More ash trees in Guildwood to be cut down due to beetle infestation
Numerous trees on and around Laurier, Miner schools cannot be saved, community meeting to be told

insidetoronto.com
Jan. 30, 2015
By Mike Adler

There is bad news for people who love hundreds of trees around two schools in Scarborough’s Guildwood area.

Residents at a meeting Monday, Feb. 2, will hear none of the almost 300 ash trees around Sir Wilfred Laurier Collegiate Institute and Jack Miner Senior Public School will survive the emerald ash borer.

And that includes 14 mature ash trees at Laurier and five at Jack Miner the board had injected with TreeAzin, a synthetic pesticide thought to be the sole defence against fast-spreading beetle.

Near the Lake Ontario shore in a neighbourhood dominated by ash, Jack Miner and Wilfred Laurier are the schools hardest hit by the pest, which is expected to virtually erase Toronto’s ash populations.

And in Guildwood, TreeAzin injections haven’t worked as well as hoped.

“Unfortunately, the success rate of the injections in southeast Scarborough has been disappointing. In other parts of the city where the infestation is not as overwhelming, the injection rates have a much higher rate of success,” Jerry Chadwick, Ward 22’s public school trustee, wrote on Thursday.

Already, Chadwick said, there are at least 150 trees at Laurier and 109 at Miner that cannot be saved.

At Monday’s meeting - which will take place at Laurier, 145 Guildwood Pkwy. at 6:30 p.m. - the board will tell residents of its plan to cut the dying trees down and make use of the wood.

The board has also made arrangements for some replanting to be done in the ward, Chadwick added,

A culling of dead and dying ash, as well as other trees damaged by the December ice storm, proved controversial when it was done by a city contractor over the last winter in nearby Guild Park.

The board says it is removing stricken ash trees across the city “in order to minimize the risk to students, staff, parents and the community.”