Council updated on Downtown Mall tree management plan

The city of Charlottesville has hired Wolf Josey Landscape Architects to create a guide to preserving and managing current and future trees on the Downtown Mall. The work will be done in three phases.

“There’s a start-up phase as well as a site analysis and research phase which we’re in the middle of now followed by recommendations for what to do in the future and after we’ve had consensus from many people, we’ll have a final plan, a management plan for the trees on the Downtown Mall,” said the firm’s Paul Josey. (view the presentation)

Recommendations are expected in the summer. The work so far has involved taking an inventory of what’s on site. 

“The trees were planted in 1976 by Lawrence Halprin and Associates,” Josey said. “That was the first phase and a second phase was done in 1980 which is the Central Place trees as well as the end by the movie theater. Then the Omni was 1985 and then a few phases before that led to the rebricking effort in 2009 and the most current is the area around the CODE Building which was done in 2022.” 

Fifteen trees have been removed in recent years due to poor health. Josey said sixty percent of the trees are Willow Oaks with Gingko trees on side streets and Shumard Oaks near the Pavilion. The data is being collected in a spreadsheet that captures many attributes of each tree and gives an overall condition. 

“Roughly 40 percent of the trees are in fair to poor or already-removed shape, so that’s a sizeable amount of the original Willow Oaks are are in poor shape and declining shape,” Josey said. 

The work is also reviewing the potential for trees to fail, a risk that could cause damage to people and property. This risk increases due to damage caused by restaurants that use heaters to warm up customers in cold weather. Josey said this dates back to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“Nine of the original 55 Willow Oak trees were impacted by heater use where the heaters were placed next to the bark of the trees and that actually burned away the cambium and the tree. Two of those trees have already been removed.” 

The city’s Department of Neighborhood Development Services now has rules in place to keep heaters ten feet away from trees and their locations must be approved in advance. 

The next phase will begin to create a plan to replace the trees over the next 20 years, which Josey said will involve diversifying species and planning for a warmer and possibly drier climate. There’s also the practicality of maintaining a key area of the city. 

“How does it impact business if you have to remove trees and replace them?” Josey said. “How do we really realize the life cycle of these trees and our Downtown Mall?” 

City Manager Sam Sanders said a report from city’s Downtown Mall Committee will come out around the same time as the tree management recommendations. 

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