Matt McDermott and Bruce Wexelberg are still getting used to how bright it is inside their house, ever since they lost one of the parkway ash trees that used to shade the front corner of their Lincoln Square bungalow.
“Our new view out our front door is just open land now, instead of seeing the ash tree right there,” McDermott said. The ash was a casualty, in a roundabout way, of this past summer’s storms, like so many thousands of trees across Chicago. But it’s hardly been forgotten. In fact, the remaining stump has become something of a neighborhood conversation piece.
“Now it’s an attraction,” McDermott said. “People stop and look at the stump.” More context:
Wexelberg, who’s a certified TreeKeeper, turned the tree’s base into a quasi memorial. “I got a grinder with a sanding disc and I sanded down a strip across so that it was smooth,” he said. “And then I drew a line straight across with a straight edge (ruler) and a pencil, and I counted all of the rings.”
Every 10 rings, he made a hash mark — 10 years, then 20, then 30 — first in pencil and later in Sharpie. Given the tree’s size, McDermott, who’s lived in the house since 1987, thought maybe the ash had been planted in the ‘60s or ‘70s.
But Wexelberg’s tally blew past McDermott’s educated guess. The total was 98 rings, dating the ash back to 1928, just three years younger than the house itself. “Most people walk by trees and they don’t really notice or think that tree might have been here 100 years,” Wexelberg said. “It’s also a way to honor the tree, like, ‘I’ve been here for 98 years.’ A lot longer than any of us, you know, so I think it’s a tribute to the tree. We’ve had a lot of people stop and say that was really cool to put the markings down.” To date a tree, professionals use a hollow hand drill called an increment borer to remove a pencil-width piece of wood from living trees in order to obtain an approximate age.
But old-fashioned ring counting remains a tried and true method, and for an amateur, Wexelberg’s technique was spot on.
