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| Arborist Loren Westenberger will move the live oak 120 feet from
the center of the lot where an addition to the Church of Scientology
will go. Westenberger has been fortifying the tree's roots with
vitamins and hormones. [Times photo: Douglas R. Clifford] |
LEARWATER -- "Let's move to the shade," Loren Westenberger says,
pointing at the large and handsome oak.
It is cool underneath. But Westenberger, a certified arborist, says the tree's great limbs offer a more lasting comfort.
"You get a better sense of yourself just being under one of these giants," he says.
The tree, thought to be more than 100 years old, once was part of a large hammock of oaks along Clearwater's waterfront bluff before downtown was developed.
It stands 65 feet tall and weighs about 125 tons. Its trunk is 44 inches thick, and its boughs reach 120 feet across. Its life began when the city's name was two words, Clear Water. Fort Harrison Avenue and Cleveland Street were paved then with shells from a local Indian mound.
Today, the tree stands near the center of a dusty city block at 215 S Fort Harrison Ave., the site of a massive new building planned by the Church of Scientology. Legally, the church could turn the tree into firewood to make way for the project.
Instead, it has hired Westenberger to perform an unusual service: move the tree to the front of the lot where it can shade the new building's glass-enclosed lobby alongside two other existing oaks.
The project normally would cost about $120,000, but donations of materials by local businesses will help trim the church's bill to about $80,000, Westenberger said.
"In those days, they built around trees," he said, referring to early Clearwater. "So we've kind of come full circle with what we're doing now. Historically, they're very important to Clearwater. . . . The church has really made a strong environmental stand here."
Preparations to move the tree began in early April, and the project won't be complete until late July.
Westenberger's strategy is to relieve any stress on the tree and strengthen its root system. Then he and his crew will methodically cut the ground around it into a giant root ball. They will hoist it out of the only ground the tree has ever known, and move it to a new patch of earth 120 feet to the west.
"I tend to think it's had a hard life," Westenberger said, noting that the tree once lorded over a courtyard at the Gray Moss Inn, which the church bought and demolished in the early 1990s.
Later, the ground around the tree was compacted when the church used the lot for parking, not the best thing for an oak tree's root system, which tends to spread horizontally near the soil's surface.
The moving process began when Westenberger and his crew removed dead limbs and moss. He said the moss blocks sunlight and adds weight to the limbs when it rains or is windy.
"It's just one more stress we didn't want on this tree," he said.
The subsequent steps include boring hundreds of 2-inch holes 36 inches into the soil around the tree; filling those holes with fertilizer, soil conditioners and other substances to build up the root system; cutting the ground around the tree to form a giant root ball; bracing the roots with a system of pipes and girders; and, finally, uprooting the tree with a special lifting device and inching it slowly toward its new home.
At present, Westenberger and church staff are soaking the roots daily with a vitamin and hormone spray. Construction soon will begin on the root ball, a painstaking process designed to stress the tree as little as possible.
Westenberger said it will take two weeks just to lift the tree out of the ground and four days to move it across a trench to its new home. Throughout the process, he said, a mister will keep the tree moist.
Once at the new location, crews will cover the root ball. The pipes will be left in to avoid further root damage and enhance drainage.
This will be the largest tree Westenberger has moved in 25 years as an arborist.
When the church asked if it could be done, "I said the impossible
just takes a little longer," he said. "Actually, this tree is
going to be healthier after the move."
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