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He Spoke for the Tree. Then He Got Fired.

NEW YORK — On a little hillside in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, there is a patch of brown mulch that, until very recently, was a tree.

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By
Andy Newman
, New York Times

NEW YORK — On a little hillside in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, there is a patch of brown mulch that, until very recently, was a tree.

It was not a rare kind of tree. It was not even a whole tree. It was the 10-foot-high living stump of what was once a mighty London plane tree, with a hollow inside big enough for people to stand in.

The hollow tree had friends and fans. Children played in it. Adults stood in it and contemplated the inside-out view of the landscape. It served as shelter in downpours. People called it the treehouse tree.

But according to the garden’s management, the treehouse tree was an accident waiting to happen. It had sprouted a bushy head of new branches that it could not support in the long run. Playing inside it was against the garden’s rules. The garden wanted to take the tree down to make room for a “vigorous young tree” that would help “make for a much healthier collection overall,” it said in a letter to members.

The garden’s own arborists, seeing how curious and interested visitors were in the tree, proposed a way to maintain it by pruning the new growth. One arborist, Alec Baxt, participated in a social media campaign to save the tree. More than 150 people signed an online petition urging the garden’s president, Scot D. Medbury, to spare it.

On July 23, the garden cut it down.

Baxt wrote a post on a Facebook page created for the tree criticizing the garden’s leadership. The post, now deleted, asked garden members to “consider canceling your membership for a year.”

The next day, he was fired.

The garden would not say why, other than “for cause,” citing the confidentiality of personnel maters, but a spokeswoman, Elizabeth Reina-Longoria, said, “We were saddened” by the recommendation that people cancel their memberships.

Baxt, 41, who worked at the garden for eight years, said the Lorax-like battle over one tree reflected a broader problem at the garden, a 52-acre preserve famed for its Cherry Esplanade and Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden and visited by nearly 1 million people a year.

For years, he said, the leadership of the garden, focusing on building new features and expanding attendance, has disregarded the input of its professional boots on the ground. He said several trees had ended up injured or dead because of the simple failure to include garden staff in planning.

In 2013, the garden eliminated its scientific research program.

“This is ultimately a desperate plea for the garden to stop causing harm to itself,” Baxt said.

The garden, for its part, disagreed strongly, saying Baxt’s representation was “inaccurate” and that “staff on all levels, as well as outside horticultural scientists, landscape architects and engineers with relevant expertise and knowledge” were involved. “Staff recommendations and feedback are always welcome and carefully considered,” Reina-Longoria said in an email.

The treehouse tree was planted around 100 years ago near what is now the Fragrance Garden. London planes are towering trees with camouflage-patterned bark that are planted along boulevards around the city because of their majesty and durability. This one grew to be about 65 feet tall, with a trunk more than 4 feet across. But the garden’s arborists determined that the tree could no longer safely hold up its spreading canopy, and this spring, they cut it off.

By early July, a riot of green shoots, called suckers, had sprouted directly from the top of the stump.

The question of whether these posed a danger was a matter of considerable debate.

The garden said that because the tree’s base was compromised, new branches would eventually pose a risk of falling, and that while the new growth could be pruned, that would require “disproportionate attention.”

Baxt said pruning the tree would have taken only an hour or two a year.

As clamor built to save the tree, the garden retained an arboricultural consultant, James R. Clark, co-author of one of the tree trade’s standard textbooks. He examined photographs and determined that the hollowed trunk would keep decaying. “That’s really just an untenable situation,” he said by phone Friday.

A different expert, who a garden staff member recommended, reached the opposite conclusion. Guy Meilleur of Historic Tree Care in North Carolina, who has written dozens of peer-reviewed articles, looked at a photo of the cut-down trunk and said that almost all the sapwood was healthy and that the tree had successfully walled off the decayed part from the healthy part.

“You can’t get any safer for a tree than a standing solid trunk with no load on it,” he said. “To say it might be unsafe if branches grow out and get big enough to fall and hurt somebody — you could say that about any tree.”

Baxt returned to the garden Thursday for the first time since his termination. A security guard greeted him with a fist bump. “I’m mad, man,” the guard said. Baxt stopped to point out a place where a tall shingle oak fell a few months ago, years after suffering what he said was an easily avoidable wound at the base of the trunk, caused by construction equipment, that allowed fungus to enter and weaken the tree.

The garden said the construction took place around 2004, before the current management was in place.

“This is a museum, and the plants are the museum’s collection,” Baxt said. “If you think about it like MoMA — if they hire people to renovate and the staff says, ‘You should really take these paintings off the wall first,’ and they say, ‘No, we’re just going to paint, we’ll avoid the edges of the paintings,’ — how many years do you do that and just watch these paintings get slopped over?”

Baxt led a reporter and photographer over to the scar where the treehouse tree had stood, about 50 feet from the garden’s administrative offices. The three visitors were quickly escorted off the grounds in a golf cart.

The garden’s head arborist, Christopher Roddick, declined to comment by phone, but he echoed some of Baxt’s broader concerns about management culture in a Facebook post after the firing. “In these times,” he wrote, “the message the executive class is sending is clear: working women and men should blindly obey orders with no questions asked, even when they are experts in their field.”

A former educator at the garden, LaShaun Ellis, said she missed the treehouse tree already.

“It was just the sweetest thing,” she said, “the way people gathered around it and just sort of fell in love with it as a sort of miniature bonsai version of its former self.” Being inside a tree, she said, “brings you a lot closer to nature.”

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