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Next for Newport Preservation: Gilded-Age Beeches
By CORNELIA DEAN
NEWPORT, R.I. — In the Gilded Age, the rich built marble palaces here, surrounding them with exotic trees they acquired with the same ardor they brought to assembling their fabulous collections of art.
Their favorites were European beeches — green, copper and weeping beeches — trees they prized for their dramatic shapes and colors. Soon the streets of Newport’s mansion district were filled with the trees.
Today, many of them tower as high as 80 feet. “They are icons of Newport, the signature trees of the Gilded Age,” said John R. Tschirch, an architectural historian who directs conservation programs at the Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns many of the mansions.
But the trees are in trouble. Planted more or less all at once about 120 years ago, they are aging all at once now, a process hastened by insect and fungus infestations they can no longer fight off. Though the mansion district’s main street, Bellevue Avenue, looks almost as elegant as ever, here and there stands a skeleton tree, bereft of leaves, or a stump perhaps five feet across, all that remains of a vanished giant.
Throughout the city, people are practicing what Lillian Dick, president of the Newport Tree Society, calls “geriatric arboriculture,” treating ailing beeches with pesticides, keeping people from walking on their shallow roots, or pampering them with water and fertilizer. Often the efforts fail, so in many lawns where mighty trees once grew, replacement saplings stand, as gawky as adolescents at a ball.
One of them, a 20-foot copper beech, grows in the lawn of the preservation society’s headquarters, a three-story Romanesque Revival mansion on Bellevue Avenue, built in 1888 as a summer residence for William H. Osgood, a New York broker and yachtsman. Jeff Curtis, the society’s arborist, removed the sapling’s giant predecessor last year.
“It was over 50 percent dead,” he said. Mr. Curtis regularly surveys all 1,800 trees on the society’s grounds, and he finds signs of disease everywhere. One day recently, walking on the lawn of another society property, the Elms, he stopped under the drooping canopy of a weeping beech and stared at its trunk for a moment. “Here,” he said, pointing to a patch of dark brown goo oozing from the tree a few feet above the ground.
That ooze is a signature of beech canker, which has been attacking Newport’s trees for more than two decades, according to Brian Maynard, a professor of horticulture at the University of Rhode Island. The canker results from a fungus, phytopthora (pronounced fie-TOP-thuh-ruh), that also attacks the bark of stressed trees.
A second problem is cottony scale, an insect that taps into tree bark, introducing another fungus, nectria. “Nectria kills the bark of the trees,” Dr. Maynard said. “The bark falls off, and the tree is in trouble.”
Vigorous trees can fight off these two diseases, but they become vulnerable as they age. A tree’s growth occurs in its outer rings, Dr. Maynard said; he added that “the tree gives up on the old wood” in the center, which can rot, spread decay or suffer from injudicious pruning or other injuries.
“Trees are constructed to be able to tolerate some of this,” he went on, “but eventually the insults build up to the point that the trees cannot keep overcoming them.”
This is particularly true of beeches, whose shallow root systems are ideal for Newport’s thin topsoil but vulnerable to cars, trucks, lawn mowers and even people strolling in the shade. Dr. Maynard said that in their native European habitat the trees can live 300 or even 400 years. In the alien Newport climate, 120 years is more like it.
Mr. Curtis agreed. “They have a life span,” he said. “All the treatment in the world is not going to save them.”
Still, he spends much of his budget on treatments that can slow the infestations but not remove them.
Mr. Tschirch said serious efforts to monitor the trees began only about 30 years ago. Since then, he said, the preservation society has been working vigorously to treat and replace diseased trees. “We replant in kind,” he said. “Where you see small copper beeches, they replaced large copper beeches.”
The society supports the effort with donations and a grant from a foundation, the Prince Charitable Trusts. Mr. Curtis said he spent about a quarter of his budget on replacement trees. Recently he bought two good-size beeches for the Elms for about $350 each, “a good deal.” In a nursery he operates in what was once a mews and greenhouse for the archetypal Newport mansion, the Breakers, he grows European beeches grafted to rootstock from the American beech. In Newport, the American beech is hardier, but it is far less glamorous. As Dr. Maynard put it, “it only comes in one color: green.”
But most of Mr. Curtis’s budget goes to treat diseased trees, which, like all trees on society property, are tagged with quarter-size ID discs. “We have real plans for taking care of every single tree,” said Trudy Coxe, the society’s chief executive.
If it were up to him, Dr. Maynard said, the focus would be on replacing the old trees. In the case of beech canker, he said, “by the time you see it, it has usually spread throughout the tree.”
He added, “By clinging to these old trees and not developing a plan for their replacement, Newport has hurt itself.”
On the Web site of the city’s Tree and Open Space Commission, Scott Wheeler, the city tree warden, makes a similar point. “Do the math,” he advises homeowners. “Is it wiser to spend more on this ailing tree or to replace it with a young tree better suited to the surroundings?”
The tree society, a nonprofit group, backs a number of efforts to maintain or replace ailing trees throughout the city, not just in the mansion district. Among other things, the group encourages planting trees on private property to replace ailing municipal trees planted too close to city streets.
The society also produces brochures for a “Gilded Age Tree Walk,” a map of notable tree specimens along Bellevue Avenue, many of them ailing beeches. “Newport’s landscape, both historically and culturally, would be devastated by the loss of this species,” the map says.
In an interview, Ms. Dick called the tree troubles “a crisis,” and Mr. Tschirch said the beeches were as important to the Newport landscape as palm trees in Florida. “Beech trees are so magnificent and their branch span is so grand, it is a definite loss,” he said.
But he added that the people who planted the European beeches in the first place probably did not live to see them mature. “You have to take the long view,” he said.
Still, Ms. Coxe, of the preservation society, said she was heartbroken when she learned that the beech at its headquarters was doomed. “It’s very hard,” she said. “It takes me a long time to say goodbye.”
