A self-proclaimed “tree geek,” Joanne Garton is the technical assistance coordinator for Vermont Urban & Community Forestry, a role that has her traveling the state to collaborate with municipalities to foster healthy trees. She’s also a fiddler, with a focus on Scottish tunes, and teaches music and dance. Joanne was born in Ottawa, Ontario, raised mainly in a rural area of northeastern Connecticut, and lived for many years in Montreal. She has called Montpelier home since 2008.
I spent lots of time as a kid kicking around in the woods. There was a little swamp in the backyard, and a river nearby where I spent ages hanging out. We were about eight miles from town, so we needed a ride from my parents to go anywhere. It was a lot of make-your-own-fun outside.
I went to McGill University in Montreal. As a young person, it was hugely liberating to live in a city. I earned my first bachelor’s degree in geology. I liked the sciences, I liked being outside, and geology is where I ended up. McGill had a planetary science program, too, which was pretty cool. I got to study rocks from Mars and rocks from the moon. Geology is a great training ground for questions about time and nature.
I also grew up playing music and competing as a Scottish Highland dancer. I started playing violin as little kid and was in several orchestras and loved it. I also started Highland dancing when I was very little and became involved in Scottish culture. At some point, I realized that I could play some of these dance tunes on my violin. When I moved to Montreal, there were a lot of Irish pubs there and a real active session scene. A session is when people sit around and drink Guinness and play tunes.
After one year at McGill, I ended up going to Scotland and learning to play the fiddle. I worked as a secretary and a bartender and a waitress – whatever it took to make it work – and went to Scottish sessions in Edinburgh. It really was an ignorance-is-bliss approach to learning. We have a pretty vibrant arts scene around Montpelier, and there’s a kids’ camp coming up in a couple of weeks that I’m helping to direct.
Near the end of earning my geology degree, I took a class in sustainable design. I loved it – it was sort of where the natural world meets the built world and that is – via a lot of different stops – ultimately where I’ve ended up working. I did some design work in Arizona with the Ecosa Institute of Developing Design (now part of Prescott College). While I was there, I heard about Yestermorrow Design/Build School, which is in Vermont, and I worked there as in an intern for a few months. The Mad River Valley was the first place I lived in Vermont, and it’s just insanely beautiful.
Ultimately, I went back to McGill and earned a degree in architecture. Meanwhile I was still working as a geologist, because that’s an employable skill. I worked in northern Quebec with a nickel exploration company, did a lot of lab work around McGill, and when I came to Vermont to work full time, it was with an environmental consulting company as a staff geologist. A couple of years after my son was born, I earned a master’s degree in natural resources from the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist and Ecological Planning Program.
Vermont Urban & Community Forestry was starting a grant-funded project called the Resilient Right-of-Ways, which had to do with best practices around education and management along roads. They were looking for someone to head the rural section of the project, which included outreach to municipalities and a creating a guide about rural road trees. During my graduate degree, I had done some work along backroads. I had spent a lot of time with road crews and a lot of time walking back roads and digging in dirt and looking at ditches. I ended up being in the right place at the right time, and was hired in 2017 as lead for this rural component of the Resilient Right-of-Ways project.
Municipal right-of-ways comprise something like 25,000 acres when you add it all up. This is land that’s municipally managed, but it’s not like a state park, where there’s going to be a management plan or a long term vision. It’s this funny little strip of forest that borders someone else’s property and it’s often the road crew who’s sort of managing it as they’re able. Many of these rural roadsides have a lot of ash trees on them. So now, with emerald ash borer and the threat to ash trees, we work with municipalities to do some inventories of ash trees and think about what this is going to look like when EAB comes through. There will be an impact for sure, for everyone.
I divided the Resilient Right-of-Ways manual into two halves: elements and processes. The first half is the types of things that you often see on Vermont backroads. This includes historic and culturally significant shade trees, overhead utilities, invasive plant species, hedgerows, agriculture in the right of way, young forests, mature forests. The other half, the processes, includes things to think about in management: knowing your partners, supporting diverse roadside trees, preparing for EAB, addressing hazard trees, developing a tree policy, developing a mowing policy.
In 2019 I was hired as the technical assistance coordinator at Urban & Community Forestry. My job is to support municipal staff and volunteers in their urban and community tree programs. That can be anything from facilitating very specific grant-funded projects, all the way to answering random questions. It could be a question I’ve heard many times before: “We just found out that EAB is a thing and it’s in our town, what do we do?” Or it could be: “Our core volunteer person has moved, and we don’t know what to do with this information.” Or even: “What’s wrong with my tree?” There’s also a lot of data analysis, making our projects clear to our respective audiences, whether that’s the public or the funder or the legislature. I enjoy writing, so I do a lot of our research and writing and also grant application writing.
Every state has an urban and community forestry program, and these need to meet criteria to receive baseline funding from the U.S. Forest Service: a program manager, a volunteer coordinator, and a council that guides the staff. We have a council of about 20 people, a mixture of arborists, landscape architects, a history professor, people who work with plants and in agriculture. They meet quarterly. Some of our funding comes from the U.S. Forest Service baseline funding and state funding. Everything else we do is grant-funded.
We have a new-to-us project working with black ash research and indigenous basket makers. Black ash will likely be lost very quickly in Vermont, so we’re working to understand what that means ecologically in terms of local hydrology – and also culturally. Who should have these resources while we can still harvest them? For basket makers, there’s a whole process of pounding and storing splints. We have a graduate student from UVM working with us this year, setting up some black ash monitoring plots. We’ve really been trying to wrap our heads around the “community” of Urban & Community Forestry being black ash basket makers. Our communities are not just outlined by town lines, but there are people who have a shared interest. In this particular situation, that’s thousands of years of history on the land and Indigenous sovereignty to some of these materials. It’s hugely interesting and hugely complicated.
I think the correlation between my music and my work is really the teaching component. I’ve been teaching music and dance since I was about 16 and now teach fiddle, step dance, and Highland dance. I’ve been an urban forester for 5 years, but I’ve been a teacher for much longer. I use those teaching skills now in my work, whether it’s in a Zoom meeting, or teaching a 7th grade science class or a group of volunteers at museum grounds, or meeting with road crews and public works departments. There’s a lot of meeting your audience where they are both physically and in the subject matter – and enjoying it, hopefully. Having that comfort of being able to adjust to different learning styles. Being able to share what you know and still hear their questions. Even though I have a lot to learn about urban forestry and trees, it’s still very much about communicating to people why it’s important, encouraging people, making people feel empowered about what they’re doing.
I do love working outside. I love field days. I love that they’re different, that you’re sweaty and tired. But with urban and community forestry, it really is all about the people. So hopefully the field work involves some cool trees, but it’s also about who you met, who talked with you, who your contact there is and what they wanted to talk about, and what the different opinions are. Sometimes you come prepared to inventory 100 trees and you inventory 20 trees and talk with the neighbors for four hours.
The term “urban and community forestry” was coined in the 1990s. It’s not something that people have been doing formally for generations. But there have been trees in built environments since forever – whether they were left as settlements were built, or they were planted in developed areas. That intersection of where the natural world and the built world meet is everywhere now. The built environment isn’t just sidewalks and roads, it’s powerlines, it’s mining, it’s fracking. Having people be happy and feel connected in their environment – whether that’s Montpelier or a small, rural town – is really important, because that’s the nature they see when they walk out the door or look out the window. Having people feel vested in all those pockets and how they’re connected is part of what urban and community forestry gets at. It’s a pretty limitless field if you’re willing to think broadly about it.
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