When the East Hampton Village Board approved a $51,750 quote to catalog every tree on village-owned land, it was in keeping with a long history.
“We have been working together as a team for over 125 years,” Olivia Brooks, chairwoman of the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s tree committee, told the board at its Dec. 17 meeting, after the resolution was unanimously approved. “We think that most likely we are the oldest partnership of a nonprofit and public entity in the United States.”
The village and the L.V.I.S., she said, are now taking management and stewardship of 3,500 to 4,000 trees, and some 800 plaques, to another level by engaging Davey Resource Group, which will conduct a geographic information system-based inventory of trees, stumps, and planting sites in rights of way and maintained areas of parks, digitally tagging and photographing every tree and recording height, species, and diameter.
Davey Resource Group will also provide its TreeKeeper inventory and management software, creating a database that the public, in time, will be able to access. The group’s parent company, the Davey Tree Expert Company, was founded in 1880 to train tree surgeons, predecessors to modern-day arborists, according to its proposal.
“We are now getting a tree inventory for 3,500 to 4,000 trees that you own — the village — and that the L.V.I.S. are stewards of,” Ms. Brooks told the board. “This is a great, great gift, and we will work together and make this a wonderful, wonderful program.”
“I’ve been talking about this since I took office, about getting the trees organized and having bios next to each plaque so that you can track it on a website,” Mayor Jerry Larsen told Ms. Brooks and other members of the L.V.I.S. who attended the meeting. “It’s terrific. I’m very, very excited about this.”
“Our tree program is the oldest in America,” Ms. Brooks said with obvious pride after the meeting. She has been chairwoman of the tree committee for the last 18 years, and is particularly pleased with its plaque program, which itself is roughly 90 years old.
“The 1938 Hurricane took down 40 percent or more of the big elms on Main Street,” she said. One theory is that the L.V.I.S. started selling the plaques as a way to earn money to plant new trees.
For $1,000, one can dedicate a bronze plaque, ordered from a foundry in Chicago, that will be placed under an adopted tree. “They’re not all memorial plaques,” Ms. Brooks said. “Some are a dedication for someone’s anniversary or a birthday. Two of the plaques are for dogs. There’s a dog on Huntting Lane and another on Newtown Lane.”
The money is spent on the plaque, but it’s also used to treat diseased trees, or spent on pruning and planting. Around 12 plaques were sold last year, by Ms. Brooks’s estimate. She will often meet the donor and walk different locations where the plaque may be placed. Sometimes, a plaque is to be placed with a new tree, in which case an appropriate place to plant it must be located.
“Sometimes it’s very emotional, if it’s a memorial plaque,” she said. “It can be very sweet. I find it fascinating. Behind every plaque is a story. I get to meet and talk with the people, and often we become friends. We have a glass of Prosecco under the tree when the plaque is installed.”
“It’s part of my mission with the L.V.I.S.,” Ms. Brooks continued. “If anything happens to that plaque, if it’s hit by a snowplow or lawnmower and God knows where it goes, we replace it. We will not ask the donor for more money. If anything happens to a memorial tree, we replace the tree as well.”
The L.V.I.S. tree committee comprises 25 women, who are divided into street teams. “When someone is interested in joining the tree committee, the first thing I do is ask them to have coffee with me at John Papas,” Ms. Brooks said of the diner downtown. “I bring a job description with me. I want them to know I’m serious about this work. If you’re on the tree committee, you have to be committed, and you’re going to have to have good knees. You’re going to have to bend down. You have to be able to dig around the plaques.”
At least once a year, committee members are tasked with creating a report for the streets they oversee. They maintain the plaques and check the conditions of the trees. This information has historically been held within a database.
“It’s a herculean task, what they do,” said Marcos Baladron, the village administrator. “It’s an unbelievable amount of data. The new software is collaborative. They can do what they do, and we can do what we do as a village, and the data is combined to help manage the assets of what our public trees are.”
“We’ll be able to make that data publicly searchable for the first time,” Mr. Baladron said. “It’ll make a living document of our trees.”
The data should be available by June 1, he said. “This year, we hope for a big push on plantings and finding new places to put new trees throughout the village.”
