Arborist returns area trees to health > Crew helped repair ice storm damage

BELFAST – Doug Johnson has gone out on a limb for the city’s trees.

For the past two years, Johnson’s firm Johnson’s Arboriculture-Treekeepers of Camden, has been working to clean up the carnage caused by the 1998 ice storm.

Working with a $140,000 recovery grant from the US Forest Service, Johnson’s crew has planted hundreds of new trees throughout the city and pruned hundreds more.

Now in the final stages of the program, the workers are concentrating their efforts on Grove Cemetery, the most heavily damaged area in the city.

“This part of Belfast, up on the hill had a lot more damage than areas down on the water. A slight change in temperature made all the difference and these trees really were hit hard,” Johnson said Thursday. “Sugar maples are the strongest of trees and yet very brittle. Rather than bend under the weight of the ice, they snapped.”

Grove Cemetery was so named because of the large grove of sugar maple trees that are interspersed between the tombstones and monuments in the cemetery’s oldest sections. Johnson said all of the 120 trees in the grove are more than 100 years old, some more than 150 years old. All told, the cemetery has more than 200 maples. Sugar maples can live 300 years if properly cared for.

Johnson said Grove Cemetery is a perfect location for trees to mature because they are not compromised by overhead wires and road salts.

The tree expert said the age of the trees made for tedious work involving a lot of climbing and pruning with hand and pole saws. He estimated that in the cemetery alone, the crew climbed as many feet as it would take to climb Mount Everest.

“It’s been a real challenge because the ice storm did most of its damage at the crown, or top of the tree. It was under hazardous conditions because there were still a lot of broken limbs up in those trees,” said Johnson. “There are 120 trees all close to 100 feet high and we had to climb up and down each with another 100 feet of limbs to climb along. Add it all up and it’s about 30,000 feet, about as high as Mount Everest.”

Besides pruning the older trees, the crew planted 30 young red maples and a screen of a dozen evergreens in the new sections of the cemetery. He commended cemetery superintendent Steve Boguen and his crew for their assistance. Johnson said Boguen was “very amenable” to planting new trees even though it adds new obstacles to mowing and more leaves to rake.

“He remembers his father planting trees here, it’s part of his heritage,” said Johnson.

Johnson’s crew also removed 112 trees from City Park and pruned another 270. Trees in Heritage Park and the Belfast Common were also looked after. In addition, the crew cared for hundreds of street trees within the neighborhood bordered by the Route 1 bypass.

“Our focus on the streets was on the younger trees, to help give them a good start and a stronger structure. We also did a lot of limb raising – removing limbs over the sidewalks that could impede pedestrians,” said Johnson.

Constant pruning is the best way to care for trees, according to Johnson. He said young trees should be tended to each year and the older trees every five years. Trees sprout new branches at breaks and those need to be pruned before they grow to maturity and strain the trunk and larger limbs.

Johnson said he was assisted on the project by members of the city’s parks and recreation commission, Friends of City Park and Greenstreets, a tree planting group separate from the city government. He said all the work and investments made by the various agencies connected to the city’s trees was tabulated and used to match the forest service grant.

“It’s been a big project,” he said. “To see how these trees have responded, especially here in the cemetery, has been great. Some have put out three or four feet of new growth since the storm. They still have a lot of vigor for older trees.”