Saving a green neighbourhood…one elm tree at a time

While we’ve heard ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, a north-end Winnipeg neighbourhood knows it takes a whole community to save an urban forest - one tree at a time.

“The nicest part of our streets is the canopy of trees,” says long-time Bannerman Avenue resident Heather Brenan. That was before the cankerworms moved in. “Some summers the trees were completely bare for 2 to 3 weeks. The trees had more and more difficulty re-growing their foliage each year. There were so few leaves on the trees it was like fall in the middle of the summer. It looked like a vast wasteland here,” Brenan says. “I’d come home from work and cankerworms would be crawling up the garage, they were climbing up the doors, on the fence, all over the stucco. You’d come in the house from working in the yard and there would be worms coming out of your hair.”

So a few neighbours started banding the trees around their property on their own. The banding process requires a special foil and insulation band be placed around the tree trunk before the first frost in the fall. Then the band is coated with sticky ‘tanglefoot’. After the first frost, the female cankerworm beetles climb up the trunk to lay eggs in the treetops. They get stopped in their tracks by the molasses-like band around the tree. “The bands get just black—covered in bugs,” Heather says. The process works like a charm for that tree, until a windy day comes along and blows the bugs to nearby trees.

It was clear to Heather and her neighbour, Eda Korchynski, that this required a more co-operative community-driven solution. They rallied under the banner of the Robertson-Mynarski Residents Association.

In the first year, 2007, they protected 64 elm trees. They now band about 160 trees on the boulevards on Bannerman Avenue from Airlies to McPhillips; Cathedral Avenue from Airlies to Robertson School and then beyond the school to McPhillips. As well they band Machray Avenue from the railway tracks to McPhillips; and Monreith Street from Machray to Church Avenue, for a total of about five well-treed blocks. The banding program has been a huge success in controlling the cankerworms. It has also built community spirit for a project that betters the neighbourhood, says Eda Korchynski, President of the Robertson-Mynarski Residents Association.

“Early on when our group first started meeting at Robertson School, the issue of the health of our trees kept coming up at meetings. Many people realized that banding a single tree on your own boulevard was futile. We knew that we needed to get to know our neighbours to successfully mobilize the entire street to address the problem of the cankerworms in our elm trees," Eda says. “In the process of taking care of trees, we have gone from a neighbourhood where many neighbours felt anonymous or isolated to a neighbourhood where we know and help each other and feel more inter-connected all because of our trees,” she adds.

What’s made the effort even easier has been a Sustainable Community Grant from Assiniboine Credit Union, Eda says. The community is able to make that go a long way by buying tree banding supplies wholesale and doing the labour of banding the trees themselves. “With the help of Assiniboine, we have been able to take care of our neighbourhood together, as a community. We feel real pride in our canopy of elm trees and what we have accomplished in maintaining our beautiful and healthy trees. Now we feel like it makes sense to keep investing in our neighbourhood. The positive feeling created by keeping our trees healthy is immeasurable!”