Politics
New York Has 7 Million Trees. Here Are 120 Great Ones.
The Parks Department is releasing a list of “great trees” for the first time since 1985. The commissioner loves a willow in Brooklyn.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about a new list of “great trees” in New York City. We’ll also get details on the departures of a top official and two lower-level aides at City Hall.
The dawn redwood in the Liz Christy Garden on East Houston Street.Credit…New York City Department of Parks & Recreation
Sue Donoghue agreed that she would never see a poem as lovely as a tree. But she has a list that she thinks is pretty great.
Donoghue is the commissioner of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which today will issue a list of 120 “great trees” in New York City — a list she called “magnificent” and “culturally significant.”
That is 0.0017 percent of the seven million trees in the city. Two of the 120 specimens on the “great tree” list are London plane trees, the most common species in the city.
The list is only the second that the city has ever compiled. The first was released almost 40 years ago, in 1985. The trees were “either so old, so huge, so unusual, so remarkably sited, so marvelously shaped or so much associated with a historic place or person” that they deserved lasting recognition, The New York Times said then.
