by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Montreal’s street trees are small and don’t live long, and Pierre-Emile Rocray says it’s partly our fault. Montreal’s urban forest engineer is encouraged that Montrealers have been upset by the chopping down of trees for developments such as the metro in Ahuntsic and a Ford dealership on the St-Jacques cliff, but city dwellers could do a lot more to help Joe Tree.

"People toss garbage, soft drinks, cigarette butts at the small squares or grills in the sidewalk where these trees are planted. Plus, others lock their bikes to these trees. I don’t know why people think that the spaces at the base of a tree should be considered garbage cans, but it doesn’t help anything when people toss their stuff there."

Citizen negligence helps limit the age of trees in the sidewalk to a mere seven to 15 years. "There’s not much we can do about it," he says.

Other factors that kill the city’s trees include air pollution and road salt, although it isn’t spread in the same abundance as in the past.

"Plus there’s a lot of heat downtown, the air conditioning tosses hot air out on the streets and glass buildings reflect sun onto these trees, making it too hot for them," Rocray continues.

Another major factor in the decline of our trees - not to mention the obvious snow clearing mishaps - is the tiny underground boxes that they are forced to spread their roots in. Rocray says that at places like the Main and Ste-Catherine, the city has started installing what’s called "floating sidewalks." "They don’t force the trees to grow in these little boxes so they allow them to root into far more soil," he says.

Rocray, who oversees the planting of 5,000 trees a year, says his favourite individual city tree is the Gingko Biloba at Peel and Doctor-Penfield, followed by one on Bourbonnière between Ste-Catherine E. and Ontario, and another at Wellington and Charlevoix.

Siberian elm, Norway maple, hackberry and red ash are the most often planted varieties of trees, but Rocray says nothing compares to the lamented American elm, which numbered 50,000 in 1944 and just 500 today. "It grows fast, it has a resistant wood, it’s beautiful, and it resists salt and the loss of roots," he says.

Ten elms of a variety supposedly resistant to Dutch elm disease were planted a dozen years back on Mount Royal near Olmstead Road, not far from where the Tam Tams take place. So far, the tiny elm bark beetles that carry the fungus into the trees haven’t killed them, but the trees are nearing the size at which they generally become vulnerable to the disease, which has reportedly become more virulent.

"As a test, we put up a special pole to try to attract the beetles and yes, there were lots of them still flying around," he says. Only three or four of the experimental elms the city planted on Mount Royal remain. Vandals destroyed the rest.