The Tree Is Gone. This Is Not Over.

Today, September 15, the magnificent horse chestnut at 1633 Stephens Street was cut down.

Watching a tree that had stood over this neighbourhood for generations disappear in a matter of hours was heartbreaking.

We fought hard to save it over the past 5 months. More than 1,500 people signed this petition. Neighbours researched, filed FOI requests, commissioned an independent arborist, contacted elected officials, spoke with City departments, investigated remediation alternatives and kept asking one fundamental question:

Why did this tree actually have to come down?

Even now that it is gone, we don’t believe we have received a clear, evidence-based answer.

What happened in the final days:

On September 14, Parks Director Amit Gandha came to Stephens Street and met personally with neighbours. We genuinely appreciated that. He listened to our concerns, looked at the site and subsequently reviewed the material again.

Later that day, he informed us that he would support the removal.

His explanation was that additional work remained to be completed, including contamination remediation, sidewalk replacement and—for the first time in our correspondence—the “potential installation of a curb cut and single-vehicle driveway.”

He also stated that the New Leaf arborist report concluded that the tree’s overall risk of failure was “High.”

We wrote back because this does not appear to be what the report actually says.

New Leaf found that the tree remained physiologically viable and estimated the root loss from excavation already undertaken at approximately 15–25%. It warned that if  further proposed excavation proceeded, cumulative structural root loss could increase to approximately 35–45%, potentially creating a High-risk condition.

Those are two very different scenarios.

Was this a dangerous tree that had to be removed? Or was this a viable tree that was expected to become dangerous because of work that had yet to occur?

If it was the latter, the question we kept coming back to was: Was all of that future root-damaging work actually necessary, and were reasonable alternatives exhausted before a century-old public tree was sacrificed?

We still don’t have a satisfactory answer.

This has become about much more than one tree. 

Over the past five months, what began as an effort to save one extraordinary tree exposed some much bigger problems.

Poor communication and transparency. Neighbours repeatedly struggled to determine who was making decisions, what evidence those decisions were based on, what work was actually required and what alternatives had been considered. Some of the most important information we received came only after filing Freedom of Information requests. Even then, it was far from satisfying the level of completeness we had requested. 

Government departments operating in silos. This situation involved Urban Forestry, environmental contamination, Engineering, streets and sidewalks, provincial contaminated-site requirements and private contractors. Yet throughout this process, we struggled to identify a coordinated assessment asking what seemed to us to be the obvious question:

How do we remediate this property while preserving a valuable piece of Vancouver’s urban forest if reasonably possible?

A missing link between what could happen and what had to happen. The technical record showed that further excavation could cause enough additional root loss to make retaining the tree unsafe.

What we still don’t understand is the step before that: what established that excavation of that extent was unavoidable?

The environmental assessment itself stated that the remaining contamination had not been fully delineated laterally or vertically. We also found records of previous Vancouver residential oil-tank cases where contaminated soil was managed differently when further excavation threatened buildings, utilities or even another mature tree.

None of that means contamination at 1633 Stephens could simply have been ignored. It means we wanted to understand why alternatives that had been used elsewhere could not be used here.

And finally, there is the question of how Vancouver protects mature trees when protecting them is difficult.

The City has committed to protecting and expanding its urban forest. Mature trees like this one represent many decades of growth and cannot simply be replaced by planting a sapling.

If protecting existing trees is going to mean something, the alternatives need to be seriously investigated while retention is still possible—not once a series of decisions has made removal inevitable.

The tree is gone. This is not over.
The City’s final explanation for supporting removal relied substantially on additional work that it said still needed to happen and the root loss that work was expected to cause.

So we will be paying very close attention to what happens next at 1633 Stephens Street.

Does the additional excavation happen? How extensive is it? What contamination is found? Is the sidewalk replaced? Does the “potential” curb cut and driveway materialize? And ultimately, does the work that actually takes place support the explanation we were given for why this tree could not be saved?

We will continue pursuing the documentary record to understand how this decision was made, what alternatives were considered, why they were rejected and what can be learned from this.

Sadly, we can no longer save this horse chestnut.

But we can try to make sure the next Vancouver neighbourhood fighting to protect a mature public tree doesn’t spend five months trying to piece together a decision-making process that should have been transparent from the beginning.

And we can continue asking the larger question this tree leaves behind:

If Vancouver says its mature urban forest is valuable infrastructure worth protecting, what does “protection” actually mean when saving a tree is difficult?

To everyone who signed, wrote letters, shared the petition, contacted officials, researched alongside us, spoke to the media, came to meetings, stood beneath this tree and refused to simply accept that nothing could be done: thank you.

You made people pay attention.

The tree is gone.

This is not over.