Emerald ash borer helps nursery industry make a comeback
The emerald ash borer has killed millions of trees in Illinois, but the impact of the metallic green beetle is more widespread than the gaps left along many suburban streets.
Besides putting a dent in municipal budgets as communities have scrambled to remove and replace ash trees in the public right of way, the advance of the destructive pest has helped boost an industry that was flattened by the double whammy of a recession and loss of quarantined stock.
Nurseries left standing after years of economic constraints say business again is booming. Nine years after the ash borer was discovered in the small town of Lily Lake in Kane County, demand for trees is high and the supply is limited. In some cases, it's been difficult to find favorites, such as Cleveland pears or autumn blaze maples, especially in larger trunk diameters.
Greg Oltman, of GRO Horticultural Enterprises Inc. in Union and immediate past president of the Illinois Green Industry Association trade group, said there are shortages in nursery inventories.
“There are not enough of the size of trees municipalities want to buy. We all cut back on planting and now we're paying the price in lack of material to sell,” Oltman said.
Replacing ash trees remains an issue for many communities, particularly since municipalities don't often fund forestry “as well as they could or should,” explained Lydia Scott, director of the Chicago Region Trees Initiative at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle.
“We're looking at all of them (ash trees) being killed (in the seven-county area), which could be 13 million trees,” she said. “We're over the halfway point.”
That means it will be a seller's market for some time.
“I think we've got five years of very strong demand, and up to 10 years, (and) we're only talking about parkway trees,” said Michael Scheitz, nurseries director at Goodmark Nurseries LLC in Wonder Lake, which supplies many suburbs, including Palatine, Schaumburg, and Buffalo Grove.
Needless to say, ash trees are a commodity of the past. Varieties of disease-resistant elm, maple, the Kentucky coffee tree and American hornbeam, for example, have become popular alternates to the fast-growing ash once favored by developers.
Many other varieties, like the tulip tree, that have been around for years but not frequently used now are in high demand, Scheitz said.
As a result, the look of neighborhoods is changing as diversity becomes the rule rather than exception. Communities are selecting dozens of tree varieties, rather than a few, to replace the fallen ash. The Morton Arboretum recommends not planting more than 5 percent of any species of a given tree, such as white oak, and only 10 percent of oaks in general, for example.
Ash trees were “one of our top sellers back in the day. A big percentage of what I grew in the field was ash,” said Kathy Sharp, owner and manager of Kendall Hill Nursery in Newark, about 25 miles west of Joliet. Kendall Hills supplies several communities, including Vernon Hills, which this year alone has removed and replaced about 800 ash trees with 30 different varieties. The village has replaced 2,737 ash trees over the last five years.
“All of us (nurseries) burned thousands and thousands of (ash) trees. We couldn't sell them, and they kept growing and growing and taking up space in the field,” Sharp added.
At Goodmark, about a third of the stock was ash. Scheitz said Goodmark was forced to cut and burn thousands of ash trees with a wholesale value of $1.8 million.
From 2009 to 2011, Scheitz said, he disposed of about 7,000 trees per year because they were getting too big.
Just a few years earlier, the industry was going gangbusters, he said.
“You were selling everything you could grow and you would get top dollar for your product,” according to Scheitz.
Then, the emerald ash borer was discovered.
“That was the beginning of everything that was hurting the industry,” he said.
Still, the nursery industry hummed along in 2007 and 2008 until the bottom fell out of the housing market because of the recession, according to Oltman.
“That is the other side of the coin. We didn't realize how closely we're tied to housing as an industry,” he said.
There are no hard numbers, but the Illinois Green Industry Association estimates one-third of growing operations have been lost in the past several years.
Some of that market contraction likely would have happened anyway, as there may have been too many startups and inexperienced operators getting into the business, according to Joe Khayyat, executive director of the Illinois Green Industry Association. But some longtime businesses also went under, he added.
Remaining growers hunkered down and cut production. And even from 2009 to 2012, “we weren't selling what we were growing,” Scheitz said.
“A lot less planting happened. Now there's a shortage of trees all over the place,” Sharp said.
That is particularly true of trees in the 2-inch-diameter range, which, depending on the variety, take years to reach that point. Preferred customers, such as Vernon Hills, get first shot, she added.
“We could definitely sell more. People want them, but we don't have the materials,” said Sharp, who has about 100 varieties in stock.
Overall sales figures were not available from the trade group, but the boost in demand is evident at Goodmark, which sold 60,000 trees in 2014 — by far a record, with the next-largest sales year being about 35,000.
Seedlings called “liner stock” from Oregon and other Pacific Northwest states can take up to seven years to mature to the point of sale, according to Scott.
“It's more complex than just some trees went down because of the emerald ash borer,” said Russ Stokes, who oversees Ivanhoe Nursery near Mundelein. He said the liner growers also put on the brakes and, coupled with some harsh winters, that resulted in thin supplies.
Stokes was hired in 2009 by the Wirtz Corp. to start the nursery along Route 60, and this summer it finally reached the point where trees are mature enough to start digging, he said.
“There's no doubt, had we had twice as much we would have sold twice as much,” he said.
Growers say tulip, sweet gum, hackberry, catalpa, various varieties of oaks and elms, and ginkgo are other popular tree selections these days.
One everybody wants is the ginkgo, Oltman said. “Ginkgo is seemingly impervious to everything,” he said.
The Morton Arboretum recently introduced a northern Illinois tree selector on its website, www.mortonarb.org.
Growers have altered their buying habits to reflect the needs of arborists and a move to native species.
“It made us have to come up with a totally different growing plan, but that's what's bringing us out of the recession. If it weren't for the emerald ash borer, we'd be floundering,” Scheitz said.
The emergence of the beetle also illustrated another point.
“A good sign, I guess, is we're recognizing the value of trees and plants in our lives,” Sharp said.