A New York Times article details the surprisingly difficult to catalogue history of New York's greenery.
Andy Newman writes about the "leafing of New York." A side-by-side comparison of historic photographs of streets with their current conditions is all it takes to reveal: "the blankness filled in and softened by soaring pin oaks, the camouflage-pattern trunk of a London plane, or a line of leggy young pears or maples."
Yet, writes, Newman, "[there] is no way to prove this assertion. Street-tree censuses were not reliable until the 1990s. The tree population fluctuates — waves of disease and storm and municipal fiscal spasm periodically thin the urban forest and undo the city’s tree-planting efforts."
The article goes on to explain more of the disconnects in the history of New York's urban forest, as well as links to two of the photography projects that help document the city's natural changes.
FULL STORY: In Leafy Profusion, Trees Spring Up in a Changing New York
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