Take a Tree Walk!

Posted by Sarah Schweig, Broomfield County Extension

Community Park, Broomfield

These photos are from a Twilight Tree Walk we did in August of last year in Community Park, which lies just outside the Broomfield Extension offices. We talked tree maintenance, selection, successes, and failures. Our City Forester joined us, and it was fun to get some insider information and history on the trees in the park.

Community Park, Broomfield

While we all look forward to the time we can walk en masse through parks again, there is a version of this you can do absolutely solo on your own time, making it a perfect activity for getting outside and learning something new in our current circumstance. The trees in Community Park are part of a Colorado Tree Coalition (CTC) tree collection, and we actually used the tree collection map to plan our route through the park.

You can view available CTC tree collections at treecollections.com/ctc/. Each leaf on the map below represents a tree collection that you can explore. Below that, you can see what our map of Community Park looks like as an example. Click a tree marked on the map to reveal more information about it. You can view all the trees at once, or toggle if you’re looking for a particular tree.

Map of CTC Tree Collections

Map of Community Park Tree Collection in Broomfield

As a caveat, updating these maps is a huge undertaking, and thus they are not updated super regularly. There may be a few trees that are out of date on the map, and there are varying levels of information for each tree. Some have species bios, or even specific tree bios, and others offer little besides an I.D. Nonetheless, walking through a tree collection is a great way to get ideas and observe characteristics and species that you like.

While most of the tree collections shown on the map above are clustered around the Front Range, there are loads of other options, and they come in all shapes and sizes. If you have a favorite park, you can start with their website. Many have maps of their trees and guided tour materials available. You can check out your local community tree inventory, though they tend to be a lot more thorough and less user friendly than sources designed for public consumption. If thorough is your thing, you might enjoy the maps and data at Colorado Tree View, a statewide application where local urban and community tree inventories are aggregated and managed.

With a little bit of digging, you can find a lot of information on the trees in your community. Already have a favorite tree walk? Let us know!