Feature

Bend's Trees Past, Present and Future

“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” —Richard Powers, “The Overstory,” winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Central Oregonians spend a lot of time talking about housing, about growth, about their latest stoke-fest ski/bike/paddle trip, about equitable government… about a lot of things that matter, some that matter only to the personal psyche, and some that matter only on Strava.

But as Richard Powers so brilliantly put it in his book, “The Overstory,” humans are but a speck on the timeline of the planet—and long before us, and before our miraculous takeover of the world, trees were here, recording and remembering. This week’s feature sets out to explore some of Central Oregon’s history—by way of its trees.

Survivors of Hiroshima in Bend and Redmond

Two “Peace Trees” were quietly planted in Central Oregon at the start of the pandemic

By Nicole Vulcan

f you don’t get the good kind

Iof chills from the story of these trees, better check your pulse.

In April and May 2020, with the quiet anti-climactic-ness that met everything we pressed on with doing at the start of the pandemic, two trees were planted in Bend and Redmond—trees grown from seeds of trees that survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. The trees are among 45 “Peace Trees” planted in Oregon as part of a worldwide project aimed at promoting peace and resilience on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Oregon resident Hideko Tamura-Snider was 10 years old when her mother was killed in the bombing of Hiroshima. Tamura-Snider survived and eventually wrote a children’s book about the experience, titled “When a Peace Tree Blooms.” She also founded the One Sunny Day Initiative, with a mission “to educate the public about the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and to plant seeds of peace, hope and reconciliation among people of the world,” according to its website.

According to an account from the Oregon Department of Forestry, in 2017, Tamura-Snider began working with Mike Oxendine of the Oregon Community Trees nonprofit to bring seeds from Hiroshima’s surviving trees to places around the world—a project initiated by another nonprofit, Green Legacy Hiroshima. Oxendine sprouted the seeds, gleaned from gingko and persimmon trees, and enlisted the help of Jennifer Killian of Corvallis Parks and Recreation to care for them. When the trees were big enough, ODF began to distribute them around the state.

Bend’s Hiroshima Peace Tree, a gingko currently about 3-4 feet high, is located in Hollinshead Park on Bend’s east side. Visitors can find it on the eastern side of the park, a few steps east and north of the park’s eastern-most barn and protected behind a small wire fence. The Bend tree was planted May 29, 2020. Redmond’s Peace Tree, also a gingko, was planted April 30, 2020, at Redmond City Hall. The Oregon Department of Forestry maintains a map of all the Peace Tree locations around the state at the Hiroshima Peace Trees page of its website.

Nicole Vulcan

Now in its second warm-weather season in its new home, Bend’s Hiroshima Peace Tree, a gingko, is seen with full leaves.

To get a tree, “Priority was given to Trees Cities USA and Tree Campuses USA in Oregon,” ODF’s January 2021 account describes. The City of Redmond has been a Tree City USA—a program sponsored by the Arbor Day Foundation—since 2005. Bend became a Tree City in 1991 and maintained that status until 1995, according to the City of Bend’s website, and then again from 2004 to 2012.

“In 2017 the City of Bend and the Bend Park and Recreation District formed a partnership to reinstate and maintain the Bend’s Tree City status,” according to the City’s website. “This successful partnership has provided resources to allow continued annual reporting and retention of the Tree City recognition.”

Timber

A day in the life of a local arborist—who loves trees with a professional passion

Story and photos by Jack Harvel

very day arborists perform

Eimpressive acts of acrobatics, precise calculations of physics and medical diagnoses of trees as they’re maintaining or removing trees. Central Oregon Tree Experts co-owner Brett Miller said after 27 years in the business there haven’t been two days that were completely alike.

“There’s a lot of people that do work in this field, and loggers are not arborists,” Miller said. “I grew up in Roseburg, which is one of the logging capitals of the world and everybody I knew down there ran chainsaw stuff, but when I found this job, this is a whole different level.”

After cutting a tree, loggers just have to stay out of its path when it falls, but arborists have to know where it’s going to land. After nearly three decades Miller said he’s never had a major collision with anyone’s property – outside of brushing a gutter or two.

“That’s not something that anybody can really teach you without your experience,” he said.

Miller started as an arborist in 1992 and said the industry has branched into a more holistic approach to tree health.

“I think that the industry, as far as our culture, being a residential commercial arborist, what’s changed the most for me, and what I try to teach [my employees] is it’s not just trimming or removals, we think about diseases now and how climate change affects all these trees,” Miller said. “When I started in the nineties we never even thought about that stuff.”

Though they sometimes remove them, Miller says arborists usually have a strong passion for trees. He recently arrived at a company-wide barbeque only to find the guests had climbed up into the trees.

“There’s like 30 guys in trees just hanging out. It’s the greatest thing,” he said. “I mean we cut down a lot of trees, but we all love them.”

