SRU student works to remove, replace stricken trees
SLIPPERY ROCK — Slippery Rock University student Luke Gregory is thinking about pear trees. But these don't have a partridge in them; they have fire blight and need to be replaced.
A group from Slippery Rock University wants to remove and replace the flowering trees that can no longer illuminate Slippery Rock's Main Street with hues of green and white.
Gregory, a senior biology major from Murrysville, is leading a campaign called “Fight the Blight” to address a problem facing 57 Cleveland Select flowering pear trees in the borough. Most of the pear trees are compromised by fire blight, a contagious pathogen that has rendered the trees' leaves brown and withered, looking as if they've been burnt.
“Plants don't complain,” Gregory said. “Trees are often overlooked, so people have to look out for them. This fire blight has swept through and infected a lot of them (along Main Street), so we're trying to remove the trees that have it and plant a greater diversity of trees.”
The goal of the project is to remove the infected pear trees and replace them with new species, such as Kousa dogwoods, redbuds and Washington Hawthorns, while increasing the variety of species near Main Street, with trees such as hornbeams, ivory silk Japanese lilacs, Linden trees, Prospector elms and Royal Burgundy flowering cherry trees.
“The diversity of trees helps with resiliency,” Gregory said. “An infection can wipe out a whole population in one season. Also, the trees we're choosing to plant are heartier and able to resist things like salt pushed up from treated roads.”
“If you have 100 trees and 15 are impacted by blight, you only need to replace the 15 with something else as opposed to replacing 100,” said David Krayesky, SRU associate professor of biology, who has a background in arboriculture. “It helps financially and it helps with the aesthetics. The trees are going to bloom at slightly different times.”
According to Gregory, the Cleveland Selects' snow-white blossoms typically appear for a few weeks in April. More than two-thirds of all trees in downtown Slippery Rock are Cleveland Selects, but the Fight the Blight project aims to diversify the tree population by raising the funds to purchase and plant about 50 new trees, with a price tag of between $10,000 and $20,000.
Krayesky and Gregory received approval from Slippery Rock Borough to execute the project; now they just need to secure the funding, with an initial goal of $7,000 to begin the endeavor as early as spring 2019.The Slippery Rock University Foundation Inc. has agreed to match all donations, up to $5,000, received through a Flight the Blight crowdfunding site Gregory and Krayesky have set up. SRU has already planted two redbud trees in planters on university property along Main Street.According to Krayesky, the Cleveland Selects were planted nearly 20 years ago by Slippery Rock Development Inc., a nonprofit community organization, but the fire blight has been present for at least a decade. Krayesky, an SRD board member and the organization's urban forester, has attempted to secure funding from private and government agencies, but many grants require student involvement as training opportunities.That's where Gregory comes in. The Flight the Blight project is part of Gregory's Leadership Practicum course. He already helped 22 SRU students obtain Tree Tender certification after they took a daylong course earlier this fall offered by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' Bureau of Forestry, in partnership with the Penn State University Extension Office.
