Bennington residents and visitors can look forward to an esoteric autumnal sensory experience. Three trees in the municipal parking lot behind the town garage and another off Elm Street, next to the Better Bennington Corp. building parking lot, will soon begin to turn lovely shades of apricot and rose. They're eye candy.
But as the leaves turn they'll also begin to fill the air with a toasty fragrance, a nose candy evoking the scent of brown sugar. It's one of several good qualities possessed by Cercidiphyllum japonicum, the katsura tree.
Another experience awaits those walking down the driveway along the west side of the Citizens Bank building, on the second floor of which our office is located. My suite mates and I have enjoyed for weeks an aerial view of ripening crab apples on the tree that is now overtopping our building, and crowding against our windows and those of our next door neighbor. The bright red orbs nestled among deep green leaves is a gorgeous sight.
But this tree, and other large-fruited crab apples along Main Street and perhaps elsewhere in town, really doesn't belong here. The large numbers of dropped fruits are messy-making. Smushed fruit isn't pleasant underfoot. I love looking at the tree both spring and fall, but a smaller fruited variety would have been a better choice.
And the katsuras in the municipal lot were the wrong choice for the parched tree islands in which they're growing. This species needs rich, moist soils, and these struggling specimens are obviously unhappy in their arid setting. Diagnosis? Wrong spot. Their sister on Elm Street, though banged up by construction, is much more highly branched and lushly green. Diagnosis? Right tree (though it should have been protected from operators of heavy equipment).
We see other examples too. A young oak on Main Street will scrape the walls and windows of the Putnam Hotel before long. Several little-leaf lindens east of the Four Corners have already had to be severely pruned, like Cinderella's sisters? Toes, to fit their shoes.
But there's one place that's always the right spot for (native) trees of any size, with any kind of flower or fruit. That's along a stream or river. The December 2007 town of Bennington's channel management and river protection plan for the Roaring Branch and the Walloomsac (prepared with a grant from the state and coordinated by BCCD) calls again and again for the "planting of channel banks and floodplain corridor" to decrease bank instability.
A similar plan on the Batten Kill prepared for the state's River Management Program in February 2007 repeatedly recommends "plant buffer." (BCCD and its partners will be implementing these and other recommendations for the Batten Kill in the years ahead.) In terms of river health, wide buffer zones loaded with trees and shrubs are not only what the doctor ordered. They are a real world magic elixir.
They keep banks stable. They trap sediments before they enter a stream. Buffers remove some nutrients and other contaminants before they enter the stream. They improve and protect water quality. And they improve and protect aquatic and terrestrial habitat.
But long stretches of our county's rivers lack tree and shrub cover. Sometimes the riparian zone is farmed. (River valley bottom soils are the best.) Maybe it's an aesthetic choice: a mowed lawn looks neat, people think, while a wildly vegetated buffer zone looks messy.
In fact, Cinderella's sisters' severed toes were messy. A streamside full of maples and sycamores, dogwoods and basswoods, birds and bugs and even sometimes bears, is healthy and productive. Find a wild spot by the water now and watch the purple ash leaves and red viburnum fruits float by. This is a river where things are right.
Shelly Stiles is the district manager for the Bennington County Conservation District, whose mission is promoting rural livelihoods and protecting natural resources in southwestern Vermont. Web site at www.bccdvt.org.
This column appeared in the Bennington Banner in September 2008, as one of the BCCD's Conservation Currents pieces, a bi-weekly feature written by BCCD board and staff members since August 2006.