Urban tree power

I am not much of an arborist (well, really, I am not an arborist at all!), but I do appreciate trees. Urban trees are especially interesting to me because of their ability to deal with the many insults of the urban environment. I thought that this image — taken where the curb had been peeled back to allow Con Edison workers access — nicely captures that ability. The tree’s root structure seems to melt into the very smallest of cracks between the curb and the tree box to which the tree is confined. It seems to me that urban trees have repurposed the ability to compete with other trees for root space, using their sheer strength to work around (and sometime displace) all the concrete and asphalt that we try to confine them with.

A Minor Post, Coevolution, Competition, Urban Ecology