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John Spizzirri recently sat down with Shawn Kingzette, district manager for the Wheeling, Illinois-based, The Care of Trees.
What is the primary function of The Care of Trees?
The Care of Trees focuses on organic and sustainable tree care and specializes in preserving trees in the urban environment. We service residential and commercial clients, as well as municipalities.
Are you the only organization in the Chicago area that implements organic solutions to the extent that you do?
Yes. There are other tree companies that are doing some organic-type tree help, but not to the degree that The Care of Trees does. And while it’s not the only sustainable thing that we do, to me, it’s one of the most interesting things that we do.
When we began implementing some of the programs that we use to preserve and maintain trees, I think it had an impact on the industry. Other tree companies have started working with organics because they found out what The Care of Trees was doing.
The concept of sustainability is certainly not new. In fact, it is thought that a German miner, Carl von Karlowitz, first introduced the concept in the 18th century, when he wrote about his vision for the sustainable development of German forests. Can you explain how sustainability is inherent in what you do and what practices you use to promote that?
Sustainability is a process. I don’t think it’s a moment.
We’re trying to get results for our clients that are reproducible. We now do something called SoilCare™ instead of fertilizing trees, which is a short-term fix—you put the nutrients down and, yes, they help the plants out at that time. But then they’re used up or they dissolve and get into our water sources.
We started adding organic materials to our fertilizers about 10-15 years ago, and we probably started doing the compost teas as part of the SoilCare™ program about five years ago. We’ve been transitioning to that because of concerns over nitrogen and the use of inorganic fertilizers.
Urban areas have less than ideal soils. Lots of clay, lots of salt from roadways. Just not really what a plant wants to grow in. The concept of SoilCare™ is to use organic materials to improve soil conditions and get those soil conditions to match the plant’s needs. It’s the same as mulching, but we use a compost of teas that are blended to match the biological needs of a specific tree which is then applied to the soil around that tree.
In theory, you can improve the soil conditions enough so that they are self-sustaining and there is no further need for the treatment. I mean, nobody fertilizes the trees in the woods, right? So how do we recreate something that reproduces the soil that’s in the woods?
What we do at The Care of Trees ensures that trees remain healthy and viable going forward to create a better urban environment and a healthier environment for humans and other living things.
Are people more aware now of nature and the need to protect it than they were five or 10 years ago?
To a degree. But for many of our clients, I don’t think so. Any sort of momentum that these kinds of environmental or sustainable concepts have, they really aren’t new for some people.
I think about the conversations I’ve been having with my clients over the last 10-15 years, they were already thinking and wanting these things. It just took the marketplace that long to catch up with what they really wanted.
How big a part of your business is tree preservation and how has the economy affected it?
Well, in our mind, everything is tree preservation. The construction end—preserving trees during construction, as well as larger scale projects—while hard to quantify, might be about 20 percent.
I actually think the hard economy has done more to preserve trees than anything, though I don’t think people’s attitudes have changed. Many times, they want what’s easiest and sometimes what’s easiest is to wipe everything out and start from scratch. That’s not entirely true, but in typical mainstream projects it’s a philosophy we’re still asked to follow way too often.
But with the harder economy, a lot more people are working with the infrastructure that’s already there and just improving or updating it. So the rip it out mentality seems to be slowing down a little bit.
In addition to being a business, The Care of Trees conducts community outreach and education. Can you describe some of these initiatives and how they affect the communities in which they are implemented?
We’ve supported a group called Openlands and its TreeKeepers program, basically from its inception. Openlands is a not-for-profit community volunteer program committed to preserving green spaces throughout Chicagoland. TreeKeepers is a 10-week course in which you learn to maintain trees—how to prune them, hot to plant them, how to mulch them—to preserve Chicago’s trees and maintain the green spaces. Then they donate time back to their communities to maintain parks and things of that sort.
One of our previous board members, Larry Hall, and former president and CEO Scott Jamieson, served as teachers for TreeKeepers for quite a long time. Arborists at The Care of Trees continue that tradition.
We’ve also done some training courses for the Chicago DOE’s Green Corps, a job-training green industry program which is run out of the Center for Green Technology. The Green Corps program is more landscape-oriented as a general rule of thumb. The tree end is slightly more refined. So they’ll send their job trainees to The Care of Trees if they think they have a person who might show a special interest in working with trees.
At the Chicago office, we do a lot of garden talks—small courses on how to plant a tree or prune tree—for various garden clubs throughout the city. A lot of our clients are members of these clubs and they’ll suggest to the other members that someone from The Care of Trees come give a talk.
How does The Care of Trees contribute to tree expansion in urban areas?
We usually piggyback onto other organizations. Sometimes we just do it on our own. We’ve donated and done tree planting ceremonies at Wilbur Wright Junior College and we’ve been the initiator of tree plantings for the Park Ridge Park District and Loyola University.
Most of the time, we give support to agencies that already exist. To create something from scratch is time consuming. We find that there is a lot more momentum when you support an organization that already has a specific mission and purpose. We offer them technical expertise and, sometimes, financial support.
So we support organizations like Chicago Wilderness, Friends of the Park and Friends of the Chicago River.
You teach at Tree Keepers and have conducted presentations at the Botanic Gardens and various garden clubs in Chicago and the surrounding area. You’ve also discussed The Care of Trees’ work on WGN radio and Mike Novak’s show on Progressive Talk Radio. What is a hot topic right now?
The emerald ash borer is a hot topic right now. We are working with the Village of Schiller Park and we’ve come up with a comprehensive approach for them to manage this problem. In my mind, some communities are over-reacting by getting rid of all their ash trees. And there are others that say, ‘Let’s save them all.’ But the amount of chemicals required to save all ash trees –well, it’s not possible. It’s like trying to stop cancer.
So we look at solutions that make sense for that person or business or municipality. What can we preserve, what makes sense to preserve? Is this realistic economically, ecologically?
Which questions are you asked most often and which surprise you?
Trees have a certain emotional attachment. So most of the time, the questions that people ask me are very, very specific, like, ‘What’s wrong with my tree?’
And more than that, there are the questions that make me realize some people don’t understand that the tree is a living thing. Sometimes they think trees are like sidewalks or roofs. They consider them more of a maintenance item and not a living organism. Basically they expect the impossible—their tree is nearly dead and somehow they think if I place my hands on it or something, I can miraculously bring it back to life.
So that’s what always catches me off guard, when someone really just has no sense that you can’t cut off 90 percent of the roots and expect the tree to live.
What’s the one thing you wish everybody knew about trees?
They’re complex and we shouldn’t expect drug store solutions to solve all their problems. Going down to Home Depot and buying a bottle of something or other off the shelf isn’t going to work.
Trees are important valuable resources. They’re incredibly beneficial to our communities and our health, but, at the same time, there are no easy solutions to preserving them and keeping them healthy.
John Spizzirri is a freelance writer and editor in Chicago. He has written on a variety of environmental issues, from greenhouse gases and brownfields to elephant sanctuaries and spider conservation. John can be reached at editor@chicagospeaks.com.
