Trees

THIS WEEK, Fairmount Park unveiled a fancy Web site (www.fairmountpark.org), long overdue, that will help more people enjoy the parks. Its features include interactive maps of the park system and other goodies that can help people find their nearest park, get help with street tree problems, and better navigate the 9,800 acres of the system. For this project, the Fairmount Park Conservancy, an independent fund-raising arm of the park, got Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Accenture to contribute resources to building the site.

Female ginkgo trees are out, so are walnut, crab apple and any tree with thorns. At the same time, pin and red oak, honey locust and sugar maples are welcome in Springfield Township. On Wednesday, the Springfield Township Council will consider a landscaping ordinance. The proposal specifies for developers what trees can and cannot be planted as well as where they can be placed and what type of soil can be used. In a township covering 29.34 square miles, inhabited by approximately 3,000 people, it would seem that there is plenty of empty land for whatever a builder wants to plant.

Councilman Jim Johnson last night told the Riverton Borough Council that the damage from two wind storms in November would cost the borough about $2,000 in cleanup costs. Johnson, who oversees the Shade Tree Commission, said that all borough roads had been cleared of fallen trees, but that stumps were still being removed. A report presented at the work session said 16 borough-owned trees, between 20 and 125 years old, were toppled during the storms. An additional 16 trees were heavily damaged and may have to be removed.

Backers of a plan to carve a ballfield from a stand of trees in Haddon Heights will conduct a tour of the site Saturday morning for residents who have voiced concern about the demise of the trees. The Haddon Heights Youth Association wants to locate a three-quarter-acre ballfield amid 11 acres of trees at the borough recreation complex at Eighth Avenue and High Street. Association vice president Thomas J. Ferrese invited eight concerned residents who attended last night's Borough Council meeting to join him in a tour at 9 a.m. Saturday.

Bensalem High School was the place to strike up the band on Saturday. Eighteen marching bands and guard units competed in the 25th annual "Parade of Colors" at the football stadium.

Frustration was running high at a crowded meeting of the Pennsbury Board of Supervisors last week when the debate centered, once again, on demands that trees be replaced at the Regalwood subdivision. Both residents, township officials and the developer expressed dismay that a solution had not yet been found. Almost out of desperation, it seemed, a compromise was reached. Jack Thomas, the developer, agreed to plant six oak trees. Each would be three inches in diameter. Regalwood is located on 30 acres, just east of Parkersville Road on Pocopson Road.

The presence of trees in the path of proposed parking spaces has prompted the Radnor Township Planning Commission to table a request by the Main Line Federal Savings Bank. The commission on Tuesday asked officials of Main Line Federal to return next month with a more detailed plan showing all parking spaces at its administrative offices, 2 Aldwyn Center on Lancaster Avenue. The bank already has received a special exception from the Zoning Hearing Board for 150 parking spaces, some of which intrude on the 60-foot front-yard setback.

Gloria Coryell, the owner of Deptford Honda, will face charges in Deptford Township Municipal Court on Nov. 3 of illegally bulldozing 35 trees to make room for expansion on the site of her motorcycle dealership. The charge, originally scheduled for a hearing last Wednesday, was continued by Judge Jeff Sprigman because Coryell's attorney, James Gabel of Pitman, said he needed time to prepare. According to Deptford planner Robert Marmion, Coryell is accused of cutting down 35 trees, most of them from 17 to 30 inches thick and 35 to 50 feet tall.

As a sewer line was being put in on Old Bethlehem Pike to service the new Lower Gwynedd Township Building and the proposed Wyndham Woods subdivision, a stack of pipe fell over on a 3-inch-wide tree. According to the township's landscaping ordinance, trees must be protected from harm during construction. Representatives of the Linpro Co., which is overseeing construction of the sewer line, apologized to the township Planning Commission on Thursday night for flattening the tree.

The tiny Glendale Methodist Church was decorated with the usual Easter lilies yesterday. Inside, you could hardly hear the traffic whizzing by. Edmund "Pete" Stafford, however, a direct descendant of one of the church's founders, talked gloomily of the church's future and the course of growth in his home town, Voorhees. "We've had some older people tell us they wouldn't come to church anymore," he said. Almost everything in Voorhees Township is new: new houses, new stores, new schools, new offices.

