“Everyone likes a big tree,” Arborist and Milton Tree Warden Kris Dulmer said.

By Maeve Fairfax, for the Community News Service

Gwen Kozlowski is an expert at measuring the biggest trees in the state. 

She calculates their big tree points: circumference in inches plus height in feet plus a quarter of the average crown spread in feet. 

The Vermont Big Tree Program maintains a list of all champion trees in the state — that is, the largest known tree of each species. Vermont’s largest tree, a cottonwood in Colchester, has 447.63 big tree points.

Arborist and Milton Tree Warden Kris Dulmer said that though champion status doesn’t protect the trees, the list gets people excited about them. 

“Everyone likes a big tree,” he said. 

This particularly applies to landowners who discover they have a big tree on their land. 

“They tend to get excited and a little protective of the tree, and they start to see it in a different light,” Dulmer said. “They have a little further appreciation for their trees.”

The list was started in 1972 by a former Castleton professor, Jeff Freeman. Initially, county foresters provided many of the nominations for big trees, sometimes unofficially competing to see who could find the most, said Kozlowski. 

The list went dormant in 2003 but was resurrected in 2021 by the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program. 

During the Covid lockdown, Kozlowski attempted to find the 145 trees on the original list. Often, the only records were old forester notes which sometimes didn’t even provide an address, she said. In the end, she tracked down about 70 of the original trees. 

There are currently 91 champions on the list, as well as a list of vacant species the program hopes to eventually fill. 

The list is stored in an ArcGIS database, including a map and photographs of each tree. Many of the champions are on private land and cannot be visited, but there are directions provided to the ones that are on public land. 

Anyone can nominate a big tree. When Kozlowski receives a nomination, she schedules a time to go out and measure the tree, or if it is far away, enlists help from another forester. 

The national list of champion trees uses the same formula. Vermont boasts two trees on the federal list: a staghorn sumac in Grand Isle County and a roundleaf serviceberry in Rutland County. 

The sumac was found by Dulmer. He drove by the tree for several years before talking to the landowner, and then nominated it to the list. 

“I measured it up and compared it to the national record, and it blew the national record away,” he said. 

Dulmer has found and nominated over ten trees on the state list. 

“Anywhere I go, I’m always looking at trees, period. So if I’m driving, I’m looking. If I’m walking, I’m looking. So it’s just a passive process for me,” he said. “As I pass any tree, it’s kinda in the back of my mind, ‘is it a big tree?’”

His interest doesn’t just lie with the huge trees. 

“My favorite niche part of the list is nominating big-little trees,” or the largest specimen of a tree species that don’t get very big, he said.

Dulmer is able to recognize these big-little trees because he knows the average size of Vermont’s tree species. 

“They often get overlooked,” he said. 

His favorite big tree finds are the champion black locust, green ash and alternate leaf dogwood. Dulmer’s job largely involves treating ash trees to protect them from the invasive emerald ashborer, whose larvae kill ash trees. He found the champion green ash tree while driving. 

A program through ArborJet allows landowners to get historically significant trees treated for free. With this program in mind, Dulmer tracked down the farmer who owned the tree, Jed Ladd, to see if he could help get it treated. 

Jed is a fifth-generation dairy farmer from Alburgh and cares a lot about that tree. 

“I just always liked that tree and watched it from a little kid riding my bicycle… till now,” he said. 

It is in one of his pastures, and his cows often use it for shade. 

He’s been measuring it for a while and said that it grew about a foot in circumference in a roughly ten-year period.

“Just the size of it has always amazed me,” said Ladd. 

When Dulmer got in contact with Ladd and went to look at the tree, he saw ashborers on it. It was going to be another two or three months before it could be treated through the program, according to Ladd. 

“My wife and I decided to treat it just to save it,” he said. “Kris thought at that point…it wasn’t gonna make it if we waited another three months.”

This was about two years ago. The tree has a few dead branches but came away largely unscathed. 

“It looks beautiful this year, has nice, dark green, thick foliage, so the tree is well on its way to fully recovering,” said Dulmer. 

Kozlowski said that in essence, the Vermont Big Tree Program is really about trees and people. 

“It’s really about the stories and the connections that people have with them,” she said. 

Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship