Saving an 'Ent'

If you want to find an Ent in Ottawa (Ents are giant, ancient, magical trees that appear in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) you can find one on Sunnyside Avenue. It’s a white oak which was a stripling when Colonel By was building the Rideau Canal and is now a forest giant stretching four stories towards the sky.  It has an immense green canopy that cools the neighbourhood in the summer and cleans the air for all those living near it.  White oaks can live for 500 years. It has already endured great ice storms, broiling summers and freezing winters for 150 years. What an Ent can’t endure is a chain saw.  In a day, a single chain saw can reduce a 150 years of life to a memory and that was where the white oak was going when I arrived.

The owner wanted the side lot on which the tree stood cleared of any obstacle to future development. This is normal. We have lost many great old trees to infill buildings. The trees closest neighbour was upset at the idea of losing the oak, not just for herself but for the community. There is no other tree like it in Old Ottawa South. On Monday, morning, I bicycled over to find a removal crew already setting up, the site cordoned off with yellow, caution tape and the chain saws were out.

I offered to pay for the crew’s time, not to start cutting until I could see if there was any way we could save it. Then I phoned the city’s forester for advice and discovered it was not possible. The city had no authority to protect trees on private property. The owner was entirely within his rights to bring it down. There was only one way to save it, we had to buy the land from the owners. I thought that this might be possible because the city has collected thousands of dollars in development charges for infill housing all along Sunnyside Avenue, some of these charges are called ‘cash in lieu of parkland’. This charge is to compensate the city for the decrease in greenspace infill housing causes. The city has never bought any new green space with this development charge.  But I couldn’t do this in time to save the tree. It would take a year to pull it off.

I explained all this to Pamela White. She nodded and then went into her house to consult her husband. She came out and looking rather pale said, she and her husband were prepared to take a mortgage out on their house to purchase the lot the ‘Ent’ stood on. The owner happily agreed to this and on a handshake, the old oak was saved. I agreed to pay for the work ‘not done’ by the tree crew from my office budget and to search for money from the city in next year’s budget to buy the lot for a community park. Pamela agreed to to purchase the property in the short term. She is getting an independent arborist’s opinion on the health of the tree and I have begun to enquire of city staff about the amount of money the city has collected in infill development charges just along Sunnyside Ave. This will be the first step in justifying the city re-direct some of these charges towards creating a little park around the oak.