LePage arrived with the seven saplings and a pile of compost in the back of a truck.
Scanlan said that this group was working on this stretch of Fairmont Avenue thanks to some tree-related canvassing she had recently done in the neighborhood. A city Engineering Department staffer told her that the city had recently put in some new granite curbs, and that she might find some residents and business owners in the area interested in some new trees.
So Scanlan walked and drove through the neighborhood, leaving cards at residents’ doors advertising the free tree-planting program. That’s when she came across the owners of Yumbla Trucking. After a 20-minute conversation, they told Scanlan they’d like to have some trees outside of their business, and promised to take care of them once they were in the ground.
Scanlan (right) looks for the root flate with Mullins.
“Brenda was excited about a purpleleaf tree,” Scanlan said about the company’s owner. So that’s exactly what URI and EMERGE brought with the chokecherries.
Scanlan said that she takes a number of factors into consideration when picking out exactly which type of tree would work best on a block. Are there utility lines that would get tangled in a particularly tall-growing tree? Are there other potential stressers like pollutants, salt, and heavy vehicle congestion?
She described the trees being planted on Wednesday as hearty and resistant to drought.
The group then set about doing all of the work necessary to get a healthy tree in the ground. They dug holes roughly a foot-and-a-half deep, determining exactly how far into the ground to go based on each tree’s “root flare” — or where the trunk meets the roots. (“It’s the lifeline of the tree,” said Hashim (pictured). “So you’ve got to find it.”)
They rolled the base of the trees into each newly dug hole, and then filled in the empty space with compost. (“This has a lot of nutrients that will break down over time and give the tree new life as it goes into the ground,” Scanlan said as she and Mullins patted the deep-brown mix around one of the trees.)
Neary waters the new tree as LePage digs the “doughnut.”
And then they created a so-called “doughnut” — or raised bit of compost and dirt — around each tree, so that the water they then poured onto the newly planted tree, as well as any subsequent rain, would stay near the “root ball.”
Tisdale then sprinkled some mulch around the edge of the freshly watered tree, describing the nutrient-rich mix as the “icing on the cake.”
Fairmont Avenue resident Tonya Cherry (pictured) praised the tree-planting crew as she walked down the block towards Farren Avenue.
“This will be real nice,” she said about the incoming trees. “It looks plain” right now with just the industrial building on the block. But when the trees are in place, “they’ll grow and they’re healthy and will keep it shady.”
Lorenzo Perez (pictured) agreed. He’s a mechanic at Yumbla Trucking who has been working for the Fairmont Avenue business for seven years. He came outside Wednesday morning to show the crew where to fill up their buckets with water.
“It’s gonna look a lot better,” he said about the soon-to-be-tree-lined block.
After the crew had finished planting four trees and were on to their final three before heading over to their next tree-planting assignment on Frank Street in the Hill, Tisdale summed up what he loves so much about the work he’s been doing with URI and EMERGE for the past five years.
“We’re making a difference in these communities,” he said. “It’s always good to give back.”
Previous coverage of URI tree-planting:
See below for previous articles in this series.
• Concrete Cleared For Roots To Grow
• RIP, Ash; Welcome, Yellowwood!
Click on the above podcast for an interview with URI chief Colleen Murphy-Duning about the organization’s work.