“If you were to take a bird’s-eye view of Greenwich and then look down on it, you would see that…It truly looks like a town in a forest, although the part of the forest I was managing was just publicly owned trees.”
According to Spaman, Greenwich contains about 1100 acres of parks, including open-space properties, formal parks, and pocket parks. In addition, there are 250 acres of school campuses and 75 acres of athletic turf and fields. Add to that “a forest of street trees that’s probably 650 acres on over 265 miles of town roads. So, that’s a considerable forest that people drive in every day.” That responsibility only adds up to about six percent of the total land area in town.
Spaman’s interests in arboriculture and forestry began early. As a young boy, “I was in Boy Scouts . . . and I was always just out in the woods and on my own. I didn’t know you could make a job out of it.” He graduated with a degree in forestry from Paul Smiths College in Paul Smiths, New York, in the Adirondacks, in 1974. “From there, I just basically got immersed in trees in general, arboriculture doing tree work, learning the climbing, doing all that.” In the early eighties, the field of community forestry started to emerge which “brings together the arboriculture business and the forestry business . . . mostly with regards to managing municipal or town-owned trees.” Spaman worked for over thirty towns in Connecticut before being hired in Greenwich in 2002.
Read the full post on the Greenwich Sentinel at OHP BLOG – Greenwich – “A Town in a Forest” – Greenwich Sentinel