Newport preservation includes beeches

In the Gilded Age, the rich built marble palaces here, surrounding them with exotic trees they acquired with the same ardor they brought to assembling their fabulous collections of art.

Their favorites were European beeches — green, copper and weeping beeches — trees they prized for their dramatic shapes and colors. Soon the streets of Newport’s mansion district were filled with the trees.

Today, many of them tower as high as 80 feet. “They are icons of Newport, the signature trees of the Gilded Age,” said John R. Tschirch, an architectural historian who directs conservation programs at the Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns many of the mansions.

But the trees are in trouble. Planted more or less all at once about 120 years ago, they are aging all at once now, a process hastened by insect and fungus infestations they can no longer fight off. Though the mansion district’s main street, Bellevue Avenue, looks almost as elegant as ever, here and there stands a skeleton tree, bereft of leaves, or a stump perhaps five feet across, all that remains of a vanished giant.

Throughout the city, people are practicing what Lillian Dick, president of the Newport Tree Society, calls “geriatric arboriculture,” treating ailing beeches with pesticides, keeping people from walking on their shallow roots, or pampering them with water and fertilizer. Often the efforts fail, so in many lawns where mighty trees once grew, replacement saplings stand, as gawky as adolescents at a ball.

One of them, a 20-foot copper beech, grows in the lawn of the preservation society’s headquarters, a three-story Romanesque Revival mansion on Bellevue Avenue, built in 1888 as a summer residence for William H. Osgood, a New York broker and yachtsman. Jeff Curtis, the society’s arborist, removed the sapling’s giant predecessor last year.

“It was over 50 percent dead,” he said. Mr. Curtis regularly surveys all 1,800 trees on the society’s grounds, and he finds signs of disease everywhere. One day recently, walking on the lawn of another society property, the Elms, he stopped under the drooping canopy of a weeping beech and stared at its trunk for a moment. “Here,” he said, pointing to a patch of dark brown goo oozing from the tree a few feet above the ground.

That ooze is a signature of beech canker, which has been attacking Newport’s trees for more than two decades, according to Brian Maynard, a professor of horticulture at the University of Rhode Island. The canker results from a fungus, phytopthora (pronounced fie-TOP-thuh-ruh), that also attacks the bark of stressed trees.

A second problem is cottony scale, an insect that taps into tree bark, introducing another fungus, nectria. “Nectria kills the bark of the trees,” Dr. Maynard said. “The bark falls off, and the tree is in trouble.”

Vigorous trees can fight off these two diseases, but they become vulnerable as they age. A tree’s growth occurs in its outer rings, Dr. Maynard said; he added that “the tree gives up on the old wood” in the center, which can rot, spread decay or suffer from injudicious pruning or other injuries.

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