By James Hedrick, Commissioner, The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC)

The National Champion Crabapple Tree at 12500 Ardennes in the Twinbrook neighborhood in the Rockville area.

Among the many agenda items that come before the Montgomery County Planning Board, some projects will stick with you. On February 22, 2024, the Planning Board held a hearing regarding an apartment complex in Twinbrook: 210-plus units, 25% subsidized, a stone’s throw from a Metro station. All good. Nothing too unusual.

Except for one thing. A crabapple tree.

Specifically, the National Champion Southern Crabapple (Malus angustifolia).

The tree immediately reminded me of the Truffula tree from Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax.”  Although Montgomery County does not have an orange mustachioed gremlin voiced by Bob Holt (or Danny DeVito, if you prefer the 2012 version) to speak for the trees, we do have something even better. What speaks for the trees in MoCo is our Forest Conservation Law, which requires a Forest Conservation Plan (FCP) for most development projects.

Not to confuse the two – one is an orange fictional character, and one is a very real and legally binding plan.

“The Lorax” balloon in Stamford, CT’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Montgomery Planning’s Forest Conservation Plan application form for development projects.

An FCP speaks for the trees by requiring the Planning Board to review and potentially grant special permission (a variance) for projects that propose removing any large, historic, endangered, threatened, or otherwise special trees. American Forests, a nonprofit national conservation organization that maintains the Official Register of Champion Trees, designated this crabapple tree as a national champion, and so the Planning Board needed to approve a variance as part of the FCP.

But why grant the variance? It’s a champion tree, after all.

At first, we didn’t. In 2020, the Planning Board approved a site plan requiring the preservation and transplanting of the tree.

However, as you might remember, 2020 was kind of a rough year. The project stalled and then returned in 2023/2024. By then, an independent arborist investigated the tree and found it a poor candidate for transplanting and in poor health overall. Crabapple trees live approximately 40-60 years, on average, and, if the tree was planted in the mid-1940s when the area was originally developed, it is potentially 75-80 years old.

But even in poor health, Montgomery County’s Forest Conservation Law and the proposed FCP continued to speak for the tree. The law and the FCP not only require a variance, but also mitigation for the removal of trees, even ones at the end of their lifespan. For those interested in more details, the staff report is available on the Planning Board website, but the upshot is that the applicant will plant five healthy native trees of a minimum size in response to the loss of the crabapple tree.

But that’s not all! As a condition of the Planning Board’s variance approval, the applicant was also required to preserve the “germplasm of the tree through propagation of cuttings.” That means this specific crabapple tree may not be around forever, but its genetic material, the genetic material of a national-champion tree, will survive through the planting of new trees.

No one will ever film a blockbuster about the impact of a forest conservation plan. Even I would think it was boring. But for every development project, our Forest Conservation Law is out there, making sure we never forget to consider our environmental impact and continue speaking for the trees.

About the author
James Hedrick has spent his career working in community development and affordable housing. He completed his doctoral degree in political science at Rice University in 2017 and has degrees in both public policy and anthropology from American University and the University of Texas, respectively. Before being appointed to the Planning Board, Hedrick was an affordable-housing consultant, a community college professor, and a long-time federal employee. He previously served on the board of the Action Committee for Transit, the steering committee for Montgomery for All, and the board of the Twinbrook Community Association, as well as serving as the Chair of Rockville Housing Enterprises, Rockville’s public housing authority. He lives in the Twinbrook neighborhood of Rockville, MD with his wife and three kids.