When Riverside trustees voted to decline a $5,000 donation from a private citizen who wanted the village to use the money to plant trees not on the village’s preferred list, much was made of the experimental nature of those trees.
Those “non-preferred” trees, selected during the past two years by the village forester, are not “native” to the area. Instead, the trees are cultivars – disease-resistant hybrids which share some characteristics of the native species, but not others.
In any other suburb, such a donation to plant disease-resistant canopy trees would be accepted with gratitude. Of course, Riverside isn’t any other suburb. A National Historic Landmark, its landscape was planned by Frederick Law Olmsted.
Ironically, what’s lost in all of this “experimental” talk is that Riverside itself was an experiment. The child of Industrial Age utopianism, Riverside is, for all its apparent naturalism, a completely man-made construct.
To create the “village in a forest” Olmsted, The Riverside Improvement Company, according to its 1871 report, planted 47,000 shrubs, 7,000 evergreens and 32,000 deciduous trees, some so big that special machinery had to be constructed to plant them.
It’s too bad that the Riverside Improvement Company went bankrupt just a couple of years later. It would have been instructive to see how they were going to manage their man-made utopia.
One thing seems certain – the Riverside Improvement Company sure was willing to spend a whole lot of money planting (and presumably maintaining) that utopian landscape.
The problem these days, of course, is that the native species available to Riverside’s founders – elms, ashes, hickories – are either under threat, difficult to cultivate or simply difficult to find from nurseries.
In addition, the village, while refusing to accept donations that have any sort of strings attached, has done precious little to address Riverside’s historic landscape on its own. For that matter, while lots of lip service is given to the village’s national landmark status, very little has been done to leverage that status for any purpose.
What last week’s vote of the village board showed clearly is that a particularly strict interpretation of Olmsted’s vision for Riverside is the order of the day. In the past that strict philosophy that has served to divide the village into camps rather than finding common ground. Common ground is tough to find when one side has all the answers.
With that in mind and with the wind blowing in that direction, it’s time, as Trustee Jim Reynolds said last week, for those with the upper hand to stop lecturing and put their money where their mouth is.
If native species are the only ones allowed and if they are so desirable, then find a way to make that plan work before the village has been stripped bare of them. If there are trees not on the “preferred” list that might be good substitutes, then the Landscape Advisory Commission ought to get cracking on finding them.