Volunteers branch out to trim borough trees

To a visitor walking around Haddonfield, several things might jump out.

It might be the unique Acme and Starbucks buildings not found elsewhere. Or the dinosaur and hippo sculptures. Not quite as obvious as a 15-foot giraffe or a Revolutionary War skirmish is the appearance of the borough’s more than 8,000 trees.

While the town and its public works department trim many of the larger and older trees, equally important are the hundreds of smaller and younger ones that need proper care while they grow.

That’s where the Haddonfield Branch Manager Program comes in.

As the name suggests, program volunteers walk the borough each year making sure branches don’t grow over sidewalks or streets and that the trees are healthy.

Robin Potter, a former chair of the Shade Tree Commission and founder of the Branch Manager Program, said the borough began the initiative 14 years ago because of so many small trees planted at the time – about 150 a year – and because public works staffers didn’t have time to care for all of them.

“The whole thought with the branch managers was really to work with the younger trees that were planted for the first three to five years,” Potter explained, “that they’re in the ground and to make sure that the branches that remain are growing not directly over the sidewalk. Not directly into the street.”

Jane Berkowitz has been running the program for more than 10 years. She’s trained as a tree tender, shows up almost every day some weeks – despite the weather – and plans to keep volunteering until she can’t.

The program has maintained a similar structure through the years.

“(It) hasn’t changed much since 2012, when it started,” Potter noted. “People come into it, they get a good hands-on training. I know Jane leads the program hands on, then she organizes a team so new people aren’t put out on the street to work without supervision. So there’s a lot of mentoring until people get comfortable with it.”

Training for the program happens once a year in November or December and can include about 10 people. On a typical weekly outing, about 20 dedicated volunteers will carry a list of trees to trim on a clipboard and spend a few hours examining each one. They carry bucket of supplies, from clippers to shears to saws.

Volunteers work either two or 20 hours a week and tend to be older, some in their 80s.

The best trimming happens in the winter, when trees have the fewest leaves. During an outing in February, Berkowitz and volunteer Pam Anderson were asked about a particular tree and thanked for their work. But not everyone is happy to see them.

Potter recalled a resident who initially protested a trim.

“The first day we were working our way down a street and a woman came tearing out in her nightgown saying, ‘Don’t touch that tree!'” Potter recalled. “She didn’t know who we were … Then when we explained, she was calm.”

The program is overseen by what’s called the canopy of the Shade Tree Commission, a group of five that includes Berkowitz and who meet on a monthly basis to hear concerns from residents about their trees.

Commissioner Itir Cole, whose duties include the commission, said the canopy maintained in part by the volunteers is one of the town’s most recognizable features.

“It takes a lot of work to maintain the canopy,” she pointed out. “And one of the most recognizable characteristics of our town is our canopy. So I think the program runs really well. And they have a fantastic level of impact on managing the trees that we have and the character that it adds to the town.”

Cole didn’t hazard a guess on how many borough employees it would take to do what the volunteers accomplish. But at a commission meeting in January, Berkowitz reported that about 230 trees out of the 750 the program wanted to address this year had been pruned. By the February meeting, the number was 325. And by March, all but 25 trees had been trimmed.

Fourteen volunteers ended the entire winter season by trimming 770 trees over 169 hours. One of them was Anderson, a violin maker who said she loves volunteering with the program.

“(Jane) is great to work with,” she added. “They’re very knowledgeable.”

Robert Marshall, a 71-year-old volunteer, believes a good tree canopy helps a town feel more personal.

“And it’s kind of sad when I drive down White Horse Pike, I think how much nicer it would have been if they had trees on either side,” he lamented. “… Communities are starting to recognize more and more the value of tree canopy. It helps the business district.

“It’s a more personal scale when you walk down the streets as opposed to a barren concrete and just traffic whizzing by.”