On a Saturday morning in October, about 20 Wichita residents met near the east entrance of Clapp Park for a two-hour guided walk led by two certified arborists. Nobody was sure how many people would show up. It was more than expected.
The walk covered roughly a mile and a half, stopping at 14 trees. The standout was a bur oak near the park's interior that the arborists estimated at over 200 years old, which would put its sprouting sometime around the early 1800s, before Kansas was a state. A few people in the group just stood in front of it for a while without saying much.
The conversation covered a lot of ground: how to tell a healthy tree from a stressed one, what bark texture and crown shape can tell you, why so many street trees in Wichita are failing, and what the city's canopy looks like from the air compared to 20 years ago. Questions kept coming after the formal walk ended.
We'll run more of these. If you want to be notified when the next one is scheduled, sign up for our newsletter below.
Want to join the next walk? Join Our Newsletter