HONORING SOMERVILLE’S SYLVAN SENIOR CITIZENS
53 Madison Street
As you can see from the other photo essays on this website, I walk around a lot and take photos of anything that catches my eye: quirky front yard shrines and decorations, wall signs and signs on walls, store fronts and store windows, abandoned cars and bikes, whatever. But until a few years ago I pretty much ignored—because I wasn’t paying attention—the trees that line Somerville’s densely packed streets.
That changed when I started reading books exploring the world of plants and their relationships with humans, such as Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, as well as books specifically about trees, such as Richard Powers’ Overstory and Peter Wohlleben’sThe Hidden Life of Trees. These authors refer to plants not as inanimate “things” (noting that the pronoun we use for plants is “it”), but as living beings who deserve our attention, respect, and especially, protection from thoughtless human choices and activities. Once I started paying attention to the city’s trees, I began photographing the larger ones with the idea of eventually adding another photo essay, as a way to honor them, and to bring attention to their all-too often unacknowledged presence. This is a first version of my tree-focused essay, which I will be modify regularly as I find and photograph more of the city’s older and larger trees.
53 Chandler
Before proceeding, some acknowledgements and technical notes: Unlike the sort of easily legible urban artifacts and spaces that have been the subjects of the other photo essays on this site, trees—especially really large ones—are difficult to photograph in a way that conveys their true size and dignity, their powerful presence. Sometimes I ask whoever is with walking with me to serve as a human yardstick, in order to show how much larger a particular tree truck is than an adult human body. Mostly this is my husband Reebee, who has re-named himself TReebee on account of how many times he’s posed with trees, although my friends Janine Fay and Julie Schneider have also filled in when TReebee is not with me.
Finally, note that while I have tried to make this gallery compatible for viewing on a phone or pad, it is best viewed on a computer.
As I began focusing more closely on the city’s trees, I became more appreciative to how lucky we are that trees are able to survive in urban conditions such as Somerville—the most densely populated city in New England. Despite the shortage of green space, some trees around Somerville are really massive. (Size, of course, is relative—for example, even Somerville’s largest trees are tiny in comparison to large trees in other parts of the world, as demonstrated by this screen- grabbed image of a line of a dozen children dwarfed by an almost unbelievably enormous tree,)
The gallery below contains photos I’ve taken of the largest trees I’ve encountered in Somerville, although be advised that my assessment of size is strictly visual, since I have not actually measured their girth. I recognize that size may not always correlate with age, so some older but smaller trees may not have caught my attention, but regardless, there’s no doubting that the large trees in this collection of photos have been around a long time!
Sometimes the largest trees are in private front or back yards, where I cannot get close to them without trespassing. Some are behind fences, and I can only imagine how large their girth is. The size of a canopy (in summer) gives a clue to the size of a tree, but it is not always accurate, since sometimes two or more trees growing close together produce a single canopy. I have provided an address for each photo, which you can see by clicking on them, so you can check out these trees yourself, but since these addresses are derived after the fact from the GPS on my camera, they are not precise locations. However, I’m sure that if you go to an address attached to a particular tree, you can’t miss it, because it will be standing tall nearby, perhaps across the street or in someone’s yard.
Corner of Pearl and Florence Streets
Some of the trees below are not necessarily some of the city’s very largest trees, but I include them here because they show how much grit and resilience Somerville’s trees (especially those adjacent to streets) must have in order to grow and flourish in such a dense urban environment. They are hemmed in by asphalt streets, concrete sidewalks, fences, houses and buildings that limit their roots’ ability to absorb rain water. They are pissed and pooped on by pets, drenched with salt in the winter, banged by motor vehicles and bikes, amputated by the energy companies seeking to protect electrical wires.
Yet despite these insults, urban trees survive and continue to grow as best they can, providing us humans with huge, often unacknowledged benefits: their shade reduces heat islands, they transform carbon dioxide into oxygen (i.e. greenhouse gas benefits), their roots prevent flooding, their bodies provide food and refuge for wildlife, and their beauty, which gives us aesthetic pleasure, contributes to our sense of well-being.
The gallery below features a selection of photos from my collection of trees that may not be among the city’s most massive, but they still qualify as senior sylvan citizens. Some are public, some private; some visible, others hard to see; but all are beautiful in their own unique way.
Some trees are not particularly large at all, but they move me for aesthetic reasons.
Sadly some of Somerville’s largest trees have been cut down, although their stumps convey how massive they once were.
Some tree stumps are not as impressive as the ones above, but they still have the power to remind us of what they must have been. The first two are older stumps; the following two are recent, painful cuts.
In this final photo, I am the model indicating the size of what was once an amazingly large tree.
Sanborn, between Walnut and Warren. Photo by Janine Fay