Disease Claiming Trees At Pines Cemetery

About 25 diseased ponderosa pines will be removed from the Pines Cemetery over the next two months.

Fortunately, cemetery officials won’t be changing the name of the memorial park to “Stump Cemetery.”

“We plan to eventually replace them with other trees,” said Neil Prescott, an Opportunity Cemetery Association trustee. “After it’s done, most people won’t even notice they’re gone.”

During the work, which began this week, sections of Pines Road between 15th and 16th avenues may be closed while crews take out trees along the edge of the cemetery.

The tree removal project has nothing to do with ice storm damage, Prescott said. The storm caused surprisingly little harm to the cemetery’s trees, he said.

Last spring, the cemetery association identified diseased trees with the help of Spokane County’s conservation forester and began planning their removal.

Several times in the last few years trees infected with Western gall rust have toppled over at the cemetery. In a number of instances, falling trees have damaged grave markers. A broken tree top that narrowly missed a pair of markers last spring was enough to convince Prescott and other trustees that the diseased trees should be removed.

“Many of the trees are over 100 years old,” Prescott said. “The forester said that most should last another hundred, but the ones that are weak and damaged, we don’t want to take a chance with.”

The cost of the project is about $4,500.

Western gall rust is a fungus that weakens pine trees, making them susceptible to falling over, said Alan Hawson, the county’s conservation forester. He said that a small number of the trees also have Western pine beetle infestations, most notably a towering giant near the corner of Pines and 16th.

“If it gets any worse, we would recommend that they take that one out as well,” Hawson said, adding that he will continue to monitor all of the trees in the cemetery.

Hawson recommended the cemetery board replace the trees with either Scotch or Austrian pines, both species that do not grow as tall as ponderosa pines.