A century’s worth of tree planting and conservation transformed our prairie landscape into one of the country’s great urban forests. This is the story of the people who have kept it alive.

When the city of Minneapolis was rising out of the prairie, it really was a prairie around here, not the forest of nearly a million trees that envelops us today. Charles Loring, first president of the Park Board and generally credited with being the first to plant trees in the city, described our terrain in the board’s 1885 annual report as “undulating prairie for the most part bare of trees. The only natural trees were clumps of black oak and scattered burr oak. These in the progress of improvement have largely disappeared.” As David C. Smith notes in his 2008 book, City of Parks, Loring expressed his hope for “the stimulus of a wider tree culture.”

It would seem that Loring got his wish. Over the years, the city -- from the power brokers to the common folk -- has consistently, though often clumsily, embraced its trees. Now, with the emerald ash borer gradually migrating toward our estimated 200,000 ash trees, the efforts of Loring and other visionaries who helped to create -- and conserve -- this remarkable urban forest will guide the city through the looming battle.

THE CITY COUNCIL RESISTED EFFORTS to establish an independent park board -- it took an act of the Legislature in 1883, followed by a vote of the citizens, to do that -- but it did create the position of city forester in 1880. And it was under his auspices that the city’s first park, on land donated by Edward Murphy in 1857 (and now surrounded by Augsburg College), was finally planted with trees.

After the park board was formed, City Hall continued to be responsible for the planting and care of trees along the streets, while the park board was in charge of the trees in the parks. In 1885, the park board planted 6,000 trees. It isn’t reported how many the city planted, but Loring wasn’t satisfied with the city’s efforts, and argued that the park board should be in charge of the street trees as well as those in the parks, to better protect them from “hungry horses, stray cows and careless drivers.”

Once again, parks advocates turned to the Legislature for support, and in 1887, won control of all the city’s public trees. Smith points out that this is especially noteworthy because it was “one of the board’s first actions that addressed issues in the life of the city outside the original scope of the park board.”

When the recession of the 1890s restricted the budget for buying trees, the park board established a nursery at Lyndale Park to grow its own. But, despite evidence that elm trees were susceptible to disease, and Loring’s caution that the city should diversify its plantings, the board purchased about 10,000 elm seedlings in 1899.

Decades later, park superintendent Christian Bossen in 1942 again warned that elms were threatened by pests; yet, when the board resumed its street-tree planting program after WWII, nearly all of the 10,000 trees planted over the next eight years were elms. By mid century, elms comprised more than 80 percent of our city’s tree canopy, defining our urban streets with their grand cathedral arches.

THE MINNEAPOLIS MORNING TRIBUNE ON MARCH 5, 1962, reported that “A tiny beetle smaller than the head of a pin could fell a million Twin Cities area elm trees in the next few years unless something is done to thwart it.” The beetle in question was the elm bark beetle, carrier of the fungus known as Dutch elm disease. The disease had already been spotted in Big Lake, killing 10 elm trees there in 1961, and in St. Paul, where it had killed one elm. The newspaper was reporting on a talk by University of Minnesota tree pathologist David French, who was to become a major player in the battle to combat the fungus in Minneapolis over the next few decades.

While Dutch elm rapidly decimated urban elm forests in other cities, the disease started slowly here. In 1963, three elms in Minnehaha Park and one along West River Parkway were felled by the disease. Four more were spotted and removed in 1964, followed by nine in 1965. But elm watchers knew that the fungus would eventually hit its stride, so when, in 1966, the park board sought the power to remove diseased elm trees and wood from private property, the City Council didn’t balk.

A few years before the elm bark beetle began to nibble at our borders, a University of Missouri forestry student wrote a paper on this little-known tree disease that had originated in Europe. When he graduated in 1959 and took the job of city forester in a St. Louis suburb, Dutch elm disease had just reached the area, and soon he was in charge of that city’s battle for its elms. Several years later he moved on to direct a similar effort in a Chicago suburb. As park board employees were anxiously watching for signs of the dreaded fungus in Minneapolis’s elms, Dave DeVoto was establishing a reputation as the man who knew how to tackle the disease.

Then, on June 30, 1967, hurricane-force winds tore through the city, toppling 1,800 trees. Soon after, park superintendent Robert Ruhe created a separate department of forestry and hired DeVoto as full-time director. “Bob Ruhe realized that they needed someone who knew trees and knew forestry,” recalled DeVoto in a 1994 interview, about a year after he retired.

