After beetle invasion, city is replanting

A year after roughly 27,000 trees in Worcester had to be destroyed due to an infestation of Asian longhorned beetles, two programs are under way to help the city and private property owners regain what was lost.

Worcester’s Department of Public Works and Parks is drawing on $4.5 million in federal stimulus funds, channeled through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as well as $750,000 from the city’s capital improvement funds, to plant nearly 3,000 trees along city streets.

A separate program, the Worcester Tree Initiative, which is funded largely by donations, aims to plant 30,000 trees over a five-year period in Worcester and neighboring communities that were part of the quarantine zone established after the beetles were detected in Worcester in 2008.

Many additional trees in the region were knocked down by an ice storm in December 2008.

This is not the first time that Worcester has had to replant following a natural disaster, according to Robert Antonelli, the city’s assistant commissioner for public works and parks. After a tornado swept through Worcester in 1953, the city planted thousands of Norway maples – a type of tree that proved vulnerable to the beetle infestation. This time, Antonelli said, the city is planting a more diverse selection of trees.

“A single street will most likely be planted with a single variety of tree, so you get the look and feel of a tree-lined street,” Antonelli said. “But the next street over, there will be a completely different species.”

The Worcester Tree Initiative got under way last year. In addition to providing various types of trees to replace those lost to the beetle infestation or the ice storm, the program requires that recipients receive instructions on proper tree planting and care.