By Lolita Huckaby
BEAUFORT
City of Beaufort officials will be celebrating Arbor Day Friday, Dec. 5, with planting of a new tree in one of the city’s public parks.
The ceremonial planting is done in conjunction with the city’s designation of Tree City USA, an acknowledgment from the U.S. Forestry Service that Beaufort has held for the past 33 years, along with 3,586 other recognized municipalities.
The national recognition goes along nicely with all the publicity our lovely, moss-laden oak trees get when tourism and real estate folks are trying to sell the area.
The City Parks and Tree Advisory Board has been pushing for years for an official tree survey which would show just how much of the tree’s canopy exists and to be used as a measuring stick to show how it’s being reduced. But the cost of that survey is estimated to run high, and with the City’s current list of major pending projects such as restoration of the Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park seawall, those funds for a tree survey don’t seem to have been earmarked.
While celebration of the “Tree City” designation takes place, it’s interesting to note the city Planning Commission, just last month, gave a nod to a preliminary sketch plan for The Grove at Broad River, a 204-unit apartment complex to be built on a currently wooded piece of property between Broad River Boulevard and Paris Island Gateway.
City planners said the developers from Raleigh, N.C., had worked with the city regulations to reduce some of the tree removal.
Maybe they could be convinced to follow the lead of some Mt. Pleasant developers, whom the Post and Courier profiled last week for their plans to relocate a 100-year-old oak tree from the 5.5-acre site of a future brew pub and retail shops. The managing partner for the developer was quoted as saying “it’s an investment in the tree and in something that has been here long before us and … probably long after us.”
Arborists have been working with the 40-foot tree for the past year to prepare the root system for the move to another side of the property.
No word on what that costs.
Too bad the City had no funds to relocate that 100-year-old oak tree removed at the foot of Charles Street in the Waterfront Park two weeks ago to make way for a new stormwater drainage system City officials hope will improve drainage in the downtown area.
Lolita Huckaby Watson is a community volunteer and newspaper columnist. In her former role as a reporter with The Beaufort Gazette, The Savannah Morning News, Bluffton Today and Beaufort Today, she prided herself in trying to stay neutral and unbiased. As a columnist, these are her opinions. The Rowland, N.C. native’s goal is to be factual but opinionated, based on her own observations. Feel free to contact her at bftbay@gmail.com.
