A Timbered Choir
Mount Dora’s long love affair with its trees
August 7, 2015
On breezy nights in this town, you can hear trees sway echoing to the wind, and if you take more than fleeting notice of it, you might hear the deeper, the inside resonance of our news.
It’s more close and familiar than anything you can get from cable news or social media — more intimate even than talking to a neighbor over the fence. It’s the deep blue end of the news spectrum, the soul of it.
All night, trees whisper our local stories on the wires of the wind — and some part of us is intently listening.
The need for news is one of the most common traits of human communication, found by anthropologists among every surviving primitive society. When a summer storm approaches, the impending sense of it is parlayed by trees as the wind picks up. An old cold finger draws up the back of our neck; time to head inside.
Subtly the voices at night change with alterations in the urban canopy — an old oak gone there, a sapling crepe myrtle or palm tree added there. Their song is so deeply enmeshed with our sense of local identity in this charming, quaint, quirky Southern town, that to remove a tree is to forever alter our sense of home by that much. Adding a tree is thus a reiteration or alteration of history, a statement of faith we hope our children’s children will remember.
This tree story is both history and news, gathered from local sources and the voices whispering on the wires of the wind. You cannot know what’s deeply happening in town without listening to this old choir.
When Mount Dora was settled in the last decades of the 19th century, the area was mostly pine, palm and cypress — hardy, scrub stuff apropos to the state’s scraggly interior. A few oaks could also be found, thriving in sandy soil, often near lakes. Some had been growing for a long time. In Orlando, Big Tree, a live oak, is thought to be more than four centuries old.
While the few year-round local residents were farming and logging, wealthy visitors from northern climes saw the lake and rolling landscape and thought to build idyllic winter homes here.
Clearing out the local brush, they built winter resorts of such grace that they competed with Orlando and Daytona for tourists, and then grand homes on streets named after the city’s founders, Tremain and Grandview and Donnelly and Alexander.
In the first decade of the next century, Louis Tremain, John P. Donnelly and Ida Hicks Rawson Bishop led an effort to plant oaks throughout the little town.
Those oaks grew tall and magnificent over the decades. At one time, the oak tree in front of the Donnelly House was grander in grandeur than the building.
Our house on Ninth Avenue was built in 1923 by a woman from Kissimmee who lived upstairs and rented out the lower rooms to snowbirds, a popular middle-class equivalent of the five downtown hotels. A number of live oaks were planted around the house — three in back and three more in the parkway by the street.
Streets were paved, streetlights lit, and tree-lined streets with swaying beards grew dense with the arch of green welcome.
The oaks continued to grow through the Depression and the Second World War as the city suffered the far reaches of global-wide events. They whispered of better times to come, they sang the news of loved ones fighting too far away. Closer troubles pressed in too — labor troubles in the groves, Klansmen driving at night.
Over the years, more oaks were planted, mostly laurel oaks that took less time to mature — 30 years compared to 70 for the live oaks. Perhaps in keeping with the changing times, the city needed trees to mature faster as new neighborhoods were added.
Those first oaks grew silently through the turbulent and times and changing conditions of the ’50s and ’60s, alongside the acquiescent lips of a city that seemed grateful at least for air conditioning, ice cold beer, and a TV set for all. The laurel oaks that often stood next to the live oaks — in this town, it’s hard to tell them apart — promised more rapid growth and change: a diverted US 441, a new Publix.
Central Floridians began to make the trip to Mount Dora, loving the town’s Northeastern vibe and swaying oaks.
By the 1970s, many of those first oaks planted by the city’s founders had passed maturity and were growing feeble, and the laurel oaks planted in subsequent decades were late in their lifecycles as well.
In 1979 the city removed 23 of these oaks that were deemed a hazard after one crashed to the street on Seventh Avenue between Donnelly and Alexander.
Taking down an oak has never been easy. Al Liveright was publisher of the Mount Dora Topic during the ’70s, and he told me that he felt an almost filial losing just one of them. Locals, especially those who have lived here a long time, count the city’s oaks as family.
