News Story: Crews along Shore Drive save young trees from bulldozers’ paths

By John Glass (The Virginia -Pilot: March 8, 2005)

Kristina Villaire, an arborist and landscape gardener, sits in the Sea Ranch oak, a tree in Virginia Beach that served as a catalyst in a battle with a developer. City workers recently finished salvaging other oaks in the area, but the developer decided to keep the Sea Ranch in place. GENEVIEVE ROSS/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT.

VIRGINIA BEACH - Kristina Villaire poked her fingers into the dark soil, searching on her knees for a clue to how her babies were doing.
She uncovered one: a live oak acorn, smaller than her pinkie . Fresh shoots had burst through its woody shell like a squid’s tentacles.
“Oh! Look at those roots!” she said, gingerly holding up the budding seed. “Awesome.” She quickly re-buried it. “I can’t wait to see these trees growing.”
Villaire is on the front lines of Virginia Beach’s effort to restore the embattled live oak trees along Shore Drive, where concrete and condominiums have consumed much of the landscape, including the hardy, wind-swept oaks.
A headline-grabbing fight in 2003 that pitted a developer’s condo project against a decades-old tree, known as the Sea Ranch oak, served as the catalyst.
Spurred by community outcry, the city has since reached agreements with that developer and another to transplant hundreds of young live oaks before bulldozers cleared the lots – a first for the city.
Beach workers last week salvaged the last of the trees they could move from a lot off Dinwiddie Road, not far from Lesner Bridge. By fall 2006, the parcel will house a six-story condo project next to the Sea Ranch oak, which developer Stanley Tseng pruned but decided to preserve.
The city crew used a huge metal tree spade to dig up the 10- to 15-foot-tall oaks. They loaded the skinny, swaying trees on a truck and drove them a few miles east, across the bridge, before replanting them along a paved multipurpose trail that winds from Lynnhaven Colony to First Landing State Park.
Villaire, an arborist and landscape gardener, has volunteered in the rescue effort. Her work on a master’s degree in horticulture has turned into a quest to ensure the live oak’s survival here on the northern edge of its range in the United States.
Many of the young oaks removed from the two sites have come to Villaire. With help from a Virginia Tech professor, she has treated the trees’ roots – called rhizomes – with various off-the-shelf plant growth hormones.
She hopes to hit on the best way to propagate the slow-growing, hard-to-cultivate species.
Last fall, Villaire gathered up several thousand acorns dropped by the sprawling Sea Ranch and gave them the same hormone treatments.
Now, she is waiting. The initial results will reveal themselves this spring at two experimental garden plots she is tending at Virginia Tech’s Agricultural Research & Extension Center, off Diamond Springs Road.
Villaire calls herself “the baby sitter.”

Kristina Villaire’s work on a master’s degree in horticulture has fueled her quest to ensure the live oak’s survival in the region. Photo by Genevieve Ross/The Virginian-Pilot.

“Right now, it’s sort of hurry-up-and-wait,” she said. “I want to see if it’s more successful to grow live oaks from acorns or from the shoots. It’s not an easy tree to transplant, and it’s not a tree that’s seeding itself all over the place. You can’t just go to the store and buy a live oak and expect it to grow.”
Of about 400 live oak shoots dug up by volunteers, about 70 have survived, she said. The ones growing in Villaire’s experimental garden look like little leafless sticks, waiting for spring’s warm embrace.
She sorted through more than 2,000 acorns to find 500 she could use.
Most of the acorns she planted had been infested by acorn weevils, which drill tiny holes through the shell and lay larvae.
Villaire had to give the acorns a bath in hot water to kill the larvae.
City work crews trying to dig up larger live oaks also had problems. Many of the young trees were growing off the roots of more mature oaks, making it hard to retrieve them with the mechanical tree spade, said Rob Hood, a city horticulturist.
“They’ll go through shock, and the leaves will probably turn brown,” Hood said of the trees dug up last week. “We’ll know by next spring if they’ll live or die. If we get a drought this summer, they could turn crisp by July.”
Last year, the City Council designated the live oak as the official city tree. Clay Bernick, the Beach’s environmental management administrator, said the effort “serves as a really good model that it’s possible to develop and still do something right for the environment, not only on Shore Drive but across the city.”
Tseng has donated $10,000 and developer Chris Wood has added $1,000 to a trust fund the city created last year to preserve live oaks.
Wood said he took his 5-year-old son, Riley, with him to help dig up live oak shoots from a lot next to Urchin Road where he is developing an office building.
“My son still talks about the day we saved a bunch of live oaks,” Wood said. “He’s kind of a barometer of our community. If we can get more people aware of how important these trees are, that’s a good thing.”
Villaire agreed. “I think they’re one of the great jewels we have here in Virginia Beach,” she said. “It’d be a shame to lose them.”
Reach Jon W. Glass at 222-5119 or jon.glass@pilotonline.com.