Do street trees live wild and free? Hardly. Wires above, sidewalks below, they must pass muster with Central Hudson and the Kingston Tree Commission and the Americans with Disabilities Act and, well … thank goodness trees have a lot more patience than I do.

To show me a prime example, Brent Knepper, Kingston's urban forester, pulled up on Maiden Lane. On our first stop (last week's column) we'd admired a honey locust in historic Uptown that grew up during the horse and buggy era of dirt streets, yet remains tall and flourishing today, a towering tree of lumps and grooves and character. Now we approached a pin oak, another popular street tree species, but it looked much younger – probably planted in the 1960s when pin oaks were in vogue – and more generic with a simple straight trunk and a round bushy canopy of leaves.

Except it had a cleaving of the leafy hemispheres, a parting for the wires, a gap right through the center for a handful of lower black wire and one bare wire much higher that was Central Hudson's power line loaded with voltage. Years ago, I knew a poet who photographed oddly pruned "wire" trees as if they were Rodin sculptures. This one made me think of Gordon Matta-Clark who became famous in the 1970s for sawing houses in half. (Don't ask. Such is the art world.) At least this tree's pruner stopped before cutting down into the main trunk. In fact, they did an elegant job.

Do you remember the great Northeastern blackout of August 2003? I do, fondly. But I had a camping lantern to read by, the romantic feeling that I was camping out in my cottage. The rest of society wasn't so pleased. It turned out that overgrown trees under sagging power lines in Ohio started the cascade of problems. Since then, Brent told me, Central Hudson has been diligent about trimming trees. They want a 10-foot buffer for their live wires. Alas, the gap over our heads was certainly doing its job – no upper branch looked in danger of falling on the highest wire – but it wasn't 20 feet wide. Had Central Hudson given this tree a reprieve? Perhaps for beauty and grace? Not likely. Brent suspected Central Hudson simply had too many more troublesome trees to bother with this one. Our Gordon Matta-Clark pin oak survives.

As we spoke, Brent made sure to steer me out of the direct sunlight into the leafy shade. Tree cooling is no small thing. Several weeks earlier, we'd "enjoyed" a heat wave at 103 degrees. Brent measured the temperature under the tree (103), then on the shaded lawn (90) and sidewalk (90). Then he'd walked over the Assembly a few blocks away where the street ginkos cast spindly shadows at best. The sun-baked sidewalk registered 150 degrees as did the pavement. (To safely fry an egg, you want 158.) What about the squirrels, I wondered, forever hop/stopping across roads? (ChattGPT now tells me animal paws suffer above 125 degrees. Maybe I'll be the one to launch a "Save Squirrels. Plant Trees." campaign.)

Now, sidewalks. Anyone who has walked more than a few blocks in Kingston has come upon that spot where an ornery old tree with stout roots has decided to push up a sidewalk slab as if raising an escape hatch. It doesn't take much to trip and fall. I did it once in Rhinebeck after dusk, failing to notice an inch high lip of bluestone while scrolling on my phone. I landed face first before I had time to think and felt damned lucky to still have my front teeth. Since then, if I want to scroll, I'll walk out in the street.

It doesn't have to be this way. This pin oak had the good fortune to have property owners dedicated to lovely plantings in the front yard. A big green ball of Japanese maple at the head of the driveway. A valet parking-like sign that states: "Please don't hit my tree. No vans or trucks." Some 50 to 100 times a year Brent will work with individual property owners on their tree problems. (Sidewalks, hanging branches, roots grown into sewer pipes.) In this case, the ADA requires four-foot-wide sidewalks, which if rigidly adhered to, would have meant cutting into the roots at the very base of the trunk, a particularly bad thing to do to a tree. Fortunately, the ADA allows workarounds. In this case, when the bluestone was handsomely re-laid, an indent was granted for the trunk. Not only that, the sidewalk slabs now rise gently up and over the raised root. No more stone tripwire.

For our third stop, we parked on a side street in the Rondout and walked down to a widespread but rather squat tree given pride of place in a large planter, you might call it, the stone retaining wall at the lower corner of Cornell Park. Brent had promised a chestnut tree. Here it was. Damned if I hadn't walked right past it many times over the years without noticing anything special, but it did, indeed, have the long elliptical leaves with tiny teeth of a chestnut tree and it bore the prickly green burr-like balls that held the nuts themselves. You need not know much forest history to have heard of the epic American chestnut blight of a century ago that killed off one the tallest, most commanding, and most common trees in the Eastern forests. Somehow, root stock still survives, so it’s possible as you ramble around the Catskills to stumble upon saplings bearing the distinctive American chestnut leaves like flags from the noble past, though these saplings will surely die off before growing into trees.

