Haddonfield Sun

By ROBERT LINNEHAN | The Haddonfield Sun
A creeping disease is spreading through a good portion of the shade trees in the borough and could spell doom for about 2,000 trees in Haddonfield.
Shade Tree Commission Chair William Polise said the borough could possibly lose a majority of its red and pin oak trees in the next 15 years to bacterial leaf scorch. BLS is a degenerative infectious chronic disease that physically clogs the tree’s water conducting tissue.
The disease is spread by leafhoppers, which include a number of different species of insects such as cicadas. The insects can carry the disease from tree to tree through contact and its eggs and fecal matter can spread through regions by air currents as well.
The disease can’t be cured and by the time the trees are showing signs of BLS it’s too late, Polise said. The most obvious symptom for BLS is a browning of the tree’s leaves, bordered by a pale halo band, separating the healthy from the dead tissue in the leaf, according to the USNA.
“The whole course can take up to 15 years, but you won’t even notice symptoms until six or seven years in when they’re at stage four cancer. At that point they will die. Most of the pin oaks and red oaks are showing signs of BLS in town,” he said. “All of these trees may go away. We’re attempting to let the administration know, especially the head of the department of public works. This is a fact, we’re in trouble here.  We want to make sure we can get ahead of this. “
Red and pin oaks are a typically hardy breed of tree, Polise said, which usually are able to grow in any conditions and live for many years.
On several Haddonfield streets there is just one type of tree, he said, and in the Radnor area of town the vast majority of the trees are red or pin oaks.
The oaks account for about 20 percent of the town’s shade trees, he said, but up in the Radnor area they account for more than 33 percent.
“Back in the day they planted entire streets with just one type of tree,” he said. “The north area of town, the Radnor area, there are a lot of pin oaks in that area. In the next 10 years that area will be horribly affected. You might lose one out of every three trees up in that area.”
The Shade Tree Commission recently lobbied the state and received a Community Stewardship Incentive Program grant and will be taking a detailed inventory of all the shade trees in the borough, Polise said. This will enable the commission to get a good grip on which trees in the borough have BLS and need to be removed.
The commission will continue to look for grant money to help replace the trees lost to BLS, Polise said, since the process of replacing and planting new trees can be expensive. Annually the commission plants about 100 new trees each year, with the total cost for each tree and maintenance coming to about $200 per tree. A grant could help defer some of the cost needed to replace the trees lost to BLS.
“We’re constantly looking for grant money; we’re looking for any money out there. BLS is the single largest challenge we face,” Polise said.

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