Protecting Pines in the Ochocos

Logging areas in sensitive habitats were blocked after an appeal from conservationist groups

By Jack Harvel

settlement between conserva-

Ationist groups Oregon Wild and Central Oregon LandWatch and the Ochoco National Forest halted logging in sensitive areas that could have put fisheries and Rocky Mountain Elk in danger. The settlement was reached on June 14, over a year after it was filed.

The National Forest Service’s mandate is to manage the land for recreational, conservationist and commercial interests, and in its Black Mountain Vegetation Management Plan over 34,000 acres were made available for logging.

“It’s maybe a tough line for the Forest Service to walk,” said Rory Isbell, staff attorney for Central Oregon LandWatch. “It’s difficult for the agency to meet all of its goals. In this case we felt that they weren’t doing enough to meet their legal duties to protect wildlife habitat sensitive environment in the project area.”

The sensitive areas were mainly riparian areas—the banks of streams that are covered with a thick layer of brush. These areas are important for Rocky Mountain Elk that often give birth on the banks of streams and rivers.

“For multiple elk lifecycle stages, both in the spring and in the fall, for various cycles of elk mating and then calving, they rely on thick vegetations to both hide from predators and also have forage to eat that occurs along riparian areas,” Isbell said.

Logging also has a two-pronged effect on fisheries and can disrupt them through the sediment released from the heavy equipment necessary to cut timber and by the loss of shade those trees provide.

“Redband trout require cold water and stable flows in order to survive, and a lot of the streams and its habitat, including in the Ochocos and in this project area, the water quality, the temperature and the amount of turbidity and sediment that’s released in that water is unsustainable for redband trout,” Isbell said.

Only the riparian areas are a part of the appeal and other areas slated for logging won’t be affected. The precedent for the appeal was solidified in June 2019, after a lengthy court battle over planned off-highway vehicle trails in the Ochocos.

“It’s really the history of that lawsuit in the same area of the Ochocos that’s led to us opposing this Black Mountain project in the same area. The three big issues that we won on in opposing the Summit OHV project, they came up again in this Black Mountain project,” Isbell said.

The two projects are a troubling pattern for conservationists who are hopeful that the natural character of the forest remains its highest priority.

“We keep seeing controversial projects, like both the Summit OHV and this recent Black Mountain project, come up where the existing management plan for the National Forest maybe doesn’t do enough to protect these habitats and guide the character of uses on the forests,” Isbell said.

Though it took some legal legwork, LandWatch and Oregon Wild celebrated the appeal.

“We’re grateful that the Forest Service has agreed to follow the laws that safeguard these values here,” said Jamie Dawson, Oregon Wild’s public lands campaigner, in a press release. “However, it’s clear that the Ochocos need a longer-term vision and stronger legislative protection to truly protect the things that make this landscape special.”

What the long-term vision should be varies among conservationists, but most of them believe that stronger protections are needed.

“In the past, people have argued for a National Recreation Area to be established in the Ochocos, so that’s one option,” Isbell said. “Another option is to just update the forest plan to better reflect current values.”

Courtesy Oregon Wild

An out of court settlement blocked logging in areas that are crucial to Rocky Mountain Elk and Redband Trout.

Protect Bend Trees

One local woman is fighting to make sure the rush for missing middle housing doesn’t come at the cost of Bend’s trees

By Jack Harvel

endite Karon Johnson and her

Bprogram, Protect Bend Trees, are seeking to change the developer code for more strict arboreal protection in a town once mainly associated with the lumber industry.

Johnson argues that high-density housing alone won’t solve Bend’s housing crisis, and that it shouldn’t come at the cost of its trees. She says Bend’s tree preservation code is vague enough that developers can clear-cut every tree on a proposed development site, and it violates Oregon Revised Statute 197.307(4).

“A tree preservation code must set mandatory, quantitative standards which are clear and objective. Bend’s clearly does not,” Johnson wrote on her website. “Any Oregon tree preservation code must allow developers to build up to their maximum legal density.”

Johnson’s solution is to increase the amount of space developers can build on by reducing the public right of way on local streets from 60 feet to 50 feet.

“Adopting the Guidelines recommendations would give developers the space they need to create designs which save some significant trees while achieving the desired density of their projects,” she wrote.

She also believes that developers should have to post bonds for each chopped tree.

“The present code does not require a developer to post a bond for each tree designated for preservation,” Johnson wrote. “The City staff does not have the time to monitor a development site to ensure compliance with the tree protection plan. The code needs to give the developer a stronger incentive to monitor subcontractors by requiring a significant bond for each tree to be retained.”

Johnson has an entire re-write of City code on her website, ProtectBendTrees. com, that she feels is necessary to maintain the natural beauty in Bend.

“Unless the City adopts a tree preservation code which satisfies ORS 197.307(4) and mandates the preservation of some significant trees, Bend’s iconic native trees will continue to be destroyed,” she wrote.

Johnson initially reached out to the Source Weekly for coverage on this issue, but did not respond to our subsequent requests for additional comment.

Orygun / Wikimedia

This is an old-growth western Juniper in the Redmond-Bend Juniper State Scenic Corridor along U.S. Route 97 between Bend and Redmond in Central Oregon.