There is an article in today’s Dispatch about how German Village residents are banding together to pony up some money in an attempt to save some of Schiller Park’s oldest and most beautiful ash trees.  I never knew that some of those trees have been around since before the Civil War, Wow.

Schiller Park is one big reason why people buy homes for sale in German Village and to see of those ash trees come down would be a blow to the park. The Emerald Ash Borer has decimated ash trees everywhere and if the Schiller Park trees can be saved, it’d be great for German Village.  From today’s Dispatch story by ROBERT VITALE:

Residents are trying to raise $5,000 over the next five months to pay for a new treatment against the emerald ash borer. The treatment has been declared highly effective by researchers at Ohio State and Michigan State universities.

The insecticide would be injected into 31 ash trees in Schiller Park. Some are estimated to be 150 years old.

“I love those trees, and I can’t see losing them,” said Lindy Michael, a German Village resident who oversees a fund that since the 1970s has collected money to plant and maintain Schiller Park’s trees.

“We at least have to try to save them.”

The ash trees are only about 10 percent of the park’s trees but are some of its oldest.

City Forester Jack Low said a Biltmore ash near Jaeger Street on the park’s eastern end has been ranked among the largest in Ohio. A white ash near City Park and Reinhard avenues and a blue ash near a statue of Friedrich von Schiller, for whom the park is named, probably predate the city’s purchase of the land in 1867.

The Schiller Park trees have shown no signs of infestation by the emerald ash borer, which has killed tens of millions of trees from Canada to Tennessee since it was found near Detroit in 2002.

The beetle, native to Asia, is thought to have arrived in North America in wood used as shipping material. Adults eat tree leaves but….click here for the rest of the story