Dennis Huett has been with the city’s public works department for decades. He recalls back in the ’80s when Fifth Avenue, as it approaches downtown, was so thick with laurel oaks “it was like a tunnel — beautiful.” Unfortunately, most of the trees were by then dying and constantly dropping limbs.
It was then that the city began pursuing Tree City status, a tree planting and care program sponsored by the Arbor Day Foundation. Four criteria have to be met to achieve the status, including having a tree board or department responsible for care and management of trees; passing tree care ordinances to properly care for and maintain the city’s trees; establishing a community forestry program with an annual budget of at least $2 per resident; and organizing Arbor Day observances.
In 1988, the city was officially granted Tree City status, and has remained so since.
In 1992, city council hired a tree expert to advise them on a preservation strategy for the city’s canopy of oaks. His plan, to take down a number of trees, was widely booed by citizens in attendance at meeting about the issue. “Not one tree limb shall be cut!” said one. Council backed down on the plan.
Six months later in March 1993, a freak spring storm developed a snatch of tornadoes that bore down on the town from Lake Dora, slamming into downtown and then barreling up 11th Avenue. Power was down for days and several local business suffered severe damage — the Yacht Club sustained $160,000 in damage — but, fortunately, no one in the city was seriously hurt.
No humans, anyway. What careful hands might have selectively taken down in quieter times, the storm blew down in one sweep — hundreds of trees toppled and another 1,500 split, falling on houses, taking down power poles and ripping up water lines.
Almost all of the fallen were oaks — the old oaks planted at the beginning of the century, and so many laurel oaks which were years past their prime.
(Since 1993, vicious storms of this sort — the tail end of cold fronts whipping across the State — recurred significantly in 1998 and 2007. Since 1953, 55 tornadoes have touched down in Lake County.)
Jane Kramer, then the editor of the Mount Dora Topic, wrote in the next issue of waking up after midnight to the catastrophe of the storm and surveying the damage throughout town, coming to rest her eye here:
The great old oak in front of the Donnelly House is down — just a shell encompassing its huge girth. One some streets, almost all the old trees are down, or will have to come down, trees that had already outlived their normal life span by one or two decades. No longer will old Mount Dora have those wonderful, shady streets, trees arching overhead. (March 18, 1993, front page)
The Topic ran in successive issues pages of photos and contact information for residents to use as they needed assistance. It’s said that institutions define themselves in emergencies, and despite reduced resources, our local paper shone.
As the city looked to rebuild, the ravaged urban canopy was of great concern. Arbor initiatives were launched by the city’s garden club. A generous donor offered red, white, live and water (laurel) oaks 15 to 25 feet tall, as many as the city wanted.
The city was careful about replanting in some areas, putting in smaller ornamental trees under power lines.
Mount Dora Friends of the Environment launched about that time, a volunteer organization dedicated to protecting and preserving the environment through education and community outreach. Their tree donation program is still very active. Tree donations are tax-deductible and will be placed as close as possible as the donor’s preferred location. Details about the program are on the Friends of the Environment’s website.)¹
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Events surrounding The “Storm of the Century” passed, and life renewed into the new millennium. US-441 was widened. An interchange of the 429 tollway was opened north of Apopka, allowing traffic a way around the city’s rush-hour bottleneck. Development spread south of the Country Club and towards Sorrento. Real estate prices began lifting with the intoxicating appeal of orange blossoms in spring.
Everything was looking on the up and up for Mount Dora in August 2004 when, eleven years after the Storm of the Century, Hurricane Charley rounded the tip of Florida and began angling toward entry into the state. At first, forecasters saw it hitting around Tampa and passing over Leesburg. Orlando hotels began to fill with those looking to escape the hurricane’s 150-mph wrath. But the storm shifted south and east, entering at Punta Gorda and speeding northeast with a furious knot of twisters. Marauding from Port Charlotte, to Orlando and Winter Park, Charley exited the state over New Smyrna Beach.
