Champion of Trees

All spring and summer, Frank Knight, 93, drives through the shaded streets of his town, peering into the leafy canopy with an eye tuned to the early stages of disease—a sign of fungus, a waning bough, a spot of fall color on a leaf in July.

“Isn’t that a monstrous, beautiful tree?” he says, gazing up at Herbie, an American elm whose muscular limbs and sprawling crown nearly blot out the sky. One of the largest elms in New England (trunk girth: 240 inches; height: 93 feet; crown: 110 feet), Herbie has survived several brushes with disease, thanks to Knight’s sharp eye and reverence for a tree that put down roots when the 13 colonies were sowing independence.

Knight’s hometown of Yarmouth, Maine, (pop. 8,360) boasts one of the largest collections of champion trees in the Pine Tree State. That’s because all the eight giants in the coastal town have a champion in Knight, the town’s volunteer tree warden (supervisor of tree maintenance) for nearly 50 years.

“Somebody,” he says, “has got to look after these trees.”

A neighborhood girl christened Yarmouth’s biggest tree decades ago when a town crew was pruning it.

“What are you doing to Herbie?” the child wanted to know, and the name stuck, proclaimed by a plaque on its massive trunk pocked from fungicide injections.

“We cut Dutch elm disease out of Herbie’s trunk 13 different years—twice in a couple of those years,” Knight says. “A few years ago, I was afraid we were going to lose him.”

That’s not likely to happen on his watch. A country boy who took his first job at age 12 cutting wood (he was paid $144 for 12 cords hauled to mill on a horse-drawn sled), Knight was a pulp wood dealer with a forestry degree when he was tapped to serve as tree warden in 1956. Dutch elm disease already had ravaged thousands of elms in the Midwest, and the fungus was moving Yarmouth’s way.

“Each town was supposed to appoint someone to monitor the trees and take the blame if something went wrong,” says Knight, who still loves to split wood and credits such labor for his longevity. “I didn’t think there’d be much to it. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

Two years later, he took down Yarmouth’s first diseased elm. Several more followed. DDT protected the bulk of the trees for a while, but when the potent insecticide was banned, the beetle-borne fungus galloped through town. Sorrowfully, Knight sacrificed each infected elm, sometimes as many as 100 a year, in order to save the healthy. Of Yarmouth’s 739 elms, only about 20 survive today.

A new generation is growing, though, in Knight’s back yard and at the private academy he attended as a teenager and where he later served as trustee. When the saplings are big enough, Knight, who already has planted more than 1,000 maples, oaks, and elms around town, will move them to road sides and other public places for all to enjoy.

His efforts have not gone unnoticed. The academy’s athletic fields bear his name, and a tree has been planted in front of town hall in his honor. “Generally, towns do things after you’re dead and gone, but this town is different,” Knight says. “This town is a great town. It certainly is.”

It was Knight who nominated Herbie to Maine’s Register of Big Trees, which lists the largest known living specimen of each species. Modeled after the National Register of Big Trees, the Maine register is strictly an archive and offers no protection for the champs, so they must depend on people like Knight who appreciate their silent grandeur and know a town would not be quite the same without them.

Knight’s name also appears alongside six of the seven other Yarmouth-grown champions: a Norway spruce named Grace (she and Herbie are two of the three known named trees in Maine); an amur maple (a shrub-like maple); and four rare oaks in front of the public library. In contrast to Herbie, they are puny, but Knight, like a devoted parent, loves them all.

Herbie, though, is clearly the apple of his eye. “Look at those limbs. Look at that trunk,” he says. “Isn’t that some tree?”

Virginia Wright is a writer in North Yarmouth, Maine, who enjoys sitting in the shade.

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