This wasn't that. This was a Chinese chestnut, Brent explained, a species that had evolved with the Asian fungus that caused the blight so it had a natural resistance that the American chestnut lacked. Nor did it tower into the sky. What we saw was full grown, probably planted in the 1960s. Also, it was wind-pollinated, which meant, I wondered aloud, where the hell was there another Chinese chestnut? Brent knew of at least three others he'd seen in Kingston yards, but he agreed that, yes, nature worked in mysterious ways. Somehow the wind knew where the pollen needed to blow.

Brent was partial to this Chinese chestnut because it was his first tree in Kingston. Originally from Chicago, he studied horticulture in college, then worked for the Chicago Parks District and later for a Great Lakes regional urban forestry organization. (Before all that, he worked as an itinerant forest firefighter in the West and lived in the back of his Subaru with his dog.) On a road trip east from Chicago with his wife, they followed a friend's advice to check out Kingston and happened to park on this street. Out stepped Brent to discover this Chinese chestnut tree. Not that this tree had magic powers, but about two years ago, he landed his job as Kingston's urban forester, funded by a federal grant. (There's money in urban trees right now. Kingston also received a $1.6 million grant from Governor Hochul's “25 Million Trees by 2033" program launched in 2024. Back in 2020, Mayor Noble announced our own goal of planting 1,000 new trees by 2030. As of this spring, we've reached 558.)

The stone retaining wall creates a terrarium of sorts with the Chinese chestnut as its centerpiece. Brent was delighted the day he found a child's chalk scroll atop the wall: "I [heart] My Tree." Chris Baker, the proprietor of Chicory Naturalist nearby on Broadway, has identified the olive lichen splotches on the wall as well as the mosses packed in the cracks. A mycologist and author of a new children's book about spiders, they have the patience and the curiosity to appreciate nature's smaller creations.

Last September, Brent and Chris hosted a community event for about 20 local residents to nerd out on the Chinese chestnut and its environs. In time the conversation turned to the fact that the park's terraced hillside suggested there might once have been a playground. As well, there were several large stumps left by trees damaged by the ice storm in February 2022 or the severe thunderstorm of July 2022. Might new trees be planted? The idea arose of creating a Friends of Cornell Park to give Brent some help.

For our final stop, we didn't drive far in distance to cross 9W, but did travel far in socioeconomic status to the Rondout Gardens apartments where we parked near a fenced-in basketball court raised up flat on a grassy berm. To one side stood an elegant pair of white pines, the Shade Kings, but to another lay the ragged greenery, bare dirt, and wood chip mulch from the spring planting of upwards of a dozen fruit trees for a community orchard, or a "food forest" if you want to keep up with the lingo. Back in 2014, Kingston planted apple and pear trees in a corner of Forsyth Park, but this collaborative effort between Brent and the Kingston Land Trust and residents of Rondout Gardens was a pilot project to see if we might do more than plant shady street trees. Already one of this spring's saplings had yielded a peach, though it looked tough as a tennis ball. But in a decade, we should have an active orchard yielding free fruit from May through October: apples, peaches, pears, and apricots. For now, the saplings still wore name tags and stood between planter stakes – they didn't look like much – but at my age I've learned that a decade can slip by before you know it.

Brent told me we were in a "food desert." Now, I've walked this final stretch of the Kingston Greenline many times on my way to the Rondout, but I'd never seen it as a "desert," not with the dense green forest ridgeline (Hasbrouk Park) looming over the apartment units. Yet I could accept his point. The brick shopping plaza across the street had a convenience market (candies, cooler drinks, a hot deli counter, cigarettes, lottery tickets, a wall shelf of bongs, as I learned on a later visit), but the nearest supermarket was Hannaford at the Kingston Plaza. If you didn't have a car, you might be close to the nearby touristy amenities of Broadway, the restaurants, the wine bar, the donuts cafe. But you wouldn't be near fresh fruits and produce or basic staples.

Would this plan work? There's an adjacent community garden that gave me pause when I walked through on a return visit. Established in 2015, the place looked rough with cardboard boxes laid down for paths and greenery seemingly growing on its own, though there were plenty of sunflowers and summer clusters of cone flowers in yellow and purple. I found a small bunch of cherry tomatoes but not much else grown for food. On the other hand, the theory of a community orchard is that trees, unlike gardens, require little work. All we need to do is walk up and pick a fruit to our liking. The first sapling Brent directed me towards was a pawpaw, our largest native fruit but one new to me. He said it tasted like a cross between mango and banana. Give this tree a few more years to grow, and I think I'll try it.

If you have a favorite tree of your own – be it for size, beauty, or legendary lore – consider nominating it for Kingston's Great Tree Program open for suggestions until Oct. 31. Click here for more.