NORWICH — Nearly 400 trees along the “fastest and busiest” town roads are slated to be cut down over the next four months.
The 394 trees along Beaver Meadow, Elm, Hopson, New Boston, Turnpike and Union Village roads make up just under 4% of the more than 10,000 ash trees along Norwich’s roadways, Doug Hardy, a member of Norwich’s Emerald Ash Borer Management Group, said last week.
The collection consists of the “most dangerous” ash trees along well-traveled Norwich roads and “virtually everything” marked to be cut down already is infested with the invasive emerald ash borer. The $106,000 removal project began Monday.
“We felt that the safest thing to do in the best interest of the community was to cut any ash tree which could fall into the road,” Hardy said.
The Norwich project is one of the first large ash removal projects in the Upper Valley. It comes after voters authorized the Selectboard to create and allocate $10,000 to an emerald ash borer response fund in 2022. Voters opted to add $100,000 to the fund in 2025 and another $60,000 this year.
The goal is to remove the trees before they fall down on their own, Hardy said.
The emerald ash borer, or EAB, a metallic green beetle that grows to be about ½-inch long, is native to northeastern Asia and was first identified in the Upper Valley in 2019, according to data from NH Bugs, a project of the University of New Hampshire Extension and state and federal agencies.
Experts in the Upper Valley fear the region has now hit a tipping point for EAB and are doing all they can to respond to the spread. EAB was most recently confirmed in Randolph, Tunbridge, Bethel and Barnard this year, according to Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. It has been confirmed in every community in the Upper Valley except Royalton.
It’s likely that Royalton, an “island” where every surrounding town has confirmed infestations, is already infected but there’s “probably no outward obvious sign yet,” said Jason Berard, stewardship director at the Upper Valley Land Trust.
The beetles attack and kill ash trees within three to five years of infestation, according to NH Bugs. The infestation starts under the bark, meaning it is likely well underway by the time it is obvious.
EAB was identified in Norwich two or three years ago and “we now know it probably had been here before it was really detected,” Hardy said.
In the core of New Hampshire’s ash infestation in and around Concord, nearly all mature ash trees have died, according to a 2024 report from the Department of Environmental Services.
Identification
EAB infestation is usually identified through blonding — or birds scratching away the outer bark on ash trees to eat the beetles, leaving lighter bark exposed — canopies dying back, and tunnels under the bark.
“If you just drive around the Lebanon area, it’s very apparent that the ash are very quickly dying along the roadside,” Matt Nola, a Corinth resident who owns Woodsman’s Tree Service, said in an interview. “You can see the crown die back, the blonding on the trees.”
Nola offers tree services including removal, trimming and logging around the Upper Valley, including evaluating ash trees for EAB infestation.
Lebanon is planning to remove six infested ash trees around the downtown pedestrian mall in June and replace them with other species of elm, oak and serviceberry.
Infested ash wood quickly becomes brittle making the trees dangerous and costly to remove, Nola said.
‘That’s actually why it’s so important to make people aware that if their ash trees are in decline they should be removed now,” Nola said. “Because the longer you let them go, the more dangerous they become.”
He typically climbs trees to cut them down, but when a tree becomes too brittle he has to bring in specialized equipment that makes the removal, often around $5,000 per tree, even more expensive. In general, he tries to promote forest health in his work and only removes trees as a last resort.
Nola said he removes fewer than 50 trees a year and has taken down about five ash trees with definite evidence of EAB infestations since starting his business in 2020. He expects that number is about to climb.
“It seems like this season finally now I’m really beginning to see ash trees, a lot of crowns that are like half-leafed out,” Nola said. “From here on out each year, I think we’re going to continue to see more and more evidence of it.”
Nola said he tries to educate clients on identifying ash trees and EAB.
Ash trees are identifiable by their narrow pointy leaves growing in clumps of five to 11, bark with diamond shaped ridges and branches growing directly across from each other, according to a guide from Michigan State University.
Chemical treatment
Sometimes, Nola will recommend clients consider a chemical pesticide treatment to help certain ash trees fight EAB and refers them to another arborist, Derek Weiss.
Weiss, who owns Vershire-based Weiss Tree Care, started offering the service this season and is scheduled to treat about 40 trees on residential properties, he said last week.
He previously lived in North Carolina, where EAB was first found in 2013 and the infestation is further along. He worked with another arborist who offered the chemical treatment and said it was extremely effective.
“Knowing that the infestation is starting to approach its peak here, it seemed like a really good time to offer the option to save some trees,” Weiss said.
The pesticide most effectively treats individual ash trees that might be a “large prominent tree in someone’s yard” where less than one-third of the crown has died off, Weiss said. It is “really not feasible” to treat a larger forest of trees because the treatment has to be repeated every two to three years and can be expensive.
Weiss said he charges $15 per inch of tree, with the average cost coming to about $300 per tree.
Some municipalities such as Woodstock and Norwich have opted to use chemical treatment for small numbers of trees around town. Hardy said last year Norwich identified and treated some ash trees against EAB including several at the Marion Cross School.
Seeking resilience
The Upper Valley Land Trust has tried to address the EAB spread in different ways, including treating 12 ash trees at Up on the Hill Conservation Area in Charlestown and 10 at My Walden in Sharon, Berard said.
“Nearly every property UVLT owns has ash on it,” Berard said.
The organization is also working to address the pest through a conservation project in Pomfret focused on regenerating ash saplings that will hopefully replenish the population as older trees die out and a UVLT intern will spend the summer identifying trees across conservation lands that might have some natural resistance to EAB, Berard said.
The work is reminiscent of efforts to preserve and restore the American chestnut tree after it was all but wiped out by blight starting in the late-1800s.
Berard said the chestnut could serve as a cautionary tale for how conservationists approach the ash problem.
“It certainly could have been that there were resistant chestnuts when the blight came through,” Berard said. “But, I think that the recommendation that the forest owners got was these are valuable trees cut them all down now while they’re still alive. (…) It’s quite possible that some resistant trees were cut down.”
While emerald ash borer has an undeniably widespread presence, Berard is not yet ready to write off the Upper Valley’s ash trees.
“Rather than just collectively throwing up our hands and saying well this is just going to happen, we’re going to lose our ash trees, it feels like there is some action and some hope around trying to do whatever we can to try and help ash to make it through this,” Berard said.
