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Reforesting the Elm City

The Urban Resources Initiative is planting thousands of trees to make New Haven a cooler city.

By Cathy Shufro | Mar/Apr 2025

Cathy Shufro, a writing tutor at Yale, has taught writing at Yale and at Wesleyan University.

At first, planting street trees in New Haven was nothing more than a job for William “The Muscle” Tisdale. “I never paid too much attention to trees,” he says. He appreciated steady work with Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative (URI), and he liked that it kept him in shape after a decade’s confinement in prison. But when Tisdale began the job in 2015, he says, “I was just throwing the trees
in the ground.”

Ten years in, he’s no longer throwing down trees. These days, as supervisor and trainer of URI’s adult field crew, Tisdale knows a ginkgo from a hawthorn, and a Japanese tree lilac from a magnolia (his favorite). He keeps tabs on “his” trees as he travels the city, watching them leaf out, bloom, attract birds and butterflies, get dinged by careless drivers. Working with trees is like cooking, he says now. To do it well, “You’ve got to put the love in.”

In May 2022, URI planted its 10,000th tree. Total trees to date: 12,400. That’s roughly one tree for every dozen New Haven residents, including babies.

Anyone in New Haven—including a renter—can request a free tree for the curb strip in front of their home or commercial building. Community groups can get trees for parks and schoolyards, trees they plant in partnership with URI. Recipients must promise to water their trees for three years. More than 90 percent survive.

The work of the Urban Resources Initiative is about something more fundamental than trees, however. “The tree is the vehicle,” says URI executive director Colleen Murphy-Dunning. “It’s about how you engage the public in taking care of nature. They look at the tree out their window and say, ‘That’s my tree.’ Even though it’s really a public, city tree, they feel a sense of ownership.”

Murphy-Dunning was already immersed in community-based forestry before landing in New Haven. Working in Papua New Guinea and Kenya, she followed the field’s guiding principle—that while visiting experts can offer technical knowledge about forestry, local people know best what their communities need. In Kenya, for instance, she worked with women who wanted to stop walking long distances to collect wood. With advice from Murphy-Dunning, they decided to plant trees for fuel and fodder in their home gardens.

In 1994, when Murphy-Dunning’s husband enrolled as a student at the Yale School of the Environment, Murphy-Dunning wasn’t sure where her career in community forestry was heading.

Then she met environment school professor William R. Burch Jr. He was doing groundbreaking work in urban ecology, an emerging field founded on the idea that the city is an ecosystem. Murphy-Dunning could continue doing community forestry in her new hometown: “He opened my eyes to it,” she says.

Burch became her mentor. In 1995, he helped her start the Community Greenspace program, which gives flowers, shrubs, and trees—and technical advice on planting them—to friends-of-parks groups and other volunteers. That program, which continues, was part of URI, which Burch had established in New Haven a few years earlier. Now staffed by five full-time Yale employees, URI is both a Yale program and a nonprofit with its own board of directors. Its guiding principle is the one Murphy-Dunning followed in Oceania and Africa—that local people are the experts on where they live.

Burch, who died in July 2024, became widely known for his approach, and Murphy-Dunning directs URI with his message in mind. “Bill Burch would say to Yale students: Environmental professionals are not going to solve the environmental problems of the world by themselves. You need public engagement in solving them.”

New Haven residents became tree stewards; by 2007, URI’s tree survival rates were high enough that the city’s parks department contracted with them to take over most tree planting in the city.

URI has recently doubled the number  of trees it plants each year, from 500 to 1,000, with the help of a grant that aims to bring trees to neighborhoods where they are sparse. URI’s tree canopy map (see page 39) shows which New Haven neighborhoods have ample tree coverage and which areas lack trees. Among predominantly residential neighborhoods, coverage ranges from 13 percent in Fair Haven to 51 percent in Westville.

Why does the number of trees matter? For one thing, trees are beautiful. That’s the main reason Elm City residents ask for them, according to Murphy-Dunning. New Haven is a city known for its trees, a distinction it owes to James Hillhouse, the senator and real estate developer who in the late 1700s planted elms on and around the Green and along what is now known as Hillhouse Avenue.

