What tree is this? (Exists in East Vancouver)

This tree lives near Dumfries and 18th, in East Vancouver. I used to walk by it almost every day.. it looks gorgeous when you look up at the sky through the canopy of leaves... I'm sure someone must know what it is!

 

Aeculus hippocastanum perhaps?

HTH
Chris

 

You can see the light through it because somebody's been cutting branches out, normally these have a solid canopy.

 

Yes, it does look like a Horse Chestnut! And yes, I can see where someone's been chopping off limbs. I guess it must be to let light through to their flowers below. Thanks for the ID!

 

Plant does not require holes being cut out of it for flowers to develop. Nobody does this in the wild.

 

If they did not drop the chestnuts, I'd love to have one, even it there are a lot of leaves.

They are such fine looking trees.

Hard to tell why it might have been pruned. It's possible that someone tried to allow more light to other flowering plants below.

 

Maybe there are wires.

 

The two branches rubbing together are the ones that maybe should have been taken out...?

 

Yes it may have been due to electrical wires too.. I was there just a few days ago but didn't think to notice. What I do remember though is that a) it is a very large tree and b) the silhouette looks like like a strange bowl shape, no branches in the middle.

 

If you call the City of Vancouver, they have every single tree in the City on their computer and will tell you everything you could want to know about this one.

I once built a box around the base of the elm tree in front of my house and filled it with soil to hold plants. Some wild man came by a few months later screaming that I was killing it, so I phoned the City for info. The guy checked his computer and said - we have had three complaints that you are killing your tree and we have had inspectors out twice to check it and I have their reports in front of me. He could tell me what it was, when it was planted, when it was last pruned, and so on.

 

Soccerdad's tale reminds me that my dealer-serviced Ford seems to have better medical records than I do. Everything's in a central database, accessible by any dealer (or me).

 

^^ Wow, amazing. So in the end, were the planter boxes harming the tree?

I wonder if the City of Burnaby, where I now live, has the same sort of records. We have a tall acer in front, perhaps a rubrum.. and I want to figure out what kind it is too. The other day the city came by and hacked off all the branches on the lower 1/3rd. Bleh. Reminds me of the once popular 'mushroom cut' hair style.

 

No. As I pointed out to the wild man - and another person who was rather more polite in explaining to me how I was killing the tree - when trees grow on slopes, like most trees in this province do, land movements often cause dirt to end up piled around the base of a tree, sometimes some feet up, and the trees are not hurt.

 

If it's a street tree it would actually be the Parks Board that has those records, not the city. But maybe they can all access the same database.

It may be that piling soil on top of the root zone would be more harmful than piling it up the trunk... although it is commonly recommended (on this site and elsewhere) to do neither for most types of trees.

Also, how do you know the trees in the forest are not hurt by having soil pushed against their trunks? Trees fall in the forest all the time... that may be one causative factor.

If the Aesculus (note that Chris misspelled it above) is pruned into that classic bowl shape, chances are that's wire-related.

 

Tolerance of fills depends on species. General recommendation is to assume fills (and cuts) will be detrimental. Even flooding adapted bottomland trees like coast redwoods may grow a replacement root system below the surface of the new soil layer after a major event, where feet of new mud is laid down around the trees, indicating the sudden change in grade is still a challenge even though they can survive it.

When I was a kid the folks and I saw an exhibit in one of the redwood parks where a sign explained the short roots coming out of a fallen giant. It had been buried by a fresh, deep layer of mud of some depth during a flood and responded by starting to grow an entire new root system. There was a substantial gap between the original and the new roots. It looked like if the tree had lived it was going to spend a long time making a whole new root system.

 

When I was a kid in Vancouver—very young; maybe 8 or 10—I thought I was hearing a bad joke when someone mentioned hacking away huge parts of trees to make room for power lines. I couldn't believe it. Surely the lines would be moved (underground) to make room for the trees. I thought it preposterous that a city council would so undervalue photosynthesis, let alone natural aesthetic integrity.

[Photo—what? Is that, like, when you stitch photos together? Awesome.]

I remember thinking, "Even adults aren't that stupid."

I had a lot to learn.

 

Oh I so agree with you. Who would hack a tree for a powerline? We humans have so much to learn.

