An Oak Park woman is calling for what would be the second tree rally in the village in about a month.
Cheryl Weiss is upset about a plan to remove healthy maple trees from Austin Gardens, the wooded retreat at the corner of Forest Avenue and Ontario Street.
“There’s nothing wrong with those trees,” Weiss said. “They’re beautiful. Why replace them?”
The answer is long, but wasn’t a secret.
In April 2005, the Park District of Oak Park approved a site master plan for Austin Gardens that included removing some Norway maples, an invasive species whose population had grown to 95, accounting for about half of the park’s trees.
Fifteen to 20 Norway maples have already been removed.
“It’s been ongoing,” said Carol Yetken, an Oak Parker and the landscape architect hired to oversee the site master plan. “We’ve been [removing] a few trees each year for the last three to four years. … It was a purposeful goal so it wouldn’t seem so dramatic.”
As part of Phase I of the master plan, about to be implemented, one “tree of heaven” and a buckthorn, both of which Yetken described as invasive “junk trees,” would be removed.
“We were very forthright in the master plan that the invasive species [needed to be removed],” Yetken said. New, shorter trees and decorative shrubs will be planted “to create a diverse, fairly self-sustaining ‘layered’ planting,” the master plan reads in part.
The problem with Norway maples is that they are too successful-in growing and multiplying-and make it harder for other trees, shrubs and flowers to live alongside them, Yetken said.
“Norway maples were sucking all of the moisture out of the ground,” she said. They also give too much shade.
Pat Eichenold, a six-year volunteer who helped create the Friends of the Parks, said people can see for themselves the effects of Norway maples on the western and northern edges of the park.
“If you look where [the maples] are thick and look on the ground, you’ll see nothing’s growing there,” Eichenold said.
She and others raised concerns in recent years that the too-shady maples were hurting the park’s wildflower garden, filled with 50 to 60 native species, such as columbine, hepatica and Solomon’s seal. After the recent thinning, she said this spring’s wildflowers were the best in years.
“We’re all tree-lovers,” Eichenold said. “But it was certainly advised by very knowledgeable people that you need to thin [the Norway maples].”
Weiss says she’s still skeptical and will host her tree rally at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 12 at Austin Gardens. She said if nothing else, it doesn’t make fiscal sense to replace healthy trees with other trees, whether they’re native or not.
“It just seems frivolous to me to take out a tree for wildflowers,” she said. “To me, that’s a drunken-sailor approach to park management.”
CONTACT: dcarter@wjinc.com