New Haven’s canopy even caught the attention of Charles Dickens. In an account of his American travels, Dickens wrote that the city’s streets “are planted with rows of grand old elm-trees; . . . Even in the winter time, these groups of well-grown trees, clustering among the busy streets and houses of a thriving city, have a very quaint appearance: seeming to bring about a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other half-way, and shaken hands upon it.”

Not only are trees nice to look at, they anchor entire ecosystems. A single white oak tree can attract 1,500 species, according to URI associate director Chris Ozyck. They might include microorganisms, insects, spiders, mosses, fungi, birds, small mammals, and picnickers. In addition, trees intercept airborne particles, reducing asthma triggers; store carbon dioxide while producing oxygen; sequester carbon; and intercept rainwater with their leaves, which reduces flooding and keeps polluted runoff out of Long Island Sound.

But more and more, cities seek trees because they buffer heat. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists report “Killer Heat in the United States,” “it is possible that [extreme heat] will affect daily life for the average US resident more than any other facet of climate change.” The 2019 report states that at a heat index of 100 degrees (a measure that considers both temperature and humidity), health problems may arise in vulnerable people such as the elderly, children, and anyone with underlying health problems (more common in impoverished populations). Worse, a heat index above 105 degrees can affect the health or even survival of any human being.

With this in mind, Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science, is creating maps to advise URI on where to plant. Seto builds those maps using NASA satellite imagery of New Haven paired with rich sources of census data. By analyzing trends in the rise of temperatures and in changes to vegetation during the past three decades, Seto can determine which city residents will be most vulnerable to heat in the years ahead. Their neighborhoods need the trees most urgently.

Already, trees dramatically affect temperatures in New Haven. A postdoctoral researcher in Seto’s laboratory at the School of the Environment, Shijuan Chen, collected satellite readings of land surface temperatures (of pavement, for example) on every July 31 from 1990 to 2022. She found that the average land surface temperature ranged from 85 degrees in the parts of the city with the most trees to 110 in the areas with the fewest trees.

Cities are generally hotter than the countryside, in part because pavement and rooftops absorb solar radiation and re-emit it as heat after sunset. Nights therefore don’t provide much relief. Trees soften this blow in two ways: They shade surfaces from sunlight, reducing heat absorption, and they reduce heat through transpiration. This happens when water moves upward from a tree’s roots to its leaves. The leaves release the water when they open pores on their undersides to take in CO2. The sun’s heat turns the water into vapor, which reduces the leaf’s surface temperature, and evaporation of that vapor lowers the air temperature.

As cities everywhere confront the threats of escalating heat, they are beginning to view trees as infrastructure. “We need to be a model for the world for community forestry,” says Seto. “We know that tree planting is going to be an important part of mitigating heat.” She hopes to create a dashboard that will allow non-specialists to map their own cities with ease. “That would be an incredible service to cities around the world,” she says.

On this crisp november morning,Wil Tisdale’s four-member crew is on Autumn Street in the East Rock neighborhood, planting the first of nine trees on the day’s checklist. Crew member William Lawrence hefts a 70-pound sapling with heart-shaped leaves from the URI pickup onto a “ball carrier” and then rolls the dolly to a hole he helped dig. Lawrence and another man tenderly settle the tree into the hole, remove the wire basket from the root ball, add compost and soil, pat it all down, and top it with mulch.

Just then, Manuel Mohr arrives home from walking his child to school. Mohr and his family are new to the block, but right away he noticed URI tags on neighbors’ trees. Each tag lists the tree’s scientific and common names, gives watering instructions, and includes the offer: “Free Tree!” on one side, and “¡Un árbol gratis!” on the other, with the URI phone number.

Now Mohr watches Tisdale eyeball the tree to make sure it’s vertical, while the crew stabilizes it against the wind by attaching ArborTie webbing to wooden stakes. A tag fluttering from a slender branch names the tree; it’s a Cercidiphyllum japonicum—common name, Katsura.

URI’s Guide to New Haven’s Trees lists 91 species. Many characteristics figure into which species URI offers: the amount of pollen (which can trigger asthma); how tall it grows (to avoid tangling with overhead wires); whether the species will likely tolerate the rising heat decades from now. Mohr chose the Katsura for its sweet fragrance.

“We’re very excited to have that in front of our front door,” he says, and he lingers on the sidewalk, watching.

