Townsend Tree Board
 | Author:
Patrick Plantenberg, Tree Board Chair
Townsend Tree Board Chair, Townsend Rotary Club |
The Townsend Tree Board is a group of volunteers operating under a city ordinance to help manage the community forest. The award-winning Townsend Tree Board has been beautifying Townsend one tree at a time since 1990. Volunteer urban forest management won’t work for most cities, but it has made a difference in our community. With a minimal city and county annual budget, the board’s survival depends on grants and donations from the public as well as money made selling trees to the public and pruning private trees.
A Broadwater County Resource Assessment in 2004 identified beautification of the highway corridors through town as one priority. The Tree Board members found a niche and got started. They started small. Built Partnerships. Built Trust. Got Training. Kept Promises. Did Good Work. Maintained Projects. Since then, they have put in 1000–2000 volunteer hours per year.
The key to the Tree Board’s success has been the commitment of volunteers. Scott Eckhardt was the hardest working and most dependable worker on the Tree Board for seven years. Linda Southall teaches students about trees, organizes the Arbor Day poster contest, and is its photographer. Retired volunteers dominate the Tree Board workforce. Judy Schenk, Mary Mistek, and others work as volunteers for the board. Part-time senior employees including Henry Murray, now deceased, and Teri Blahnik, and others have watered hundreds of new trees through the years.
City trees are watered from April 1 through the first freeze each year. In 2020, 750 trees were watered at a cost of $13 per tree. From 2005 to 2021 the Tree Board funded watering trees from tree sales and planting/ pruning services. The City Council began funding the watering program in 2022.
Current members of the board are Linda Southall, Dan Mainwaring, Iwy Obrigewitch, Laverne Heavirland and Patrick Plantenberg. Since 2004, the Tree Board has partnered with many organizations. Youth involvement has been critical. Every student from the Townsend School District has helped plant a tree on campus on Arbor Day, helped with other town landscaping projects, or helped prune trees on campus. Students will get a chance to plant trees around the new school beginning next spring.
The Tree Board also plants trees on private land. A contractor was hired to do a tree canopy analysis in 2009. The contractor’s recommendation was to plant at least one private tree for every tree planted on public property. The lack of a nursery and landscapers in town created an opportunity. The Tree Board started purchasing extra bare root trees for sale to private citizens. Tree sales and planting services for private citizens largely pay for the following year’s trees. Currently, the Tree Board plants at least three to five private trees for every one public tree.
Additionally, the Tree Board has been partnering with and selling trees to other cities and towns in Montana. In 2021, over 250 trees were sold outside Townsend. Helena bought all their urban forest trees from Townsend in 2021. In 2020, 2021, and 2022 the Tree Board purchased over $20,000 worth of trees and paid $9,000 to water trees.
What are the results? The Tree Board has increased the number and diversity of trees in Townsend with an increase from 15 to 70 species on private property between 1990 to 2020. One urban forest guideline shows no tree species should exceed 10% of the total trees in the inventory. The Tree Board keeps trying different Zone 2–4 tree species. The Tree Board has significantly reduced the dominance of green ash, Siberian elm, and blue spruce but green ash still exceeds the recommended 10%.
Is volunteer urban forest management sustainable? No. Tree Board members are aging. They have not been able to identify an individual to manage the program going forward. The Tree Board planned to start cutting back by not ordering trees to plant in 2023. However, Jemma Loughery, the Broadwater High School horticulture class teacher, asked that the Tree Board continue to order a reduced number of trees to allow her class the opportunity to learn what it would be like to work at a nursery, garden center, or as a landscape contractor.
The Tree Board will continue working in 2023 even it if is at a reduced pace.
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PhotoCredit: MT43 News
Image 1 Caption: Patrick Plantenberg pruning one of the hundreds of trees planted by the Tree Board
