Quote:
Originally Posted by vid
You can't plant conifers along busy sidewalks. They crowd people out, unless you trim the bottom 10 feet of them, but even then they're annoying and look stupid. They're also slow growing, and their conical shape means they'll never form a canopy or cast meaningful shade.
You can't stick a cones of plant with 12 foot bases along downtown streets. It just doesn't work.
Maple is a pretty good tree. Thunder Bay uses Hackberry on a few streets but they have big leaves so young trees look really stupid.
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I did landscaping for 14 years, and there are few tree's that can be planted downtown on the main routes, this is due to SALT. Elms and Maples and Ashes do good, the rest do very poorly.
We had also tried about 100 15 foot Spruce down Portage allready, when Mayor Suzy T was in office, and remember after one winter they were all brown on the street side due to salt spray.
Now planting other trees say in the parts of the exchange that are not planted, you can go with just about anything as the Salt spray is not that large. Spruce though need to be at least 10 feet back from the street curb to be succesful.
Elms will always win though, they are extremly long lived, fast growing, form a wonderful canopy and take salt and poor soil conditions with stride. The Siberian ones you see on the center of portage do not do so well though. But they do not get Dutch Elm. But on the Dutch Elm issue, they do have a cure for it now, but the city is too poor to immunize all the tree's. All they care about is what is around the Leg.
And the second biggest killer of trees is people at night breaking new ones or idiot drivers taking them out. Here is where we need to put some thought into how to protect them till they are mature enough to withstand cars and people.