On a recent sunny day, Jeff Tarling, city arborist with Portland, Maine’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Facilities, pulled his truck to a stop at Pine Grove Park, a 12-acre green oasis in the North Deering neighborhood.
The park, acquired by the city in 1923, has an obvious namesake. Mature white pines stretch overhead along a trail leading to a ledge outcropping. Only a few years ago, there were lots of big white pines the same age – and not much else. The pines shaded the forest floor into a virtual desert.
Over four weeks in the late winter of 2013, contract loggers thinned the grove. It was one of the city’s first forest management projects since officials included harvesting in the city’s forest management plan in 2007. And Tarling was all too aware of the possibility of blowback from those living nearby.
The Pine Grove operation did draw a lot of attention, said Tarling. Residents came by to watch the work. Some were skeptical, others supportive. “One man was in his eighties and said he remembered growing up in the area and how much it had changed,” said Tarling. “He said he was gratified to see that we were opening up the woods.”
Neighbors brought their kids out to watch the feller-buncher, skidder, and slasher at work processing the pines. School groups visited on field trips to learn about the forest and harvesting trees. And in spring 2014, the kids came back to plant some young balsam firs and white pines.
In the end, criticism was minimal, and Tarling relaxed. Five years later, he hopped from his truck and walked briskly along the trail, noting a healthier understory – blackberries and blueberries; young white and red oaks; mountain ashes and red maples – growing between the pines. Of which there are still plenty. Tarling wondered aloud whether maybe they should have taken out a few more. But he was satisfied that they’d hit the “sweet spot” between cutting too many pines and too few.
He chalked up the positive reaction to an intensive effort to educate the public. City workers put up signs, talked to groups and the local elementary school, and explained the operation to other city officials, Tarling said.
“We knew that Portland residents love their trees and forests and would support the work if they knew it was in the best interest over the long term,” Tarling said. “Having a forest plan with specific objectives – in this case, sustainable forest health, wildlife, and recreation – was key, along with a media release about what to expect.”
An Advanced Approach
So far, Portland has conducted harvesting operations on a handful of its forested parks, with several others planned. The projects generate some revenue for park improvements and help educate people about what thoughtful forest management can do to improve public green spaces.
Portland, a city of 65,000 people and the hub of a metro area with a population of 250,000, isn’t the only New England city to incorporate harvesting into its plans for parks and preserves. Bangor, Maine, has long been praised for its management of the Roland Perry City Forest, and dozens of communities across the region manage town forests.
But Portland is “doing a lot right now where they didn’t necessarily for a long time,” said Jan Santerre, the director of the Maine Forest Service’s Project Canopy, which helps municipalities with funding for education and the management of their woodlands. The city “sets a great example for what can be done when the proper groundwork is laid and the operations [are] undertaken correctly,” she said.
It’s not easy, Santerre noted. The forestry operations may be straightforward, but there’s always the people factor: Many urban residents are protective of their neighborhood woodlands and aren’t used to seeing timber harvesting in their backyard.
John Parry, the coordinator of the US Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program in the Northeast, agreed. He described Portland’s urban forestry program as “a little more sophisticated and progressive” and “a little more advanced” than those of most other cities in the Northeast, most of which do not have a forestry professional on staff.
“It’s kind of a newer approach and cutting edge. A lot of communities . . . aren’t necessarily managing and harvesting the smaller wooded areas. Those areas are typically preserved and protected,” Parry said. “There are a few communities doing it. And, where appropriate, it’s working out well, especially when you get into larger wooded areas.”
Parry recently brought some two dozen national forest supervisors to Portland to let them see things firsthand. In Parry’s eyes, the city was practicing “low-impact” forestry, with little damage to the land or remaining trees. According to Parry, that type of program can not only improve forest health, but also help wildlife and provide income to make other projects possible.
Growing Green Spaces
Portland’s nickname, interestingly enough, is “The Forest City.” The city owns more than 600 acres of forestland, with a few hundred additional acres owned by conservation groups and land trusts with which Portland’s Parks & Recreation office works closely. Then there are the thousands of trees along city streets, growing in parks and public grounds, that the department also manages.
Portland wasn’t always tree friendly. The city was founded in 1786. But even before then, the forest was under assault. Trees were being felled left and right to clear land for agriculture or development. The sound of axe and saw was the sound of a new nation creating itself. Paul Bunyan became a mythic hero. But during the twentieth century, trees and forests came to be recognized for what they had to offer beyond lumber and charcoal – shade for streets, a buffer for an increasingly noisy urban landscape, and rejuvenation for the human spirit.
Portland planted its first ornamental trees, Lombardy poplars, in 1793. In 1921, 200 lindens were planted along Baxter Boulevard to create a memorial grove to Portland’s World War I veterans.
