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Thanks to Viki Seward's grassroots group, a Maryland town is realizing that its tree are as valuable as its historic steeples.

This article is the first in a new series to appear in each issue of American Forests, and in our sister publication Urban Forests. Each installment of "The Trees of Home" will pinpoint a homeowner (or group) who is touched by a tree-related issue affecting the quality of life in a given city or town. Most articles will include a professional analysis of the situation, including actions the homeowner has taken or can take to overcome specific problems.

"The Trees of Home" will emphasize solutions, and back them up whenever possible with the latest scientific information, including the new Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping and data analysis being produced by the urban forestry department at AMERICAN FORESTS.

A FAMOUS POEM by John Greenleaf Whittier begins, "The clustered spires of Frederick stand/Green-walled by the hills of Maryland." The historic town of Frederick, 45 miles from the nation's capital, prides itself on the storied steeples of its churches. More and more, this Maryland town is also coming to value its green spires--the trees of its streets and parks. One reason is Viki Seward. She is helping the town fathers become aware that visitors who stroll the streets to see the colonial architecture appreciate shady sidewalks.

Victoria ("Viki") Wachter Seward, third-generation resident, believes that the best view of Frederick's clustered spires is from Baker Park, a mile-long swath of grass dotted with mature willows, sycamores, and silver maples. Reminiscent of a village green, Baker Park is flanked by colonial- and cape-style houses like the one where Seward lives with her husband and their two boys.

The park is an extended front yard for Seward and her family. To reach it from her house, she crosses a swinging foot-bridge over Carroll Creek, which meanders from Frederick's suburbs to Baker Park and then to the center of town.

In the park, the Seward boys and other neighborhood children get up a game on the ball diamond or cast into the creek for catfish. Parents enjoy the park's jogging trails, feed the ducks on the lake, or lounge in the gazebo on Sunday afternoons and listen to carillon concerts. The carillon bells--the largest weighs 3,500 pounds--are housed in the park's most prominent landmark, a 70-foot stone bell tower just across from Seward's house.

Seward grew up a stone's throw from the park and can point out the trees she climbed as a child--and the empty spots where favorites have died. In fact, she has something unique to say about every tree we pass:

"This one, the red oak, was damaged by fill dirt."

"These elms are our last two."

"We saved this sycamore from a sewer line."

The trees seem like old friends, almost as beloved as the huge English walnut in her backyard.

Three years ago, Viki Seward founded the Friends of Baker Park, a neighborhood group that now numbers 100 families. The organization's members are continuing a heritage that began in 1927, when their grandparents created the park out of pasture and began planting trees. Back then, Frederick was a sleepy rural town little changed from the days when Whittier wrote about its clustered spires. The town was still so rural that Seward's father can remember seeing cows herded through the streets.

By the 1950s, when Seward was a little girl, Frederick's population was 20,000. Today it is near 46,000, and the woods and orchards of Carroll Creek's upper watershed are gone, replaced by subdivisions and a shopping mall.

Over the years, Seward had noticed that the trees across from her home were dying from old age and not being replaced. The town's Department of Public Works, headed up by Fred Eisenhart, is responsible for caring for the urban forest. But money is tight.

"The department has about 600 acres to take care of with the same manpower that used to maintain 125 acres," Eisenhart points out.

Even so, the department will plant--for free--trees that homeowners purchase for the treelawn (the grassy areas between the sidewalk and the street) in front of their houses. In 1990, Seward decided to approach the mayor and volunteer to go door-to-door to spread the word about this excellent program.

"The mayor seemed receptive," she recalls, "but our conversation got sidetracked." The mayor happened to mention that the town was planning a major flood-control project on Carroll Creek. A concrete wall and holding ponds would be constructed, and the creek would be channeled into four stormwater conduits, each large enough to hold a Greyhound bus.

In the town library, a photo from 1976 shows floodwaters from Carroll Creek lapping at the base of Baker Park's bell tower. Forests and orchards in the creek's watershed used to absorb the stormwater, but today it streams off parking lots and rushes down the creek. A comer of Baker Park would have to be sacrificed.

"I figured that if something this big could be planned, and we didn't even know about it," Seward says, "maybe we needed to start a group."

Seward's style is positive rather than confrontational. She wrote a letter and distributed it to 40 of her neighbors, inviting them to a meeting at Baker Park's playground.

"I had some ideas written on a chart," she says, "about how we could be extra eyes for the city and report broken tree limbs and swings that need fixing. I had no idea whether anyone would show up."

The turnout was 18. A month later, 18 people showed up again, and then 35 the month after that. Seward and others succeeded in persuading the city to build an attractive stone wall for the Carroll Creek project instead of using concrete.

Today Friends of Baker Park is an accredited nonprofit with a board of directors, and publishes an annual report. The group has raised $1,800 to plant 20 new shade trees, and the members are also working to restore the carillon and improve the playground. Each fall, the group participates in a community service day to clean up the park and mulch the trees.

(As we walk the winding paths, Seward waves to retired social worker Ed Eiker, a board member. "On the last cleanup day," she says as she introduces Eiker, "he would fill his wheelbarrow and then run with it." He beams.)

Friends of Baker Park, after these initial successes, began researching the park's history and came across the landscape architect's original plans. He had designed the park's curving walkways in a style reminiscent of the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, with groupings of trees to frame vistas of the clustered spires.

"I realized that we could almost do more harm than good by planting trees willy-nilly," Seward admits. "There's a danger in getting people fired up. We didn't really make any big mistakes, but I saw that enthusiasm has to be channeled. I put out a warning, not exactly putting on the brakes, but saying that we should bring in some tree experts."

After consulting a local expert, Seward realized that the park needs a master tree plan to ensure that future plantings will restore the aesthetic qualities envisioned by the landscape architect. She began taking inventory of the park's trees and mapped them by hand on oversized sheets of graph paper.

"In the back of my mind," she says, "I was beginning to see the need for an inventory and master tree plan for the whole city."

Then, in 1992, Frederick was selected to be one of the first Cool Communities, an AMERICAN FORESTS program that encourages energy conservation through planting trees and lightening building surfaces in cities to counteract heat buildup. The mayor of Frederick, knowing of Seward's interests, asked her to chair the town's Cool Communities advisory committee.

Frederick was selected for several reasons, a major one being that it is on a climate border. At present, the town's energy use peaks in winter, but that's expected to change to a summer peak, like nearby Washington and Baltimore, as trees are lost to suburban sprawl and replaced by heat-absorbing surfaces. The urban heat-island effect overtaking Frederick offers a unique research opportunity.

The first step in collecting baseline data was to have AMERICAN FORESTS arrange for color aerial photos to be taken of Frederick's tree canopy. Scanned into a computer, the photos were analyzed with high-tech software to calculate the urban forest canopy and its current environmental benefits for energy conservation, stormwater reduction, and air quality, as well as the potential increased savings with additional trees and light-colored surfaces.

Public support is essential to help convince policymakers that spending money on a community's urban forest is a sound investment. The Cool Communities analysis provides the basis for investing in a citywide, comprehensive master plan. A master plan would include plans for perpetuating a healthy urban forest and public education to increase community support.