Soon DeVoto was leading the battle of the century for the city’s trees. His forestry department began planting 5,000 trees a year in 1970. He joined with other city foresters, French, and a tree-hugging lawyer named Don Willeke to form the Minnesota Shade Tree Advisory Committee in 1973, as the number of diseased trees in Minneapolis climbed into the hundreds. In 1975, the death toll passed 1,000. French and Willeke lobbied the Legislature for state funds for the fight, and the city’s forestry budget shot up from $1.5 million the year DeVoto was hired to $10 million in 1977. That year, the number of elms lost to the disease in Minneapolis alone peaked at over 30,000.

DeVoto countered Dutch elm disease’s threatened devastation with a vigorous campaign that included removal of diseased trees at an unprecedented rate, and planting replacement trees between the still-healthy elms, in anticipation of their inevitable demise. Not all of DeVoto’s strategies were appreciated at the time; residents were often alarmed as towering elm trees were cut down and quickly ground into mulch to prevent the beetle from breeding in the wood. But he credited the sudden dramatic devastation for waking up a complacent population. “Finally the public got on the bandwagon,” he said.

Going beyond his predecessors’ pleas to diversify, DeVoto joined with City Planning and the Committee on Urban Environment (CUE) to develop a Boulevard Reforestation Plan in 1978 that specified which trees would be planted where. In keeping with the symmetry that had defined the urban tree aesthetic for a century, the new plan dictated that, “Generally along any street four to eight residential blocks would be designated for one kind of tree.” The plan listed 20 or more different genera and dozens of species of trees to be planted throughout the city, and indicated that each type of tree should comprise between 8 and 20 percent of the whole. This mix eventually included 38,000 ash trees, although private plantings would bring the total number of ash trees in the city to 200,000.

By the time DeVoto retired in January of 1993, he left the city with a net increase of 53,000 trees, despite 117,000 having been lost, mostly to Dutch elm disease. Willeke told the Star Tribune at the time, “Dave is going to be a tough act to follow.”

FAR FROM BEING INTIMIDATED by the DeVoto legacy, the city’s new director of forestry, Ralph Seivert, arrived from Cleveland in January of 1994 delighted to find he had landed in a city that truly loves its trees. After learning of the recognition Minneapolis had received from the National Arbor Day Foundation, Seivert said, “I’m amazed that the park board is proud to be a Tree City USA. In Cleveland, the city council didn’t care about being a Tree City USA.”

It was the early years of the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), and neighborhood groups were not only designating funds for tree planting, they were also working with the forestry department to involve residents in the care of their boulevard trees. “In Cleveland, people would say, ‘Why should I water it? It’s the city’s tree,’” Seivert said at the time.

Minneapolis continues to lose thousands of elm trees every year, and the park board plants about 4,000 trees every spring, a number that no longer includes any ash. Still, ash trees comprise about 20 percent of the city’s tree canopy, and forestry personnel are carefully watching for signs that emerald ash borer (EAB) has arrived on our side of the river.

But in marked contrast to the public complacency that shrugged off the early arrival of Dutch elm disease, residents today seem to understand what we’re up against. Seivert attended a meeting this spring in St. Paul, where residents were told that their entire block of mature ash trees, which were not infected with EAB but did have some root damage that made them susceptible to the pest, were slated to be removed.

“People were mostly OK with it,” he says. “They had been through Dutch elm disease and understood what was needed.”

And when it comes time to plant a block with new trees, Seivert’s forestry team is taking a more flexible approach to tree selection. “It used to be that if your block was assigned to get hackberries, and if you don’t want a hackberry, you don’t get a tree,” he says. Now they try to honor requests by residents, within reason. Seivert wants to limit any one genus of tree to about 10 percent of the total, and any tree has to be well-suited to the site where it’s planted. “Lots of people request sugar maples, but you have to get the right boulevard for them, they won’t tolerate salt,” he says.

When Seivert met with residents on a block that had lost all of its elms a few years ago, he offered them a choice of five trees. “One guy on a corner wanted three different trees in a row,” he says -- an unthinkable mélange at one time. “We said OK.” He did limit their choices to trees that attained similar heights at maturity to maintain something of the symmetry of traditional streetscaping.

But when I asked him what aesthetic considerations inform their revising of the tree plan, recalling that Loring held up a romantic image of the New England village as his model, Seivert admitted that practical considerations rule the day: “Our main thing is just making sure that what we plant is going to live.”

--Sharon Parker. This article first appeared in the winter issue of MOQ, along with additional tree history trivia, more essays and articles about the bucolic city, book reviews, a cartoon, an almanac, a poem and more. For an overview of the current issue’s content and how to buy one or subscribe, please go here.