Tree Guard Benefits for City Parks Departments
A study conducted by New York City’s Park and Recreation Department of the City’s young street trees found that just under 11% of the trees they surveyed had a tree guard installed around it’s base. They concluded that city trees with tree guards had a 15.8% greater chance of survival rate then trees without a guard. In the same study, stewardship, such as signage and plantings around the bed, gave street trees a 36% greater chance of survival then those trees that didn’t show any visible signs of care14.
“Forest trees may live to be hundreds of years old or more, but the average city tree lives only 32 years and inner city trees only seven years. As a result, a large portion of our urban trees die well before maturity and never provide the aesthetic, economic, and functional benefits for which they were intented15”. Healthy, beautiful, shade-providing street trees work hard for us against all the elements in urban environments. And with a little investment for guards, trees can produce incredible results.
Curb Allure offers fresh, exciting new tree guard products that keep our cities green. Curb Allure’s solutions:
- Make owning a tree guard easy: Curb Allure’s rust resistant metal tree guards are affordable and easy to install. In addition, they can enlarge if a tree pit expands without adding significant cost. We expect that offering lower priced and easier to install tree guards will improve guard installation rates dramatically.
- Offer flexibility: Although tree guards help to protect trees, existing welded steel tree guards can sometimes get in the way of replacing or caring for street trees. Because Curb Allure’s tree guards are aluminum and ‘locked’ and not welded together, Park’s personnel can use a proprietary key that will unfasten the tree guards easily when doing maintenance or planting.
- Inspire citizens: Through education and by example, Curb Allure and its metal tree guards hope to help educate the public about street trees and inspire people to take part in protecting our trees and urban gardens to make our cities more beautiful.
- Protect the urban forest: Planting new street trees is an expensive investment. Curb Allure’s tree guards help protect that investment. Trees have been shown to have a noticeable and lasting effect on people’s sense of community in their neighborhoods. City street trees play a key role in making a city feel welcoming and vibrant.
- 14. Jacqueline Lu and Jennifer Greenfeld, New York City’s Young Street Tree Mortality Study (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/trees_greenstreets/images/YSTM_philadelphia.PDF) November, 2010
- 15. Larry R. Nelson and Donald L. Ham, Clemson University Extension, Tree Health Care: Managing Natural Changes Forestry Leaflet 18, Revised October 1997 (http://www.clemson.edu/extfor/publications/forlf18/)