TREE COUNT.(Bram Gunther, New York City's forestry and horticulture director)(citywide census of street trees)(Interview)

As a "thoroughly, thoroughly urban person," growing up on West Sixty-sixth Street, Bram Gunther didn't care what type of trees were on his block. Gunther is the city's deputy director of forestry and horticulture, and he now knows that his old street is lined with honey locusts, and that there are more than thirty-three thousand of them in the city. "It's amazing, the human capacity to not notice things that you're not interested in," he said.

On a recent morning, Gunther crossed Fifth Avenue and headed east on Sixty-fourth Street, embarking on a dry run to test the forms and equipment that are to be used in a new citywide census of street trees, due to begin next month. Over the summer, more than a thousand volunteer "tree stewards" will comb the five boroughs, noting the presence, size, and condition of every silver linden, pin oak, redbud, and Japanese pagoda, among other species (there are about seventy in all). The Parks Department will use this information to identify "urban forest trends," to estimate the monetary value of the city's trees, and to inspire a new generation of tree geeks. The first census, conducted in 1995, counted nearly half a million street trees in the city, out of an estimated total of five million trees, when parks and yards are included.

"In Queens, it's going to be the Norway maple and the London plane, the same as in the other boroughs," Gunther said. "But Manhattan is unusual in that the Callery pear and the ginkgo feature much higher. The Callery pear is Manhattan's favorite tree, but its internal structure is very weak--it dies quickly, and its limbs fall a lot."

This, however, was a ginkgo block--there were five between Fifth and Madison, on the north side of the street. Almost all of them had wounds from car doors, locked bicycles, or bugs. The fourth one in had a birdhouse tied to a limb--an "infrastructure conflict," in tree-census talk. The fifth, in front of the Indian consulate, had been cut down--a stump. On closer inspection, the pit of soil surrounding the stump was found to be emitting steam. Gunther stared at it for a while, then approached a chauffeur whose Town Car was idling nearby. "Did someone spill hot water there?" Gunther asked.

"No, sir," the chauffeur said. "That's how it is, sir. All the time it's steaming, sir."

"No tree could survive that," Gunther said.

Down the block, Gunther came to a soaring London plane in front of a town house that belongs to the Versaces. "It's a little underweight," he said. "It looks like a skinny boy." The London planes, he went on, "are the direct legacy of Robert Moses. This and the Norway maple were his two favorite trees." Neither is planted anymore, because both host the Asian long-horned beetle, the biggest threat to trees on the East Coast. "If the ...