Keeping the Gables Green
It’s All About the Canopy
If you didn’t know the history of the Gables, you might think that its tree-lined streets were part of some original forest. Far from it. The original landscape was pine barrens, and scruffy at that. The luscious canopy that drapes over nearly every street was planned and planted.
Today, the greenery of the Gables distinguishes the city from its neighbors. Go to Google Maps and click on “Satellite” and you can see the city’s green silhouette against the grey of urban Miami. The City Beautiful boasts a tree coverage of 41 percent, making it the second highest in the state of Florida behind only rural Gainesville.
Maintaining such abundant landscaping does not come easy, however, and necessitates a dedicated green space management team with technical resources and a passionate, experienced leader – in our case, Deena Bell-Llewellyn.
Bell-Llewellyn is the Assistant Director of Public Works in charge of the city’s Greenspace Management Division, a role she recently took on after working nearly five years for the city. Today she has some 25 city employees and a bevy of resources – including an extraordinary digital map on the city’s website showing the location of 39,706 trees in public spaces. Click on any dot to reveal the species of tree, its height, maintenance schedule, and health.
Bell-Llewellyn originally moved to Miami from Georgia in 1991 after visiting during her college years at the University of Georgia, where she studied landscape architecture. She fell in love with the Gables’ greenery and was finally able to return with a job in the city’s Greenspace Management Division in 2017.
The role of Greenspace Management is to manage and maintain the tree canopy, as well as prune plants in the city’s public rights of way. The division is also responsible for managing everything from lighting to park furniture and trash collection in public areas. When you’re enjoying your day sitting in a clean, well-lit Coral Gables park, you have Greenspace Management to thank.
With 31 years of experience as a licensed landscape architect, Bell-Llewellyn is no newbie to the green world. Prior to working for the city, she owned a private landscape architecture firm, Bell Landscape Architecture, and her experience in designing greenspaces with high-level quality and aesthetics helped prepare her for her current job. The difference between a private practice versus working for the government, she says, is the number of clients. “Instead of having one client to focus on at a time, I now have around 50,000,” she says.
One thing both roles have in common, however, is attention to detail. Besides its interactive map database, the city’s website provides information on pollinators you can plant in the Gables, recommendations for swale landscaping, a list of invasive and banned plants, and a tree guide of recommended species available in local nurseries – among other useful information.
Although Greenspace Management monitors nearly 40,000 public trees in the city, this does not include trees in private residences. These are protected by some of the strongest tree regulations in the country, which make it against the law to abuse trees or to remove them without a permit. The city also requires landscapers who work in the Gables to register their vehicles and receive educational information from City Hall about noise, proper pruning, and landscaping permitting requests. “We receive about 200 [tree trimming] requests per month,” says Bell-Llewellyn, “but we prioritize the health and safety of the tree when it comes to pruning.” The only time Greenspace Management can enter private property, however, is to assess if a tree can be approved for removal.
Of course, in a city where trees are so highly valued, a tree removed does not go without a tree planted. The Tree Succession Plan, for replanting when trees become sick, damaged, or die, solidifies this, and requires owners to pay $1,500 per each 500 square feet of tree canopy removed – money used to pay for new trees planted in public spaces. Around 125 trees are removed due to illnesses or damage from weather or traffic each year in the city, and thanks to the succession plan, about 125 to 150 are planted in that same year to replace the loss.
Not every tree in the Gables is looked upon with favor, however. According to Bell-Llewelyn, most people complain about Black Olive trees, which make up nearly a quarter of the canopy, because they stain cars and sidewalks with residue from “berries.” These stains are actually feces from bugs residing in the trees, for which 2,000 Black Olive trees are treated each year with insecticide. On the other hand, the Gables’ favorite tree? The Live Oak. “They are resilient and native, they don’t do any damage, and are great for attracting wildlife,” says Bell-Llewellyn. “They also have plenty of shade.”
- Photos by Emily Fakhoury