Summit Park trees cut down for safety reasons

As the last of the snow was melting on the summit towards the end of last month, some visitors to Summit Park may have noticed that a considerable amount of tree cutting — reducing a few tall trunks to stumps in some cases, and leaving behind piles of logs — had taken place around the entrances to Summit Park's main paths.

The matter was also raised by resident John Johnston at this Monday's city council meeting.

"I've noticed in the last few days a number of trees that have been cut down in that area," Johnston said during question period. "I'm not sure why they've been cut up. They're not rotten. I looked at them myself. Certainly, there are bundles of trees around. But why? Has the path been widened?"

City Councillor George Bowser, who chairs the Community Safety Committee, said he was told the trees were taken down in places where they were deemed to be a danger because of their proximity to where people walk.

"When they're taken down, the resulting logs are left to decompose in situ," Bowser said. "I'm sure that in every case they were deemed to be unsafe. It would be beyond my comprehension that someone would take a tree down for no reason at all.

"I'm sure that the person who tests them establishes a percentage of rot in a place that is deemed to be unsafe," Bowser added. "It may not be immediately visible in the logs that result, but I think it's done in good faith by experts."

The trees were taken down "some time ago, starting around when the really bad weather started to hit," Director General Bruce St. Louis told the Examiner. "All those trees were dead, and as time went on they were deemed dangerous, so they were taken down for safety reasons."

According to St. Louis, the cut wood is being distributed in Summit Park, in accordance with its vocation as a nature site.

"The branches that are there, the smaller ones, will be left," he said. "The larger pieces will actually be put through a chipper and put back into the park so that it can decompose and go back into the soil.

"Our normal policy is that if we have to do any type of pruning or cutting, it is a natural reserve and we leave the material there," he added. "Because in nature it would fall down and it would rot and that provides shelter and food for other animals."

Cutting trees can be a sensitive issue in Westmount. In November 2006, a furor erupted among some residents when the City decided to undertake a long-overdue re-landscaping of Sunnyside Park, which is located on a slope beneath the mountain lookout. A large number of trees were cut there in order to improve the view from the lookout.

Les Amis de la Montagne, a lobby group dedicated to preserving Mount Royal's three peaks, including Westmount, was critical of the Sunnyside Park tree cutting at the time. However, a spokeswoman for the group said they are not as concerned about the recent cutting in Summit Park. "All parks are doing that," said Gabrielle Korn.

"Basic maintenance of trees is often done in the spring and then later on the fall again. Especially with the amount of snowfall that we had, I'm not surprised that there would be a fair bit of pruning and removal of some of the dead wood. I'm happy to hear that they're keeping the logs on the property to serve as habitat. That's an important thing for the eco-system."