Bits and pieces about
trees pile up on my desk like autumn leaves in the yard. Last week I mentioned
Barrington, Illinois, as a Tree City USA. It is not alone. In addition
to the U.S. flag that it flies at its city hall, the west-suburban town of
Hinsdale proudly flies not an Illinois flag but its Tree City USA flag. The
more than 100 different tree species
planted on its public lands earned another Tree City, Oak Park, the honor of
being named the state’s first municipal arboretum by the Morton Arboretum; the
town maintains for the edification of its citizens an on-line inventory with
geographic information for every one of the more than 20,000 trees on public
space in Oak Park.
You don’t have to
travel so far to see one – 175 towns have earned that honor in Illinois. It is said that when Jesse Fell laid out his
new town of North Bloomington (later to be known as Normal, Illinois) he
planted more than ten thousand trees there, turning his bare patch of farmland
into a prairie grove. By doing he was simply doing what uncounted developers
have done since, which is This is widely reckoned to have been a good thing. Bloomington followed his example
so avidly that it earned the nickname Evergreen City. Both Normal and
Bloomington are Tree Cities.
Springfield? Take a guess.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2016.
