15
November/December 2018
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THE DAVEY BULLETIN
eastern red cedars, Norway spruces
and a variety of elms and oaks.
"The hard part was rounding up all
the plant material and getting it there
in a short period of time," said Rick
Hanshaw, manager, Davey Nursery.
"Once that happened, the toughest
part of the project was basically the
lay of the land, the steep slopes we
had to work on."
Work zones in direct proximity to a
busy highway presented yet another
challenge – particularly the safety of
the crews. So, a subcontractor was
brought in to perform maintenance
of traffic, Daniels said.
The North Detroit R/C office and the
Detroit North CLS territory tackled
maintenance duties once the trees
were planted.
"Our part has been collaborating
with the CLS territory and its branch
manager, James Gabbard, to manage
the watering of all the plants that
were installed all summer long and
into the fall," said Josh Leo, district
manager, North Detroit office. "A Plant
Health Care technician has been out
there with a 1,000-gallon water truck
we fill up two-to-three times a day to
water these plantings."
In addition to watering, the North
Detroit office helped by volunteering
its yard space for staging plants and
other materials critical to the work. The
project has special meaning for these
two Detroit R/C and CLS operations
given that it's in their backyard, Leo said.
"The neatest part about it has been
watching it from start to finish,"
he said. "Because we're so close
we had to deal with the construction
traffic and so forth. Now, seeing the
improvements and all the trees planted,
it's been a pretty cool process."
Burns said MDOT has so far
praised the results and may call on
Davey to duplicate the process as
part of future highway landscape
beautification projects.
"The key to success has been
properly coordinating all the logistics
of a large tree planting along a
major highway with lots of people,
equipment and safety concerns,"
she said. "Planting trees is the easy
part. Doing it on a major highway was
the challenge, and we met it well."
Above: A before photo of a planting area.
Below: A planting area now features a variety
of trees and shrubs where only grass and
weeds grew before.
Above left: Trees are staged for planting along I-75 outside Detroit for client MDOT.
The massive project involved planting more than 4,400 trees and shrubs.
Above right: One of the finished planting areas for the MDOT I-75 project.
