A Transcona woman and her neighbour are unhappy after the City of Winnipeg ordered them to remove garden boxes and face ornaments from their boulevard trees, or face fines.
Joyce Maryk received a visit from a city arborist Wednesday morning regarding a report to the department about decorations on and around an American elm tree on her boulevard.
Maryk built a garden box around the elm’s base five years ago to protect the roots from her lawnmower and city-operated snowplows that nick the trunk every winter. The tree face was just for fun.
“The neighbours couldn’t believe I got in trouble for it,” Maryk said Thursday. “It wasn’t bothering anybody.”
According to the city worker who spoke with Maryk, the decorations were considered “tree defacement” and they were “depriving the tree of oxygen.”
Next door, Paige Johal got a similar notice in her mailbox the same day for the face ornament she installed to her boulevard tree in the spring.
“It’s kind of like the principle of it,” Johal told the Free Press. “I know you’re not supposed to put anything on your boulevard, but, walk down a place like Wolseley.”
The ornaments — decorations nailed or screwed to trees and often depict whimsical and fantastical faces — spruce up the small neighbourhood, Johal said.
Area children from the nearby Wayoata School nicknamed her caricature “Ferdinand.”
Johal is frustrated the city didn’t give her an opportunity to apply for a permit or warn her before ordering the decoration’s removal.
“We’re the ones trying to make the community look nicer and have talking points and bring a little smile to people’s faces. And we’re the ones that are getting called out,” she said, adding homeowners in other city neighbourhoods have long displayed eccentric and colourful features on their boulevards.
“We’ve taken everything down because we don’t want to get fined.”
Boulevard trees are owned and maintained by the city, and a bylaw states no person is permitted to “in any way injure or deface the trees, shrubs, plants or turf located on a boulevard” without getting a permit or permission.
The bylaw dealing with boulevard maintenance says property owners need not a permit or permission in applying “non-standard boulevard treatment” if it does not inhibit or obstruct snow removal operations, does not include an object weighing more than 10 kilograms and does not include vegetation that will be more than one metre in height when fully grown.
“We’re the ones trying to make the community look nicer …. And we’re the ones that are getting called out.”–Paige Johal
City spokesperson Julie Dooley said non-standard boulevard treatments that contravene bylaws may be allowed under a special permit application, but permits generally do not allow residents to put anything in trees — including nails of any kind or length.
“Tree decorations are not specifically called out within the bylaw; however we respond from a tree protection standpoint (rather than a bylaw infraction one) to complaints about issues with trees as we receive them,” Dooley said in an email.
Because it is not a specific service area, the city doesn’t track statistics on fines or notices notices handed out for tree decoration contraventions, Dooley said.
Alexander Martin, a board certified master arborist and director of Ironwood Urban Forestry Consulting, says while asking for the garden box to be removed was part of arboricultural best practices, there are worse threats.
Garden box soil compacted against tree bark can introduce too much moisture and lead to decay of the bark and wood tissue, while nails and screws can introduce bacteria into a tree if sunk beyond its bark into trunk, Martin explained. Ornaments affixed to tree trunks can lodge moisture behind it and cause damage over time.
However, the weight of Christmas lights, swings, slack lines and play structures hung from trees attached are worse for a tree’s health, Martin said.
“Those have the potential to cause more damage than ornaments screwed into a trunk,” he said.
None of the elm trees lining Johal and Maryk’s street look to be in ill health or are marked for removal due to Dutch elm disease, Johal said, which she said could have explained the arborist’s hesitancy to allow the ornaments.
She has also never seen regular inspections of the trees in the neighbourhood before.
“I’m not here to argue whether it was legal or not. I know that I’m not supposed to put that on there. I just wanted to find out why other people can have it and how we can’t do the same thing,” she said.
The debacle has prompted her to apply for the $46 permit that would allow for Ferdinand’s face to be affixed permanently, and authorize the return of Maryk’s garden box, as well as add more decorative pieces to the boulevard.
“At the end of the day, the frustration is that they didn’t give us a chance to go through the proper channels,” she said. “The law is the law, and I get that, but if there’s a way that I could do it, why weren’t we afforded the opportunity?”
nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca
Nicole Buffie
Multimedia producer
Nicole Buffie is a multimedia producer who reports for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College’s Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom in 2023. Read more about Nicole.
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