WATERLOO REGION — The tall maple tree in Heather Read’s front yard is older than her house. Older than the city she lives in. Older than Canada itself.
She sees it as a living lesson for her children.
“It teaches the kids that in the grand scheme of the world, they’re part of something bigger than we are,” says Read. “It’s always been huge. It’s this old big thing that has stayed the same. We’re just borrowing these things for a short time.”
Read nominated the maple tree in her front yard for the Forests Ontario heritage tree program. In 2017 Forests Ontario encouraged Canadians to nominate their local trees in honour of Canada’s 150th anniversary.
Read feels the tree connects the people of the past, present and future.
“We take care of it, but it’s not our tree. It was here long before us,” says Read.
“What it makes me think of, is what came before. The people that were here, the change. It was never cut down and all these houses were built so close. The people who came before must have felt the same.”
“Even when we’re gone. It’s a permanence.”
Even if Confederation was the catalyst for the nomination, the old sugar maple at the Read’s home on Young Street West in Waterloo was growing for almost 100 years before then. It spiralled to the ground as a maple key and sprouted as a sapling while Alexander Mackenzie was learning the fur trade as a clerk out of Montreal.
It grew among quiet columns of smooth beeches and expansive sugar maples in a forgotten part of the Great Lakes Basin. This part of the forest had once been tended by the Attawandaron people. They cleared parts of the land to farm sunflowers, squash, corn, beans and tobacco and treated the forest as a huge garden. They lived in peace between two rivals: the Hurons, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of Iroquois nations. The Europeans fanned this rivalry with the fur trade and weapons and brought smallpox and influenza. This escalated the war between the Haudenosaunee and the Huron, and the Neutrals were wiped out in consequence. The forest was left to itself.
By the time Abraham Erb rattled up the German tract in his wagon from Pennsylvania in 1806, no one had lived permanently in the area for 150 years. The Young Street maple was a thin tree, almost 30 years old, growing toward the light as fast as it could.
All around it, people cut down the trees and settled, beginning with farmers and millers, and followed by industrialists. The cutting down of the trees in Waterloo County was one drop in the mass deforestation across southern Ontario.
The deforestation culminated in an acknowledged crisis in the 1930s when most of southern Ontario could be described as “acres of sand barely tied down with grass cover and scrub trees.”
Here in the Grand River Watershed, which stretches about 300 kilometres from north of Grand Valley through Waterloo Region and south to Lake Erie, the land was just as desolate. The province commissioned a study of the Grand River Watershed, called the Finlayson Report. The authors estimated that by the time of publication in 1932, less than five per cent of the watershed remained forested.
This deforestation caused an increase in frequency and intensity of floods in the spring, and drought conditions in the summer. The river was too low to use as a means of waste disposal, and the water levels too unreliable to use as a water source. The watershed’s constant fluctuation between drought and flood conditions also destroyed fish stocks.
It also caused mass erosion. The report notes that historically, bridges were swept away in the spring because the banks they were built upon were so eroded they were crumbling into the river. The authors predicted the destruction would continue unabated and worsen as populations grew unless something was done.
Eventually, ecological restoration became an understood goal in Ontario. Edmund Zavitz was a headman of the movement as the first provincial forester in 1904. In the rural areas, Ontario farmers formed two organizations to help reforest land in the late 1930s: the Ontario Crop Improvement Association and the Ontario Conservation and Reforestation Association.
In the Grand River watershed, the municipalities of Brantford, Kitchener, Galt, Fergus and Caledonia came together and formed the Grand River Conservation Commission in 1934, which was the beginning of the Grand River Conservation Authority.
People in this community worked together to bring the landscape back to life, as their own lives and livelihoods depended upon it.
Today the Young Street sugar maple continues to grow. It is now 355 centimetres around, nearly 30 metres high and over 240 years old.
It grows slowly, as it’s basically reached its maximum height and width, and can now rest.
Since Erb built the first mill where farmers gathered to grind their grain steps away from the tree, Waterloo has grown up around it.
The land near the tree was bought and sold among Erb’s descendants and kin throughout the mid-1800s, and the tree was surrounded by fields, wood lots, farmhouses, kitchen gardens, and the beginnings of industry including grist mills, sawmills and distilleries.
Throughout the 1800s, more people moved into Waterloo. They were letting go of their rural lifestyles and wanted to do leisurely activities like picnics. In 1890 the tree stood where the Mielke and Erb farms met near the mill pond now known as Silver Lake.
Across from the tree, Jacob Eby’s farm was sold to Waterloo and landscaped into West Side Park (later renamed Waterloo Park). Next to the Young Street maple, Eby’s trees were cut down, and his fields were built up, levelled and made in to manicured lawns, racing tracks, grounds for bandstands, and pathways for strolling.
The Young Street tree continued to grow on the Mielke farm. Mielke’s sons divided the property into lots and sold them for houses in the early 1900s. By now, Waterloo was an urban centre focused on insurance and manufacturing, and the town’s business owners and upper management built their homes and lived near the tree.
Behind it, the stately brick home where Heather Read and her family live today was built in 1906 when the tree was 129 years old. The Reads are the fourth family to be raised directly under its branches, coming after the Bolducs, the Schafers and the Ramsays.
George Bolduc, the home’s first owner, was a carver and carpenter at the nearby Woellner and Bolduc Furniture factory. Edward Gladstone Schafer, the home’s next owner, retired as the president of Dominion Life insurance company in 1971.
Clearly, the families that lived around the tree cared for it. No one cut it down despite its size and proximity to the house. One of the families even installed a bar to support the two leader branches sometime before the 1960s.
These days, the Reads invite neighbours over to tap the tree in the spring. They give the sap away so anyone can try making their own maple syrup. The family takes plenty of photos around the tree. They love to play in the leaves and look through the canopy. Heather Read doesn’t like the tree’s squirrels, but she sees them as a small price to pay.
Not only the Reads, but the whole surrounding environment benefits from the tree. Every year it intercepts over 28,000 litres of water run-off and sequesters over 1,400 pounds of CO2.
Mature trees like the Young Street maple are known to boost physical and mental well-being, improve air quality, and even reduce heat-related health emergencies in the summer.
Across Waterloo Region and all of Canada, initiatives are ongoing to restore, preserve and invite more nature into urban spaces.
Local projects include stream and river restoration, habitat research, tree planting, pollinator gardens, environmentally sensitive land designations, land trusts and rediscovering Indigenous ways of understanding and taking care of the land.
Organizations private, public and non-profit all over the region are coming together to protect and restore the land, waters and forests that were once almost wiped away.
The old trees that do stand are sentinels descended from the old forest that have come of age along with the region itself. The mysterious bur oak on the Blair flats in Cambridge is estimated to be 250 years old, another pre-Confederation tree in the region.
Besides the Young Street maple, four other trees in the area have been nominated for heritage status with Forests Ontario: a red oak in Elora, an Eastern white pine in Guelph, an American beech in Puslinch and a white oak in Cambridge.
Trees like these are living demonstrations of what is possible when value of a place is passed down through generations. They stand because of the cumulative choices of individual people to let the tree continue living instead of cutting it down — people taking their turns to each find value in the world and land they live in.
Read says the tree reminds her that not everything is a commodity. There is value to a living thing that is simply let alone to just be.
“It’s peaceful to look up and stand there,” she said. “It’s all you can see: The canopy, and the sky showing through. It really is beautiful. That’s its value.”
