All Maryann Waterhouse could do was watch as her companion, confidant and guardian of nearly four decades fell from the heavens and crashed to the earth. A resounding boom and a shock wave of wind rattled downtown Greenfield, as Waterhouse and the onlookers who’d gathered in the Harvester Market parking lot stood in awe, watching the mighty sentinel come down. The eerie silence was broken by the sounding of the town hall bell, a death knell for the 137-year-old elm tree that Waterhouse thought she’d never see fall.
“This tree is my guardian,” Waterhouse said, before embracing the tree for one final time, her arms not even close to encircling the massive trunk. “I’ve been talking to it for 40 years, telling it all my problems.”
In recent years, more and more of her problems were rooted in the tree itself. Waterhouse has been on disability, a back injury forcing her out of the medical field, and as house maintenance and yard work started to fall by the wayside, the tree’s deterioration went unnoticed.
“I knew it wasn’t doing well in the last few years,” Waterhouse said, “but I didn’t realize it was actually dying.”
The tree’s declining health became very clear to Waterhouse in March, however, as two massive, dead limbs came crashing down onto the house, destroying the deck and smashing clear through the roof of the bedroom where Waterhouse’s daughter, Caroline, and grandchildren were staying. Fortunately, the room was empty at the time, but the damage was done.
“We really haven’t been sleeping that well [after the limbs fell],” Waterhouse said.
Soon after that unwelcome arrival forced its way into the home, so did another: a letter from the town. Fire Chief David Hall and Building Inspector Michael Borden had taken a look and ruled that the home was not safe to inhabit until the tree was taken down.
“It is not a question as to if there will be further events like [the limbs falling],” Hall wrote in the letter, “but when they will occur. The tree is massive and poses a serious threat to your health and wellbeing.”
Waterhouse and her daughter didn’t want to part with the tree, but they saw the end was nigh, and there was little they could do. Waterhouse chose to keep living in the home, against the town’s wishes; Caroline moved her children out, away from the tree which had stood longer than the house had, where she’d had tea parties, the ever-present guardian standing watch.
“It’s always been there,” Caroline said, “but it definitely has to go. It’s sad to see it go, because it’s so old, but nothing can live forever … It’s a pretty impressive tree – it’s been through a lot.”
Indeed, the massive elm stood tall for 137 years, a survivor of brutal ice storms and hurricanes and the outbreak of Dutch elm disease that laid bare so many New England streets in the 1930s and ’40s. You can’t go far in this area without finding an Elm Street, which makes sense to forester Swifty Corwin, who got the task of taking down the tree.
“Elm trees make perfect street trees because they go up, they don’t have any branches and then they have this perfect crown, so you don’t have to do any pruning,” Corwin said.
This particular tree, of course, stood tall over the old colonial house Waterhouse inhabited, where she raised her children. That, too, is in keeping with New England tradition.
“Typically the biggest trees in the area are next to houses because trees in other areas are more available to be logged,” Corwin said. “Trees near houses in particular can really make a landscape and a home feel like a home. A tree like that has such a dominant presence that it’s really a weighty being, so it’s important to do what we can for them.”
In fact, early detection may have saved this particular tree, or at least prolonged its life. The official diagnosis was Dutch elm disease, according to forester Karla Allen, who reinforced the town’s suggestion of taking down the tree in a letter to Waterhouse.
“While no other elms are adjacent to this one,” Allen wrote, “any tree that may have grafted its root system to this elm is at risk for sharing diseases.”
Corwin said that this particular elm may have been afflicted with Dutch elm several times in the past before finally succumbing.
“This time,” Corwin said, “for whatever reason, the tree didn’t have the gumption to fight.”
If she’d known the symptoms of Dutch elm disease, Waterhouse might have noticed the tree “flagging” in recent summers, yellow, dead spots peppered into the canopy as leaves died well before their time, nutrients blocked from the limbs by the invasive beetles that come along with the disease. And if she had, she might have been able to save it, by calling someone in to prune the afflicted sections out and inject the tree with a fungicide to slow its decay.
As it turned out, the old guardian fought and fought, standing tall through the years in the face of the disease that would kill it.
In the end, it just couldn’t fight anymore.
“Every tree falls,” Corwin said, repeating a lesson his father taught him as he passed on the family forestry trade to a new generation.
“Some just take longer than others.”
It took an ax, a chainsaw, a pump-jack and a winch truck, along with a three-man crew, to finally topple the mighty elm, rings numbering 137 when it fell, exposing its age. Now, the pieces are off to Portsmouth, where they’ll be burned in the Schiller biomass station and return as electricity.
Waterhouse could barely look as the tree came crashing down, knowing that it had always been there for her, even though it had put her family’s lives in danger and caused her much heartache in its latter years.
“I don’t think it turned on us,” Waterhouse said. “I just think it’s old and tired.”
(A GoFundMe campaign to help Waterhouse repair her house is underway online at www.gofundme.com/fqv4f2ck.)