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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, reporter in the WNYC Gothamist newsroom and I'm sitting in for Brian today. We're going to move on to the impacts of this week's storm and how one fallen tree can affect an entire ecosystem. The New York Botanical Garden lost one of its oldest trees, a giant oak that had been part of the garden since it was established in 1895. Here to join us to talk more about the impact of the loss of one ancient tree is Eric Sanderson. He's the vice president of urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden. He's also working on a book about New York City's indigenous landscape. Hi, Eric. Thanks for being here, and I'm so sorry about this old oak. Tell me what happened.

Eric Sanderson: Yeah. Hey, Matt. Yeah, we're all really broken up about it. It's been raining a lot. I think everybody noticed, and this tree is very old. They're actually outside counting the rings now, between 175 and 200 years old. So that's older than the botanical garden. The garden was established in 1891. So this tree was just probably have an acorn maybe when the Erie Canal was being dug in the 19th century, and it's been standing there for a long time. The old trees of this site in Bronx Park are the reason why the Botanical Garden was established here in the first place and you can still come and see a lot of the forest.

We have the only uncut forest in New York City, 50 acres, the Thain Family Forest with a river running through it. It really tears us up, but I also think it's telling us something important about the way the climate is changing and what that means for the ecology of the city.

Matt Katz: And I want to get to that, but first, were you expecting this? Was it a surprise? Was it, I mean, you come out in the morning and totally shocked to see the tree falling?

Eric Sanderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was an old tree and so it was showing some signs of old age, but you never know. It's been through there for 175 years of storms. The particulars of why one storm or another knocks a tree over, but we got five and a half inches of rain the other day. That's a lot of rain. That's more than a month's worth of rain in one day. That saturates the soil and then that weakens the way the roots interact with the soil, so yeah, it's a huge shock. It's a tragedy, but it's also true that trees don't live forever, and just like all of us. We're only here for our time on earth.

I think it's worth saying that such large trees are very important ecologically. This is a white oak that-- Quercus alba, and they take about 50 years before they produce their first acorn, and then they produce thousands and thousands and thousands of acorn in these large mass events that are so important to wildlife. White oak acorns in particular, really preferred wildlife foods because they have a very high carbohydrate content. That's what, in a forest, would bring in the deer, and would bring in all the birds, all the caterpillars. Oaks are famous for their ability to support caterpillars and other insects, and then that's why they're the basis of the bird life. Oak trees are such an important part of our native flora and fauna here. They're essential elements of the ecosystem, and they only have their sort of greatest expression when they're old and big, like this one was.

Matt Katz: Listeners, have you had an experience with a fallen tree after a storm, maybe this storm? How did you deal with it? And what's your favorite tree in your neighborhood? We want to hear from you. Give us a call, send us a text, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If you have questions about trees and what happens when a really old one falls or how to care for trees in flooding, give us a call, 212-433-9692. So Eric, this tree that fell, what's going to happen? Will you leave it there? Does it stay so it can spread into the soil, enrich the other plants around it? What's the plan?

Eric Sanderson: Yeah, so if a tree falls in our forest, we typically make sure it's safe for all the visitors, of course, but then we leave it there as part of the forest ecosystem. In this case, it was one of the more ornamental trees on our third lawn. In this case, the wood will be chopped into pieces. Some of it will be given to a local artist that we've worked with for a long time to turn into bowls. White oak have a very beautiful wood, a very beautiful venation in the wood, and then others will be cut into timbers.

We work with Rocking the Boat, which is a group in the South Bronx here that helps local youth to build boats and then to go boating, to build wooden boats. Some of the wood will be reused in that way, and then we will replant. The garden's in it for the long run, so another 175 years from now, another big tree will come down.

Matt Katz: So you'll replant-- What will you replant from this tree?

Eric Sanderson: Yeah, I think the horticultural staff will have to evaluate, because the environment is changing. The environment is changing and with more wet weather, we need to be thinking about how we plant into the landscape. I think it's worth saying, Matt, that New York City is a city in a forest. We tend to talk about the trees in the city, but in fact, from nature's perspective, it's the other way around. We put a city here in a forest where there would have been millions and millions and millions of large trees and smaller and smaller and smaller trees across the place, and that they were such an important way for the way water moved through the city, the way flooding was handled in the past. I actually think that planting trees is an important climate resilient strategy going forward as well.

Matt Katz: And you mentioned that climate change had a role here in this tree falling. Can you explain that?

Eric Sanderson: Well, yeah, because I think we understand that there's so much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air that you and I are breathing right now hasn't been in the atmosphere for 24 million years, back from the time that giant sloths were walking around and looking for acorn trees or looking for oak trees. Because of that, the air is holding more water. When the carbon dioxide, it holds in more heat, more heat holds more water, and then in some places, that leads to droughts, and in other places, like here in the northeast, leads to more storms.