The city now has some 20,000 street trees in addition to thriving woodlands – like Deering Oaks Park, with its 1,000 trees, including heritage white oaks. And Evergreen Cemetery, half of which is wooded, has 150-years-old sugar maples and is well-known as a stopping point for migrating songbirds. There’s also Baxter Woods, with 30 acres of white oak and hemlock.
The city is still acquiring green spaces. It contributes funds to the Land Bank Commission, which purchases targeted undeveloped areas. The goal is for all residents to be within a 15-minute walk to a green space, whether that’s a public park or a forest. By providing open space in town, Portland has made itself more attractive to those seeking a place to live: “Instead of seeing people leaving the city, we’re seeing people want to move to the city,” said Jeff Tarling.
Portland’s city government has had a city forester since the 1800s; the title was later changed to “city arborist.” Tarling was hired in 1989. He heads a staff of nine with a budget of $795,000.
In 2007, Portland developed its first forestry master plan using a grant from the Maine Forest Service’s Project Canopy program. Until then, the city-owned woodlands largely had been left alone – many for decades. Some had a good mix of ages and species of trees and showed healthy regeneration – these didn’t need active management. Others, like Pine Grove, were starting to decline. Some were infested with invasive species, a serious problem in southern Maine.
Maintenance and Messaging
Despite the common moniker “urban forest,” most of these wooded areas are too fragmented to be true forests, which implies a self-sustaining natural ecosystem. Urban forests are artificial environments, vulnerable and occasionally in need of human help to be their best. Think of them like aquariums, which require a lot of maintenance compared to a natural river or lake.
“We knew that we had a number of acres that, in order to care for [them] well, we had to do something and not just wonder what was going to happen to the forest,” Tarling said.
Technically, the city’s first harvesting operation took place three years before Pine Grove’s, when truckloads of red spruce from trees that had toppled in a 2007 storm were salvaged. A couple of years later, Tarling’s office also oversaw tree clearing and thinning as part of the development of the Portland Technology Park; part of that property will remain green space.
In Portland, it seems like history is everywhere, and Tarling enjoys talking about it. He pulled his city truck into the lot at the 30-acre Riverton Trolley Park. It’s located on the reclaimed site of an amusement park that once hosted a casino and the largest roller coaster in Maine, named the Riverton Flyer – all built to encourage people to use the city’s trolley system, he said. The trolleys have vanished. Ditto the casino. And the roller coaster.
The acreage is now wooded, with a small ballfield.
“If you look out across there to the right, that is all thinned out,” Tarling said. In 2015, loggers took out Norway maple, ash, and white pines. “The challenge now is controlling the invasives, such as Japanese tree lilac, Norway maple, buckthorn, and Japanese knotweed,” Tarling said.
The city’s Riverside Golf Course, built in the 1930s, has an 18-hole course, a 9-hole course, and a 3-hole practice course. It also contains a 20-acre forest, and woods embrace the fairways. In 2016, the city began harvesting timber here – mainly white pine, basswood, and ash. The operation wasn’t aimed just at improving forest health, but also reclaiming some of the course from trees that, in spots, had encroached 40 to 50 feet onto the fairways.
Tarling and the Parks & Recreation department again braced for criticism. But according to Tarling, the next spring, golfers were saying the playability of the golf course had improved, and park visitors noticed that once the trails were improved the park was back to “normal.” Having a plan and knowing that the science backed them up were key to going forward, Tarling said.
At the next stop, Tarling showed off the results of a 2017 thinning operation on about 20 acres of Evergreen Cemetery. The operation was greenlit after a forester’s assessment. White pines were taken out, and some tree planting was done afterward. They made sure one tree wasn’t touched: a lone American chestnut, about 16 inches in diameter.
Tarling looks with pride at how the harvested areas have responded to the work. “[The forest] has come back even better than before,” he said. “It has been really rewarding.”
Some 70 percent of Tarling’s time is spent on Portland’s street trees. Every tree is entered into a computer database and color-coded according to how well the tree is doing and what maintenance might be needed in the future. Another 15 percent of Tarling’s time is spent on planning and executing forest management projects, and the remainder is spent on public relations and citizen education.
Communicating his goals and assuring people that thinning operations in forests that many consider “sacred” don’t equal destruction are perhaps the biggest challenges, but they’re crucial to making it happen, Tarling said. And without the thinning operations’ generating some money, funds to manage the woods would likely be hard to come by. Tarling said that it helps that land trusts and conservation groups support the work.
“The challenge is always to relay the information to the public about the goals of forest health. We want them to see it as productive and not detrimental. Trees and forests make cities more livable; the environmental and health values provided [by the woodlands] more than offset the cost to manage the resource.”
Tarling said his experience has convinced him that other cities, too, can tackle forest management, and they shouldn’t shy away from it. Project Canopy’s Jan Santerre said that with Portland’s track record, she’s certain the successes will continue, resulting in healthier forests and happy residents. But, she admits, “It is a challenging process when you’re not an individual landowner, but a city of 65,000 people who all feel like they have a stake in the process.”