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By Ron Dieter, Sunnyfield Greenhouse & Gardens
January 27, 1999
Last week the city of Chicago was living up to its "weather" reputation with
snow a yard deep in some places. The snow and frozen lake outside was in sharp contrast to
the atmosphere in the main hall at Navy Pier. There the nation’s largest nursery
trade show was underway with hundreds of exhibitors selling everything under the sun for
nurseries and landscapers. Large displays of flowering trees, shrubs, perennials and
bulbs, all in full bloom, shared the floor with the latest in mowers, trimmers, bobcats,
paving and retaining wall blocks, as well as planters, pots, tools, hoses, and chemicals.
One item displayed every year by the Vermeer Company is what I call a tree grinder. The
huge yellow contraption dominates the display hall. Larger than a semi trailer, the
machine eats trees and spits out wood chips. There’s no need to cut up whole tree
trunks and limbs into smaller pieces. Just shove ‘em in and stand back. You’d
better need a lot of chips, too.
The same company also builds mechanical tree spades capable of moving trees up to six
inches in diameter. That’s a pretty good-sized tree, considering that the root ball
would be fifty inches wide. That machine, however, is not big enough for a company called
Environmental Design Inc., in Tomball, Texas.
Environmental Design owns the world’s largest tree mover, capable of digging and
moving a tree with a 50-inch trunk. That’s more than four feet in diameter or 13 feet
around. The rootball of such a tree weighs more than 40,000 pounds. The company guarantees
that transplanted trees will survive and using careful pre- and post-transplanting
management, it has a survival rate of 95 per cent for relocated trees.
Why would anyone move such enormous trees? It turns out that housing developers in
Texas and throughout the country have discovered that homes with large mature trees in the
neighborhood sell faster and for more money than similar homes with young immature
landscapes.
The idea makes sense. Old established neighborhoods have a sense of security,
permanence, and warmth due in part to the presence of mature trees and shrubs in the
landscape. I’m sure you have observed the difference it makes to the ambience of a
lawn or neighborhood when on old tree is removed for whatever reason. Read the real estate
ads in the newspaper and you’ll find if a property includes large mature trees, their
presence is always mentioned.
When I imagine a new housing development, I see rows of new homes of similar shape and
size, with newly planted trees here and there. I can easily imagine how different the
whole picture would be if mature trees were placed strategically throughout the
development. So the affect of mature trees on housing prices is really no surprise.
Environmental Designs claims the demand is growing for even larger trees to be moved
and soon the largest tree spade in the world will lose its title. Their company is now
building a machine that will move a tree and rootball weighing a million pounds. I
don’t think my whole front yard weighs that much.
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