How To Pick A Shade Tree

We had a tree, and then it fell during a storm. And we wanna replace it with something but we don't know what. This is the southwest corner of the property. So the lot of hot afternoon sun's gonna hit the house. They need a big shade tree. Yeah. And it's gonna be really hot out here in the future. So how do you feel about a big boy? I want a nice big boy. Okay. Here, the other thing is if we look this way, the blacktop, it's going to help the community stay cooler to have half the canopy going over the street. We wanna have as much shade and canopy over hardscape as possible. We need hopefully native and we want something that smart people who study trees as a profession, they are doing research that show they think they're the most adaptable trees. We're looking for future trees that can be adaptable to climate change. The Chicago Tree Initiative list of trees. Okay. And they would be Bald cypress, a needled conifer, I'm gonna write this down. Common hackberry tree. That's what I have. Kentucky coffee tree, a willow oak. Ooh, I love willows. A bur- Oh, dude, a bur oak. A bur oak. Okay, bur oak supports the most diversity of caterpillars. It's the toughest tree alive, but takes a really long time to grow. So those are your, that's your kinda short list. Don't forget, the native trees support a lot of caterpillars of moths and butterflies. The birds, one nest of chickadees needs 5 to 6,000 caterpillars to feed their babies. Whoa. The other thing that's really important, you need to look around your whole block and try to pick a tree from that list that nobody has. We need diversity in the tree canopy or we end up like the elm trees, which we used to line the streets with beautiful cathedral elm trees and then they all got wiped out at once by a pest, by disease, Dutch elm disease. And then they replaced them all with ash trees, which are beautiful, but then came the emerald ash borer and knocked them all out. So we need diversity so that if something comes to strike the silver maples, we don't lose the canopy off the whole neighborhood. I don't see any of the trees I gave you actually anywhere on this block. So that's good. So that's very good.