There are more than 660,000 street trees in New York City, and many of them are dangerously dehydrated.
Local arborists said street trees — which are peed on by dogs, mostly ignored by humans and occasionally surrounded by litter — are suffering during the ongoing historic drought. While trees in city parks receive more attention from caretakers, the pin oaks, blackgums, silver lindens and other trees along sidewalks are rarely tended to, said Nina Browne, community field manager at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
“Every single street tree bed is a little miniature park,” Browne said. “Life at the curb is life on the edge, and a lot of street trees are really, really vulnerable to use and abuse,” she said. “The care of street trees, when it does happen, really does fall on the shoulders of a lot of residents of New York City who take it upon themselves.”
Insufficient water is the leading cause of death for street trees, according to Browne. New York City has received historically low rainfall over the past three months, and October was its driest month on record. While recent rainfall offered a little relief, Mayor Eric Adams cautioned on Monday that it was not nearly enough to lift an ongoing drought warning urging residents to conserve water.
Young trees, which are usually held in place with stakes and defined as under 2 years old, need about 15 to 20 gallons of water — equivalent to an inch of rain — per week, according to city arborists. Young or unhealthy trees face the greatest risk of becoming drought fatalities. Browne encouraged New Yorkers to give local trees a drink, saying they could use the help.
Dehydration can disrupt trees’ hormone levels, which affect the buds in spring. Trees with pre-existing conditions like diseases or insect infestation are more likely to succumb.
“Insects can hear when trees are drought-stressed,” said Melissa Finley, a curator of woody plants at the New York Botanical Garden. “They’ll be attracted to feed on that tree, so what we can anticipate is there might be more diseases, more insect infestations on our street trees.”
A sidewalk tree’s life is short and harsh even in the best of times. Browne said the lifespan of a tree on the curb is about 25 years, but added that that same tree could live thousands of years in a wild forest upstate.
A random sampling of street trees in the summers of 2006 and 2007 found 25% of the woody plants were standing dead or gone altogether. Saplings planted in industrial neighborhoods had the lowest survival rates, at around 60%. Tree care is a major reason why some trees survive and others don’t, particularly during droughts.
“I look at the trees that I’ve been able to water, and they look markedly better than the ones next to them,” said Amy Wolf, a Brooklyn resident. “I do fear that springtime is going to roll around and instead of budding, our trees will be dead, and that’s when we’re going to realize we’ve made a terrible mistake and that we sat here doing nothing.”
Wolf said she had received no response to her many inquiries to 311, the parks department and elected officials concerning the sickly state of trees in her South Williamsburg neighborhood.
Even when rain is plentiful, trees face another risk: pet waste. If thirst doesn’t kill a tree, urine will, according to arborists. Dog excrement attracts rats that will burrow into a tree well. Canine urine adds nitrogen and salts to the soil, which kill its living nutrients.
Pee also burns tree bark, which functions like human skin and protects trees from infections and infestations. Arborists said pet owners must curb their pets and keep them out of tree beds.
“Anybody who has a dog and lets their dog do their business on the tree poses a threat,” said Maddy Lopez-Molina, a street tree care coordinator at the Lower East Side Ecology Center.
New Yorkers can immediately help their thirsty, woody neighbors by using a hand rake or fork to scrape and loosen the top inch or two of soil in a tree bed. When the soil is compacted, it is difficult for precipitation to reach the tree’s roots. A puddle in a tree bed after rain indicates that the soil is too compacted and must be aerated.
“Give the soil in your tree bed a nice really big back scratch,” Lopez-Molina said. “When rain does come, you’re allowing for the rain to actually be absorbed by the tree roots.”
Arborists also recommended putting mulch or wood chips in the tree bed, leaving 8 inches clear around the tree trunk. This slows down the water, reduces runoff and provides organic matter for the soil.
The city offers free mulch on request. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn has a free mulch pile near its entrance at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street.
After the holidays, residents can also trade in their Christmas trees for a bag of mulch during the parks department’s annual Mulchfest. A good mulch substitute is chaff from local coffee or chocolate roasters.
Adding a half-inch of compost every year can help cultivate the soil. Free compost is available for tree beds from the city’s sanitation department.
Trees depend on year-round care from their human neighbors. To learn how to care for local street trees, some community districts offer tree clinics, and the parks department has a Super Stewards program. One key tip: When watering a tree, do it slowly with a watering can or a bucket with holes.
Trees are a crucial part of state and municipal plans to climate-proof the region. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an adult tree can remove nearly 50 pounds of carbon dioxide annually.
The city has ambitious goals of increasing its tree canopy coverage from 22% to 30% by 2035. The state’s own 2033 goal is to spend $47 million on planting 25 million trees.
“There’s plant blindness when people become really unaware and disconnected from the plants that they see every day and stop seeing trees as living beings,” Browne said. “We stop seeing them as our relatives and we begin to see them as hardware or as infrastructure or as bike racks or as something that can be damaged. We come to take trees for granted and we come to take their health and their well-being for granted.”
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