If you look at the projections in the New York City Panel of Climate Change for precipitation in New York City, you can see the curves going up. We're just the very beginning of a curve. The expectations are that there's going to be more rain and more intense events like that and that affects everything about our city. It affects where you can drive, it affects your ability to get to work, and it affects everything for the trees as well.

Matt Katz: We have a question for you from Richard in Washington Heights. Hi, Richard.

Richard: Hi. How are you doing?

Matt Katz: Hi, there.

Richard: Well, yeah, first I wanted to just say that after Superstorm Sandy, the amount of trees that fell in Inwood Park was incredible, and to see the, you know, the shallow but broad root system there. I was just wondering, what do you think of putting like fish guts and bones to fertilize trees on the street. I did it once and it seemed to work. I just wanted to know if there's a professional view on it.

Matt Katz: Huh, Eric, what about that?

Eric Sanderson: Yeah, well, I think it takes a lot of nutrients to build a tree, and it takes a long time for bones to break down, so I think it's probably better to use the Sanitation Department to take care of our bones and our garbage like that.

Matt Katz: Fair enough.

Eric Sanderson: I think what's more important is to give space to trees to make sure that when we plant new trees, because we have to be constantly planting new trees, to make sure they're well-watered and that they're taken care of, that the tree pits around them are open and that we give them as much access to the ground as possible. I think that's the best thing we can do to take care of the trees in our communities.

Matt Katz: Are there other, even older trees at the botanical garden?

Eric Sanderson: There's a very old tulip tree that's in the middle of the forest that's thought to be over almost 200 years old. There's another tulip tree that's just outside my office, the mother tree that was here before the botanical garden was established, and that led to the tulip tree, Allée, that very famously leads up to the museum building here and then we've also had to replace recently because of lightning strikes and concerns about it getting old. It's a very interesting problem from a horticultural perspective to think you have this mature, beautiful, well-loved landscape and you want it to last in a time, but of course, these are not pieces of art that you preserve. These are living organisms that have natural lifespans. We have to plan for that in our horticultural and our ecological management.

Matt Katz: We have a couple of listeners who are shouting out their favorite tree, the camperdown elm in Prospect Park as their favorite, so wanted to--

Eric Sanderson: Oh, that's a beautiful tree, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Katz: Absolutely.

Eric Sanderson: There's wonderful books that catalog the trees of the city, the very old ones. There was one in Douglaston in Queens that went down in, I don't know, about 10 years or so ago that was thought to be 600 years old. There were some in Flushing in the Fox Oaks that George Fox, the famous Quaker preacher preached underneath in the 17th century and lasted well into the 19th century. We live in an ancient forest.

It may not feel like that all the time, but that's actually what nature wants for us is to live in a forest, that we have the right kind of four-season climate with the right kind of levels of precipitation, the right sorts of soils to make all of the city want to be a forest.

Matt Katz: We have one more caller. Let's go to Pierre in Brooklyn. Hi, Pierre. Thanks for calling in.

Pierre: Hi, thanks for having me here and thank you for bringing up this topic.

Matt Katz: Oh, our pleasure. Yeah. You're on with Eric Sanderson from the Botanical Garden.

Pierre: Hi, Eric. I admire your work so much, and I admire everything you're saying. I was just talking about how I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and in between all the brownstones in the back, there was this one huge, beautiful maple tree that had been there for at least 100 years. The owner ended up leaving and the place was bought. I think it was being gentrified and changing. You never think of the ecosystem as being gentrified. What ended up happening was they cut down this huge tree, this huge, beautiful maple tree, which was like the center of an ecosystem. There were all these raccoons, and squirrels, and beautiful birds. There was a red-tailed hawk that was there, and there was woodpeckers and blue jays and cardinals.

There were so many little bees and propagators that were flying around, and it was just kind of its own Disney film in Brooklyn, and people forget. I actually, when that tree, when they cut down the tree, I felt such a loss because we're part of the ecosystem too. It really resonated. I still feel that loss, even though it was last summer.

Matt Katz: Thank you, Pierre.

Eric Sanderson: That's right.

Matt Katz: Well, Eric, what do we do? How do we take care of these ancient trees, protect them from not only the weather, but also people development, gentrification?

Eric Sanderson: Yeah. Well, that's right. I think that it's really important to tell these kind of stories and to talk about why these trees matter so much to us. They matter in their own sense, and they matter in their human relationship to them. This is the central problem of ecology in New York City, which is that ecology wants to work on a landscape scale and yet we so subdivided the properties of the city, the way we manage them. There are so many individual land managers making individual decisions that come out of our history as Americans. I think the best way to coordinate across them is to tell stories about why these things are so important.

Matt Katz: Thank you, Eric, for sharing your story about your old oak over there and hope it can lead to many more oaks in the future and in the centuries to come. My guest has been Eric Sanderson, vice president of urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden. Eric, thanks so much.

Eric Sanderson: Thank you, Matt.

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