The second most-powerful storm to strike the United States after Andrew (1992), Hurricane Charley did result in human fatalities — 14 deaths statewide — and also caused some $13 billion in damage to Florida.
Central Florida’s oak canopy was especially hard-hit by the storm, not having seen winds that strong since Hurricane Donna crossed in 1960. Orlando alone lost some 20,000 trees. Two days after the storm, I drove south to check on my mother. And while by then most of the roads had been cleared, electricity was out all over the city. The culprit — trees fallen on power lines — was on ghastly, citywide display. Oaks had toppled all around my mother’s house; one had fallen across the street, it upper boughs grazing the porch of her neighbor’s house. She waited two weeks in August heat before power was restored to her home.
Winter Park lost 8,000 trees in the storm, most of them the aged laurel oaks that dominated that city’s urban canopy. Since then, the city has had to remove another 3,000 of the trees due to storm-related damage.
In many ways, Winter Park is Mount Dora’s wealthy cousin — bigger houses, older art festival, pricier downtown shopping district — but their oak-lined streets give off the same vibe, and that city shares our deep love of oaks. Winter Park’s tree Armageddon from Hurricane Charley was eerily similar to the 1993 Storm of the Century that hit Mount Dora. It could have been us. It was supposed to be us.
We were spared; though it was in rebuilding that Winter Park got the real payoff — a gem of an urban forest management plan that is comprehensive, smart and long-sighted.
According to Dru Dennison, Winter Park’s urban forest manager, the plan was based on her observation that Winter Park had “an over-mature monoculture, resulting in a declining urban forest.” Noting the benefits of a healthy urban forest — from creating shade and protection from weather, providing areas for recreation, absorbing storm-water runoff, mitigating urban heat island, buffering noise and increasing real estate value — the plan provides a framework for ensuring that trees are appropriately cared for and provide guidelines for replacing trees and placing new ones.
Winter Park hopes to create a diverse urban canopy within ten years, balancing tall trees such as maple, oak, spruce and pine with medium-height trees (hawthorne, goldenraintree) and smaller ornamentals (redbud, dogwood). Trees would be planted in appropriate place (ornamentals in city parkways so they don’t have to be pruned for power utilities). The city’s preponderance of laurel oaks will be diversified with other trees native to the area.
The price tag is steep: $1 million annually for tree replacement with another $500,000 a year for tree maintenance by the Electric Utility Department. If you want to see what that kind of money will buy, click here to download a copy of Winter Park’s plan.
Keeping in mind that Winter Park is roughly twice the size of Mount Dora, I asked John Peters of our Public Works and Utilities department about his budget for tree replacement. He quoted a figure of $400. According to public works manager Dennis Huett, the overall tree maintenance budget, in keeping with the town’s Tree City status, is in the range of $25,000 (remember, our Tree City status requires us to budget $2 per capita for tree care, and the city now has 13,000 residents.)
In the most recent budget discussions, city manager Vincent Pastue has asked for an additional $14,000 more for tree maintenance, and has expressed interest in expanding the city’s urban forest plan.
But with all the pricey items contending for the city’s attention, budgeting for an urban forest plan on the scale of Winter Park’s is going to require a lot of political will, money, and public patience.
As everyone in town knows, the city has been engaged in a three-year downtown construction project to replace old water, sewer and storm water lines underground, repave streets, add irrigation and replace aging laurel oaks with trees deemed more suitable for the space. Fifteen aged laurel oaks have been removed, while all six live oaks remain in the ground and another nine will be planted. The project is on schedule to complete in October.
The issue of replacing those laurel oaks with sabal palms has been a sticking point for some downtown business owners and a citizens’ group. The city agreed to change out four parking spaces to add additional oaks in those locations. But tearing out the palms planted in earlier streetscaping phases to replace them with oaks is a topic some citizens say they still want to be a addressed. City officials have said that is not a part of the city’s present budget discussion. Parking issues are pressing, and the city is also looking at major utilities infrastructure work in a couple of years with the widening of US-441 to accommodate the Wekiva Parkway interchange.