 

Since we see so many reports of people cutting down large numbers of mature trees just to improve the views from their houses, it seems hopeless to imagine that there would be much of a movement to prevent the destruction of trees to accommodate power lines that serve the whole community.

 

Yes, really. "Improving the view", right next door to where we live now, meant felling three, 100-foot cypresses and one full-grown chestnut. The person who did it is an avid gardener var. control-freak. This is in Vancouver's West End, so his improved view is an excellent panorama of concrete and asphalt.

He himself has planted a garden in which he takes great pride. Biomass has been reduced 90% from what there used to be.

Insodoing he completely destroyed the natural air-conditioning of half a dozen neighbouring individual suites, all tiny places with an east view. They used to look right into the cypresses, which were almost touching-distance outside their windows. Those suites are now horrid little hot-boxes with no escape from the direct sun. He also wrecked the escape-terrain of dozens of songbirds that relied on the big cypresses. And robins used to sing there.

Changed my view of gardeners. There are gardeners, and there are gardeners; the two are polar opposites.

—Apparently it would be much cheaper to place power lines underground. I don't know; but so I've been told. Maintenance is drastically reduced, and of course you'd no longer need to fell entire forests for power poles.

 

Yeah my landlord who bought this house recently and has a 'humans must dominate and tidy the land' British imperialist aesthetic, cut down two tall Doug Firs in the backyard this year and is counting on getting the last one next year, 'to let more sun into the backyard.' He's probably gotten rid of a lot of birds, wildlife, and not to mention evapotranspiration / air cleaning / cooling ecosystem services....

 

In the past here utilities have wanted to charge property owners along specific lines to put them underground, so I think it has seldom been undertaken. Public school levies also often get voted down.

Removal/destructive altering of trees and other features on private property considered to be of public value is becoming addressed by historic etc. designation systems with supporting regulations. This has become a contested issue where land use rules have prevented land owners from undertaking projects that they considered acceptable returns on their original financial investments. It is kind of a trap when a property is purchased for eventual development and then the laws change, but the public welfare must come first.

The neighbor there spent thousands having the lot cleared. It is funny how often people buy treed lots and then remove the trees.

 

On the flip side, its sometimes refreshing when, amidst the rows of boring lawns, one comes across the rare front lawn that has been retained as a tall forest grove of doug firs, cedars, etc, with accompanying native understory. There is one in a neighbourhood near me. They also have a big old canoe on the boulevard, planted with more native shrubs / perennials. I think most people are too scared of windstorms and 'cleanup of branches and needles' to do that.

 

Hugo Chávez once said that there have always been two very different kinds of people. He felt one type of person loved to share, and the other preferred self-aggrandizement.

There may well be another division. There are people who never question where they came from or where they are going; they are simply here, and what is around them is just the background to their lives.

And there are very different people who feel that there was a system or a universe here before they arrived; and that they belong within the natural orchestration of that system. Hence they see themselves within a natural ecological system that is greater and older than they are. For this second group of people, it is overwhelmingly obvious that "they had better" obey the rules, or work within the harmony that actually owns them. "Owns" in the sense that this greater reality creates oxygen and carbohydrates and nice things like that. Good to have on hand.

The Costa Rican naturalist Alexander Skutch was asked, toward the end of his hundred years, whether he believed in God. "I can't say for sure whether God exists or not," he replied, "but I think it isn't a bad idea for us to lead our lives as though he just might."

 

Conquering nature and building a man-dominated world is a Judaeo-Christian feature (not peculiar to the British Empire) that has enabled millions to live the quality of life western civilizations enjoy. Cultures with different outlooks have existed for very long periods of time without making major alterations to the natural environment, First Nations peoples that have been here since walking over the ice from Asia 10,000-13,000 years ago being the obvious local example. But who among us, here today, including First Nations people would want to live without modern conveniences, including things considered essential such as medical care?

Giving up modern approaches to land use, including cutting down trees is not going to happen. What is needed is continuing refinement of the process. Maybe the time is coming when someone can't log a Vancouver site with large trees on it just because they want to grow vegetables or roses.

 

Vancouver does have a Protection of Trees bylaw, with a permit process. See
http://vancouver.ca/your-government/protection-of-trees-bylaw.aspx
and
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/tree-removal-permit.aspx

Any sizable tree removed is supposed to be replaced by another tree.