Meet the woman searching for the oldest trees in Hamilton

Lesia Mokrycke winds a measuring tape around an imposing bur oak tree. This massive, slow growing oak is isolated on a tiny piece of land next to St. Joseph's Hospital in downtown Hamilton.

"I think this tree is over 350 years old," she says using a mathematical formula involving the circumference of the tree to guess its age.

Mokrycke is a landscape architect and environmental artist from Hamilton. Three days a week she works for OMC Landscape Architecture here. The other two days a week she walks the streets of Hamilton documenting the oldest trees in the city. They have to be at least 150 years old to make the list.

Her project to list the old growth trees in Hamilton is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. The tree list is just the ignition point for a project that blends science, social connections and art. 

Her research also captures the stories people tell her when she is snooping about, eyes to the sky, tape measure in hand.

"It's teaching me how much people love old trees, how they feel a sense of ownership about them," she says.

She studies front-yard trees, and is invited in to backyards for viewing, often spontaneously. Many people take her to their favourite big trees in the neighbourhood. That's how she met the big bur oak on Mountwood Avenue. 

"It's curious. It's surrounded by a chain link fence like someone is trying to protect it," Mokrycke says. "And the location, near the base of the escarpment, I'm sure the water flowing underground has helped it survive so long."

She continues to invite residents to alert her to trees of interest. With an artist's eye, she photographs each tree. Once she finishes her inventory, she plans to publish her findings in spring 2022, followed by an art exhibition.

Her stylish photos, which she is planning to blow up big and install outdoors, perhaps at the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG), or Bayfront Park, would tell the story of Hamilton before it was a city, before it was carved up into a grid — a time when there was a true urban forest.

Mokrycke sees these trees, the bur oak by the hospital, the beech trees on Herkimer, a big bitternut hickory on Margaret Street, as anchors of what could be a holistic way to reforest the city.

"Trees are not competitive, they function better in communities, they work together," she says.

The idea of protecting the city's oldest trees in a way that would foster new growth of saplings could also help in the quest to increase the urban tree canopy — something the city and organizations like Green Venture and Environment Hamilton are out to do. 

To help those efforts, Mokrycke suggests old trees could be fenced off allowing the understory plants to grow in place of grass. This more natural habitat could be an incubator for new seedlings and new trees.