For those who say they remember the small-town charm of the oaks on Donnelly Street between 4th and 5th Avenues, it must be remembered that that particular stretch of Donnelly had very few trees at all until the 1980s. For the past 60 years, only palms stood in that stretch of downtown.
But does a palm have the charm of a shade canopy tree? That’s the bone of contention for the Save Our Oaks coalition, with its rallying “An Oak for an Oak!” cry. Oaks downtown remain a political hot potato, and candidates challenging incumbents in the upcoming council election are picking up the Save Our Oaks rhetoric. Expect to hear plenty more about this as the city heads into the fall.
Whatever is decided downtown, the larger issue of what to do with Mount Dora’s aging canopy needs resolution — hopefully before the next big storm. Earlier this summer — only 24 hours after a raucous council meeting where citizens loudly criticized the city’s plan to remove old oaks downtown — a massive thunderstorm lingered over the city, and a falling sycamore took down a power line and knocked out a portion of Mount Dora’s power grid for hours.
And just a few weeks ago, a vicious thunderstorm ripped through Tavares, leaving a trail of fallen oaks along Old Highway 411.
Storms are no vindication for arguments, but they are storms.
Hurricane seasons have been quiet since 2004, but experts predict Florida will experience more violent weather. With an average temperature rise of 4–10 degrees over the next 100 years and a summer heat index increase of 8 to 15 degrees (the most dramatic in the nation), stresses on trees will be great. Higher temperatures and intense drought cycles will greatly increase the risk of wildfires. The spread of exotic species and invasive diseases will further weaken the tree canopy. And if sea levels rise as they threaten to, Floridians will be eking a tougher existence on a much smaller plot of land.
Our trees need us as much as we need them.
Last week, a tropical low in the Gulf dumped tons of rain on the state’s west coast, flooding streets and causing the Anclote River in Pasco County to crest six feet above flood level. Here the rain was sporadic (Orlando got much more) but the breeze was high for days, a humid, pulsing restlessness that reminded me of when Hurricane Jeanne crossed the state in 2004. For fifteen hours, winds came in mighty waves, waxing to a crescendo tree-thrashing fury and then ebbing to an eerie, momentary calm.
At my early rising hour the other day, I sat on the front porch feeding our two stray cats and listening to that breeze in the trees, wondering what news it carried from afar.
I thought of the two old live oaks in our back yard desperately in need of pruning, a budget item that keeps getting passed to the next hurricane season as we scrape our nickels. A lot of history in those trees; if they could do more than whisper, what would they tell us about this local world we live in?
That night the trees were loud in the breeze, from the rattling of trash fronds up in our palm to the half-song of maple and laurel in the parkway, carved sideways by repeated pruning over the years by the utilities department, to the camphor in back with its invasive, full throated thrash.
The four ghost oaks that used to line the street but were lost in the Storm of ’93 whispered most faintly in the breeze, distantly recalling Hudsons and Studebakers careening on Ninth on a Saturday night, registering a note of fear from the sizzle and cracks of forgotten Fourth of July firecrackers, and fanning the distant cheers from Mount Dora High as the Hurricanes battled the Eustis Panthers in seasons that have accumulated like rings on a tree. Ghost voices grow fainter over time and gone perhaps when the community forgets.
Mount Dora’s trees will grow until they are too old or something stops them. Their news is something we often don’t get until they’re gone. As the most visible evidence of living history, our local sense is protected and bordered and welcomed by the choir of these trees. Hurricane season is upon us and the threat of extreme weather grows with each warming day. If we don’t pay attention to the needs of our urban canopy, Mount Dora’s quaint local sense of community may lose its a resonant and beloved voice.
Note: “A Timbered Choir” — the title of this post — is derived from Wendell Berry’s 1998 poetry collection of the same name. Twenty years of walking in the woods are captured there, in full reverence of the nature shared between human and forest.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
Originally published at www.mountdoracitizen.com on August 7, 2015.