You have to give Christopher Guest credit: When he finds a comedy style that works for him, he sticks with it. Since This Is Spinal Tap in 1984, he has devoted himself to deadpan mockumentaries like Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman , using a loyal troupe of improv-adept actors including Michael McKean, Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, and John Michael Higgins. In his new eight-episode series for HBO, Family Tree , premiering at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, Guest uses his oft-imitated technique (e.g., The Office and Modern Family )

NEWARK, N.J. - The location of the trees that Joyce Kilmer wrote were more lovely than any poem has long been in dispute, with a handful of towns from Massachusetts to Indiana claiming to have inspired the verse. But a New Jersey historian said he now has irrefutable proof that Kilmer was stirred by the woods of the Ramapo Valley when he wrote the well-known words, "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. " Alex Michelini, founder of the Joyce Kilmer Society in Mahwah, said Friday that a letter written in 1929 by Kilmer's widow, Aline, to a graduate student shows that "Trees" was written on Feb. 2, 1913, at the couple's former home in Mahwah.

* FAMILY TREE. 10:30 p.m. Sunday, HBO.   ANCESTOR worship's all the rage these days. So HBO's newest comedy, "Family Tree," about a man tracing his roots, should have built-in appeal for those not already sold by the name of co-creator Christopher Guest ("Best in Show," "Waiting for Guffman"). A writer, composer, director and actor known for improvisational comedies structured like documentaries (and for being married to Jamie Lee Curtis), Guest, who says the show was inspired by his own ventures into genealogy, boasts an ancestry that's probably more hoity-toity than that of most people scrolling Ancestry.com.

When Sandy and Chris Ross were in Portland, Ore., they lived in a house built for those who buy large suburban dwellings. "Our house was a McMansion, designed for most people who want a front and rear entrance, a dining room, and a recreation room," says Chris Ross, a software engineer. But the Rosses are not most people. When they moved to Bryn Mawr, they wanted a house built to accommodate their family's special needs, limited finances, and environmental awareness. "We didn't have a great amount of money to spend, so we shopped for a site we could afford," says Sandy Ross, a computer-company lawyer.

A proposal to put a zip line in a five-acre section of Wissahickon Valley Park in Upper Roxborough sounds exciting. This creative way to help residents enjoy the city's wealth of parkland represents the kind of thinking many hoped to see when the city Recreation Department merged with the Fairmount Park Commission a few years ago. The idea is getting some well-reasoned opposition. Some neighbors worry about traffic and parking, as well as losing the quiet contemplation found within the piece of the park they frequent.

This is the time of year trees are most appreciated. Streets and parks fill with walkers, joggers, and bicyclists enjoying the transformation from brown to green. Students gather outside their schools to plant saplings. Budding branches everywhere invigorate our senses and lift our souls. Utilitarian entities like power companies, also, should love trees. Cities and towns become heat islands in the summers. Urban temperatures are considerably higher than surrounding suburbs, caused by the thousands of rooftops, jam-packed along miles of streets, interspersed with acres of parking lots, all absorbing the heat of the sun. By cooling the air beneath them, urban trees reduce the need for air conditioning.

As part of a national Arbor Day Foundation program called "Energy Saving Trees," Atlantic City Electric is offering 2,000 free trees to customers. The idea is that planting them strategically near houses and businesses can help reduce energy bills. Arbor Day officials estimate that within 20 years, the 2,000 mature trees the electric company gives away this year will save $380,000 in energy costs. An online tool developed by the foundation and the Davey Institute, a tree-care group, uses Forest Service research to calculate the benefits of planting trees, including cleaner air and improved storm-water management.

OPELIKA, Ala. - The Alabama fan who poisoned the iconic Toomer's Corner oak trees at rival Auburn has been sentenced to 3 years in prison. Harvey Updyke Jr. pleaded guilty on Friday to criminal damage of an agricultural facility. The sentence requires him to serve at least 6 months in jail and spend 5 years on supervised probation for the Class C felony. He has been credited with 104 days already served. Lee County Circuit Judge Jacob A. Walker III also fined the former Texas state trooper $1,000.

INDIANAPOLIS - Saplings from the chestnut tree that stood as a symbol of hope for Anne Frank as she hid from the Nazis for two years in Amsterdam are being distributed to 11 sites in the United States in a project that aims to preserve her legacy and promote tolerance. The tree, one of the Jewish teenager's only connections to nature while she hid with her family, was diseased and rotted through the trunk when wind and heavy rain toppled it in August 2010. But saplings grown from its seeds will be planted starting in April, when the Children's Museum of Indianapolis will put the first one in the ground.

WANT to spruce up your yard this spring? The city can hook you up with one or two free trees - but you have to act fast. The deadline to register for TreePhilly's spring campaign is March 31. Go to treephilly.org. Residents can choose from nine times and locations to pick up trees in April. They also can get information on the 10 species that the city is offering. There's the pawpaw, which grows to about 20-feet tall and sprouts "fruits that taste like banana custard"; the sweetbay magnolia, with "large fragrant white flowers" in the spring and "bright red berries" in the fall; the enormous tulip tree, which can grow to 90 feet; and many others, according to the city's website.