LINCOLN SQUARE — Ah, fall, the season when this gardener's thoughts naturally turn to spring.
No sooner do the leaves begin to show a hint of a color and I start envisioning the changes I'll make to next year's flower beds.
I haven't talked much about my landscaping efforts these past months, mostly because all of the work I've put in over the last several years has finally paid off and the beds are now to the point where they're nearly maintenance free.
But I have big plans for 2015, people. Frederick Law Olmsted-sized plans.
I'm taking over the parkway.
I made up my mind over the summer, during our first-ever trip to New York City. Safe to say I'm the only person to come away from the Big Apple raving, "The trees, the TREES," but there you have it.
Not to be confused with sycamores, which are to Plane trees what horses are to mules, the Plane grows in abundance in Central Park, Bryant Park, Prospect Park and probably lots of other places that weren't within walking distance of our hotel.
The Plane's distinctive peeling bark is often likened to camouflage, which scarcely does the tree justice. I'd liken it more to a Jackson Pollack painting — what bark would look like if it were made up of splashes of earth tones.
I fell hard for this tree.
At first, I thought of bringing back a piece of Plane bark as a souvenir, which isn't so far fetched if you've ever seen the jar full of rocks I have, holding chunks of the Green Mountains, Black Hills and the Grand Canyon.
Dave watched me sift through a clump of bark peelings at the base of a Plane, searching for the perfect specimen to pack in my purse, and called a halt to the proceedings.
"You know what they say, 'Take pictures, leave only footprints,'" he said.
Ugh. No one in New York — or anywhere else outside the refrigerator magnet/inspirational poster industry — talks like that, but he did get me to stop with the bark. I hate it when Dave throws my hippy-dippy love of unspoiled nature in my face.
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Alrighty, I would go one better than bark. I would get myself a whole damned tree.
I just needed to figure out the parkway thing.
(A moment's digression: Where I come from in Ohio, we call the strip of grass between the sidewalk and curb the "tree lawn." At some point, every kid discovers that the tree lawn is public property and uses this knowledge to taunt some other kid in a "nah-nah-nah, you can't kick me off the grass" kind of way. This passed for seriously bad behavior in my youth, which is why my memoir will be all of two pages long and titled "Curse My Safe and Happy Childhood.")
Anyhow, back to parkways.
Responsibility for Chicago's parkways falls under the purview of the Department of Streets & Sanitation, which oversees the Bureau of Forestry.
Streets & San is not, as the "streets" part would suggest, in charge of fixing potholes (that's CDOT), but it is the place to go to request a parkway tree.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened to be attending a town hall meeting where Charles Williams, Streets & San commissioner, was one of the presenters. Ostensibly I was on hand to report for DNAinfo Chicago but really I was there to find out how to get my Plane Tree.
The answer was essentially "take a number."
Apparently, I am not the only Chicagoan who wants a tree. The city is so behind in meeting demand, they're just now getting around to fulfilling requests filed in 2012, according to Williams.
And that was before the Emerald Ash Borer hit, threatening to wipe out some or all of the 90,000 ash trees in the city's parkways.
Forestry has inoculated 70,000 ash trees that look salvageable, but the city won't have a good idea until 2015 or 2016 as too how many of those are or aren't going to make it.
So Streets & San has its hands full.
No biggie, I thought, I'll just plant my own.
I asked Williams if this was OK.
"Yes," he said, "but you need a permit."
Noooooo!!!!!!!!!!
Someday, some bright young screenwriter will pen a horror movie called "You Need a Permit," starring Nicolas Cage as an unhinged bureaucrat armed with a pair of giant rubber stamps labeled "Denied" and "Approved." He'll terrorize a young couple — think Anne Hathaway and Ryan Reynolds — attempting to convert a vacant warehouse into a work/live space.
The good news, according to Williams, is that the Streets & San permit is only 10 bucks and the department doesn't have any mechanism in place to actually collect the fee, so they just waive it.
But, and there's always a but, CDOT wants in on the permit action too, and they charge $300 to come out and assess the proposed location of said tree, in order to make sure there aren't any important underlying utilities.
Three hundred dollars.
How do I love thee, Plane Tree? Let me count the Benjamins.
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