A Notre-Dame-de-Grâce woman is on a one-person crusade to save her tree from the chainsaw.
Judith Bercusson lives on a quiet residential street in the Snowdon district and wants to keep a mature maple from being felled.
City officials plan to cut it down claiming it is unhealthy.
Several of it branches are also caught in Hydro-Quebec power wires.
An email to Bercusson from city official Margaux Narbey reads: “Hydro-Quebec has to change the height of both poles and wires and informed us that the tree could no longer stay that way. One of our agents also met with HQ’s technical people and apparently there is no solution to avoid cutting down the tree.”
But Bercusson isn’t convinced. She wants to hire an independent arborist to inspect the tree and determine its condition.
“Let’s get an arborist in. Let him evaluate the tree and tell me what’s wrong and if we can trim it and save it,” she told Global News.
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Bercusson has been living in the duplex on Jean-Brillant Street for 16 years.
City officials already cut down one tree in front of her house. The home owner says life won’t be the same if they cut down the second tree.
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“I would be very angry. And I wouldn’t like my house so much. It’s not very pretty without these two trees,” she said.
There are signs the tree is in trouble. A steel road is attached between two massive branches preventing the tree from splitting.
And there is a massive crack running through it all the way to the base.
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Neighbour Guy Lanoue says some trees in the area have fallen ill with a disease and that the city has been cutting them down.
But he prefers the trees be saved if possible.
“They should try to save them as much as possible because they’re a very distinctive feature around here. There’s a lot of trees. and it’s a very nice neighbourhood because of that,” Lanoue said.
The tree-lined street sits in a lot of shade due to the canopy many of the maples provide.
Bercusson just hopes she can stop the final ax from falling on her tree to keep a similar canopy to hang over her house for years to come.
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