For four years, Wayne Dubin and his team at Bartlett Tree Experts have been caring for 400 trees in a holding facility in Englishtown, carefully pruning, watering and fertilizing the growing swamp white oaks.
Next week, Dubin, vice president and division manager of the company, will see those four years of care come to fruition, as 225 of the 400 trees already will be in place as the Sept. 11 memorial plaza opens. The trees have been trucked over the George Washington Bridge, two-by-two, for several months.
On Tuesday, Dubin was at ground zero tending to a survivor tree — a Bradford pear tree that was damaged in the terrorist attacks 10 years ago, but survived and has been moved back to the plaza. Bartlett will be tending to all of the trees in the memorial for another two years.
“There’s another 180 that are still in the holding yard that will be moved over the course of the next year or two as the buildout of the plaza continues and the areas for the trees to go are created by the construction,” Dubin said.
Dubin said Bartlett partnered with Environmental Design, a firm based in Houston, to bid for the memorial project in 2006. After winning the bid, Dubin said the specified care for the trees was “beyond anything I’d ever seen in a bid package for tree care” and more comprehensive than any other project he’d worked on.
“There was really nothing left to interpretation or chance,” Dubin said.
In order to complete the project, Dubin said his company installed an intricate irrigation system at the Englishtown facility, built large planting boxes that would prevent root cutting before transportation and created online reporting software with the University of Georgia so caretakers could track what was being done for the trees every day.
“It represents a relatively small percentage of my annual revenue from the division that I’m in charge of in New York and New Jersey, but it’s certainly been a positive for us, financially,” Dubin said. “We got involved with it because we felt that we were the most qualified to do it, as opposed to something that was going to dramatically impact our bottom line.”
