The guardians of Bristol’s trees are a punny bunch.

“You want to talk trees?” asked Tony Morettini, chairman of Bristol’s Conservation Commission. “Our tree management plan has grown organically … the root of it is … I’ll go out on a limb, we’ll branch into another discussion and leaf it there.

“I don’t want to be a sap, so I’ll stop now.”

Despite some high-profile losses in recent years, Bristol’s trees are in excellent hands — though whose hands depends on the location of the tree.

According to Ed Tanner, town planner, his office and the Bristol Conservation Commission are in charge of planning trees along town streets, while the State Department of Transportation (DOT) manages planting and removal along state roads, including 114 and 136. The office of town administrator fields complaints about trees with issues, and dispatches the tree warden, Steve Saracino, to inspect the tree in question. Depending on the location of the tree, either Bristol’s Department of Public Works (DPW) or the state DOT will send workers out to address the issue. With a trained arborist already on staff at the DPW, much management can be done in house.

It’s a big network, but one that is working well, as Bristol has recently been honored with the designation “Tree City USA” for the 18th consecutive year.

“Bristol loves their trees,” said Mr. Morettini. “I’ve had folks from other towns ask me how do we do it, and part of the answer is that it’s in the budget. We spend $90,000 each year on our trees, about $15,000 to plant trees along the streetscape, and the rest to maintain. There is no downtown in Rhode Island that looks like quite like ours, where you drive through a tunnel of trees — especially on High Street.”

Hard to say goodbye

Despite sound management, Bristol’s trees have been going through a rough patch — throughout the region, years of drought and stressors brought on by pests like gypsy moths have taken their toll. That, plus the fact that trees, like all living things, have a life cycle, and a lot of Bristol’s oldest and largest trees are reaching the end of their lives. The result is that these trees have to be taken down before they come down on their own, without warning, potentially leading to personal injury or property damage. It’s a process that is often fraught with controversy.

“One thing I have learned is that sometimes you look at a beautiful tree and it’s not a beautiful tree,” said Mr. Morettini. “It’s a hazard.”

He has come to trust the judgement of arborists, whether they are employed by the town, the state, or National Grid (which reserves the right to prevent trees from impacting their lines.)

“Arborists don’t like to get rid of trees,” he said. “That’s why they’re arborists. Their inclination is to save trees.”

Mr. Morettini cites the work done by the state several years ago during the road work along Hope Street, from Constitution to Washington streets, as a good example of the diligence exercised by state arborists. “The state came in and did an inventory of all the trees along Hope Street. Really an exhaustive, scientific one,” he said.

“They used a probe to test the thickness of trees. There are a lot of trees that may look like they’re 2 to 3 feet thick, but there’s really only six inches of wood. The middle has rotted or aged out. They told us what they found for every single tree, and for about 33 of them, they told us that they were going to take them down because they are either not going to survive construction or they need to come down anyway and now is a good time to do it.

“They ended up taking out about 33 trees, but they put back 37.”

That is not to say that the Conservation Commission always agreed with the determination of the state.

“There was this great old Linden (near the southwest corner of Hope and Church streets.) They said this guy’s gotta go, and we said ‘no, no, no … this one we’re going to go to the mat on. That’s a great old Linden tree. It’s an iconic tree, there are pictures of it from 100 years ago.’ The state, however, insisted the old tree was a hazard.”

The state won — and they were right. They took it down, and the tree was completely hollowed out. In a similar case, local opposition delayed the removal of a tree at Hope and Byfield streets. When Hurricane Sandy came through in September 2012, it took the tree down, and that tree singlehandedly knocked out power to the downtown business district for five days. It’s a cautionary take not likely lost on anyone who lived through it.

Proactive management

Several years ago the Conservation Commission decided it was time to be more proactive about how Bristol’s trees are managed, so they began to map and inventory the trees, focusing on street trees. With the help of

Roger Williams University students and about 20 local residents, about 5,500 trees have been mapped using an app called Open Tree Map.

“We’ve had an army out there,” said Mr. Morettini. “When will we be done? Never. But we’re only mapping street trees with a few exceptions, unless we are invited into someone’s yard.”

In addition to mapping the existing trees, they have mapped the roughly 470 street trees that have been planted by the town in the last 15 years. Now, again with the help of RWU students, they are taking all that data and applying it.

DEM is so impressed by Bristol’s nascent tree management plan, they have asked to use this model to serve as a statewide blueprint for similarly-sized towns.

“Next we want to make Bristol a town arboretum,” said Mr. Morettini. “At this point it’s just a matter of filling out some paperwork. We’ll probably do this by the end of the year.”

Rooted in education

This week, a new generation of Bristolians got a lesson in tree appreciation — and biology — as some Guiteras School fifth-graders took part in an Arbor Day tree planting ceremony on their campus, presided over by longtime Conservation Commission member and Vice Chairman Ray Payson. It is Mr. Payson who has long been the face of Bristol’s tree program, inspecting sites and determining where a street tree should go, and which species. The tree going in at Guiteras is a Princeton American Elm, a popular “noble” tree which is resistant to the Dutch Elm Disease that wiped out so many trees in town in the middle of the 20th century. Other popular species that the Conservation Commission plant include Oak, London Plane Tree, Sycamore, Red Maple, Sugar Maple, and Linden

At Guiteras, the Arbor Day event wasn’t a typical political photo-op. Whether due to the energetic influence of the fifth-graders or the opportunity to get some fresh air in the middle of a workday, everyone enthusiastically participated in the planting. “Line up! Everyone gets a shovel!" said Mr. Contente, applying his delegating skills to the rapidly-diminishing pile of dirt. In very short order, the tree was in the ground. It was even straight.

Before sending the students back to class, there was one final detail to attend to — the incantation — which saw a couple dozen fifth-graders form a circle around the tree and, along with Bristol’s town officials, wave their arms in the air and chant an incantation for the health and wellness of the newly planted tree. If that’s not part of the existing management plan, it ought it be.