Frankfort KY

In my recently-completed trip to Lousiville, Lexington, and Nashville, I never actually made it to Frankfort, KY, the capital of the Bluegrass state. I decided to spend the night of June 30 instead in Lexington so that I would arise early on July 1 and have several hours to spend in the UK Arboretum and Botanical garden on Alumni Dr. in Lexington, before heading off to Nashville to visit my brother and his wife. That I didn't make it to Frankfort doesn't mean that I didn't want to make it there nor that I didn't study up on some aspects of the town before not eventually going there. This and the next essay reveal what I studied about Frankfort, with liberal comments interspersed about how my learning method should be of use to people of all kinds as they try to learn.

Learning and Planning

I knew I would have the night of June 30 "free" (i.e, between my appointments in Lousiville and Nashville), and I originally planned to stay in Frankfort. One of my knowledge-gaining activities these days is learning all about identification, habits and the life of trees. Of course, trees are, for me, just a window into all kinds of precise knowledge in other fields--as I expand my knowledge into plants, shrubs, flowers, weeds, architectural styles of 23 homes styles in American history, and many, many other areas. The principal methodological "breakthrough" is that you build slowly, using the Internet, visits to sites and questioning of people who have knowledge, so that you, more quickly than you might think, begin to develop a solid and unassailable knowledge base that will eventually make you an impressive and fruitful source of knowledge/wisdom for the world. You can start with trees. In fact, you can start with almost any subject which requires precise and detailed knowledge, knowledge that then can be recited to help organize or explain some aspect of the natural or human or scientific world.

Returning to the "Idea" of Frankfort

About two weeks before my trip to KY/TN, then, I decided to begin to "study up" on Frankfort. I got no further than its trees. Why? Because a study completed in 2008 for the city on its trees is so useful and productive of knowledge that all I had to do was to read it, think about it, and then stop. The field of "Urban Forestry Management" is slowly, imperceptibly, making an inroads into American culture. It is an extremely unsexy movement, when first examined, but its goals are so consonant with the larger emphasis on sustainability and "going green" in our culture that it soon will ineluctably bring its message to all educated people. One of the goals of the "Urban Forestry" movement is to cover our cities with trees. Well, that needs to be qualified. There have been numerous studies showing that the "tree canopy" in our cities affects the quality of life by moderating temperatures, providing color and aesthetic beauty and creating more inviting living spaces. What the Urban Forestry movement wants is to increase the "forest cover" from the present amount. For example, one of the recommendations from "An Urban Forestry Management Report" of Frankfort was to "increase the forest cover in Frankfort from the present 20% to 40% in the next 20 years."

I want to pause on that point for a moment. Just that one sentence reflects a fairly new approach to trees and cities in American life. It isn't an "Arbor Day" approach to trees, where we plant them because trees are a "good thing" for life and we teach people how to care for them in order to get a Boy Scout merit badge; here we have a specific approach to increasing forest cover or canopy in a specified period of time as a way of enhancing the ecologic, economic and enjoyment aspects of a city.

So, a city wants to increase its "canopy" or forest coverage. It can only do so through the spaces that it controls, either on right-of-ways, parks or other areas the city owns. That still is a very considerable chunk of real estate. Thus, the City of Frankfort wants to double its forest canopy. It is a great goal. But let's break this goal down further.

The Angels are in the Details

We have to begin with numbers. At present Frankfort has 2887 street trees. The goal is to increase this number, in the next 20 years, to 15,000. Actually, the details of the report mention adding about 13,165 more trees, which would bring the total to more than 16,000, but I don't want to quibble over this one. In any case, I don't understand right away how adding 500% more trees will only increase the canopy coverage from 20-40%, but that would be a quicestion to raise for the experts some day. There are answers, but you never really get to the question unless you master some basic data.

So, they want to increase the numbers of trees in pretty extensive ways. But then we need to ask what kinds of trees we have, in what numbers, and what kind of trees they want to add. An interesting point is that the report-makers considered that the number of species of trees now along city streets/parks is sufficient for the future--there are 86 species. Thus, the issue will be to develop an approach to further planting of trees that will make use of these 86 species in numbers and proportion so that aesthetic and ecological goals are preserved.

All of a sudden we are now in a world where the seeming randomness of trees on the sides of roads now takes on a notion of planning, thinking, creativity and even whimsy. But there is much more that is happening, also. We are now invited to think about these 86 species of trees, to see which ones we know, to learn about other species and then gradually to build our sure knowledge of trees. There really is no reason to be ignorant about something so omnipresent in our lives as trees. In fact, by not learning about them, we are almost saying to the universe that we really don't want to learn much about life; we really don't want to listen to life as it teaches us its lessons.

So, let's try to learn a little about the 86 varieties, 29 more than Heinz, that bedeck the streets of Frankfort.

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