A river town grows serious trees
Stand on Lover's Leap and the problem is laid out below you: Hannibal is a town of old neighborhoods under older trees, stacked on hills that run straight down to the Mississippi. Silver maples planted when the streets were new now drop limbs the size of small trees. The white oaks and burr oaks that make the bluffs worth photographing carry serious weight over rooflines from Broadway to the marina. And the ash — along Bear Creek, in yards across the county — is dying on its feet, because the emerald ash borer is established across northeast Missouri and spares almost nothing.
Out in the county the same story wears work clothes: hedgerow cedars swallowing fences between Palmyra and Philadelphia, hackberries leaning over machine sheds, cottonwoods in the Taylor bottoms that grew fifty feet in twenty years. None of it is a crisis until the wind arrives. All of it is cheaper to deal with before then.