On the third saturday morning of the new year, 60 people crowd into a circle in the New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing Dedicated to Victims of Gun Violence. Nearly all are people of color. They wait silently. In the center of the circle, Colleen Murphy-Dunning kneels on the brick walkway. She hands a brick and a rubber mallet to a family member of a 25-year-old man shot and killed in the West River neighborhood on December 2, 2024. Kneeling across from Murphy-Dunning, the family member pounds the inscribed brick into a rectangular opening in the walkway.

“Say his name,” someone calls out, and the group replies, “Christopher Santana.” Three other family members lay bricks for people killed in the past few months. Each carries a person’s name and the age at which they died.

No one comes forward when Murphy-Dunning asks who will place the brick representing 21-year-old Niygere Wicker, shot at midday on October 9, 2024. Murphy-Dunning waits a moment, then calls on Tisdale. He installs the brick. “Say his name,” a voice calls out. “Niygere Wicker,” the crowd responds. Tisdale came this morning because Wicker had briefly worked on Tisdale’s crew. “If he didn’t get killed, he’d be working with us this season,” he says later.

Marlene Miller Pratt, a retired high school science teacher, created the garden with three other women mourning children lost to gun violence. URI helped build it. Beginning in 2019, URI and city employees laid the red brick walkway and created a circular plaza beside the West River. In its center they planted a fern-leaf beech that the founding mothers call “the tree of life.” Year by year, the mothers have worked with URI to choose and plant dozens of trees, perennial flowers, and shrubs. They have ensured that, even in the dead of winter, the red berries of holly bushes provide color.

In an interview, Pratt explained that she didn’t want to mourn her son in a cemetery; rather, she wanted to think of him in a place full of life, of renewal. Her son, Gary Kyshon Miller, was 20 when he was murdered in 1998. He would be 47 now.

“When I walk into that botanical garden, it’s a sigh of relief,” Pratt said. “I’m looking over at the water, hearing the wind chimes. You have the life of the birds flying around, the ducks that come down to the river.”

Her son’s brick is among 699 on the walkway, each commemorating a city resident killed by gunfire since 1976. Most were between ages 18 and 27. One was a seven-month-old girl.

Before leaving the garden, where he briefly spoke, Mayor Justin Elicker ’10MEM/MBA commented, “This place provides a sense of peace, when there’s so much stress and strife.”

For Tisdale, planting trees is a kind of restitution. Before going to prison, he sold drugs. “In my mind, I destroyed the community I was in. This is another side of me, that’s giving back. It’s an opportunity to better the community, to plant trees, new life, and say I’m sorry.”

For Common Ground High School senior Alex Almanzar, joining a URI tree-planting crew helped him return to a full life following a kidney transplant. He is one of 44 high school students with paid URI internships each year, usually for a semester or a summer. Alex is now a crew leader. He’s learned how to observe what each student in his group does well. “As time goes on, I have them ease into doing tasks they’re unfamiliar with,” he said.  His goal is to see his crew members do things without being directed.

Six Yale students supervise the high school students. Alex’s team leader, Clara Kleindorfer ’26, spent a semester off interning with URI. She chose planting trees “to get me outside of the Yale bubble, to get me outside more, and to become more involved in the New Haven community.”

For Professor Burch’s family, a particular tree in New Haven’s Criscuolo Park serves as a memorial for a man who loved city parks. In the fall, URI invited family, friends, and colleagues to remember him. They talked about what he meant to them and to urban ecology. And then, overlooking the place where the Mill and Quinnipiac rivers meet, URI planted a white oak.

The two Cumulus serviceberry trees in Greg Gorski’s yard on Townsend Avenue remind him of his son Carter’s birth. When Gorski and his wife, Lisa Gorski, left Yale New Haven Hospital as new parents in July 2019, they received a postcard offering them a tree. URI found space for two. The trees bloom in early spring and produce edible purple berries.

The Gorskis live in a windy spot, so when the trees were smaller, Greg had to re-stake them from time to time. Remembering now when they were just “little sticks,” he says, is “a reminder that it takes care and love to let these trees grow, like with a child.” Five-year-old Carter helps mulch the trees.

Now and then, Carter will tell his father, “Hey, look at my trees!” 

And his father will reply, “See how big they are, and how big you are!”  

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