Long ago, probably 50 years ago, someone planted a grove of oaks along the Kings Highway in Brooklyn, running from Farragut Road to Clarendon. A greek proverb says, “A society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” I surveyed trees there on the two medians that bracket this frantically fast and loud urban speedway. Old, gnarled, rough-trunked trees are not what I think of when my mind goes to NYC normally, especially its fast roads. But here there was a forest, the inheritance from the days of monoculture, when people in charge of planting in New York thought it was ideal to plant all one species. You could tell you were not deep in nature, however – many of the trunks were marked similarly with gross tearing of the bark at the bottom, about knee height. I asked a homeowner about it. “Yeah, we have a lot of traffic accidents on this road,” he said. But however victimized the oaks were by human car culture, they stood tall and survived.
Today I’m standing on the margins of another highway, the Bruckner Expressway, a Robert Moses creation. Bruckner Boulevard is the service road that runs along both sides of this freeway, and it has trees that need pruning. The trees are in bud, about to leaf out – zelkovas, london planes, ash trees, cherries all coexist with the traffic fumes and grit and wild traffic patterns of the Bronx. Another grove of sweet green in the midst of concrete, cars and trucks.
I watch a plump squirrel carrying a wisp of something scurry across the pedestrian overpass, headed for its nest. There’s a collection of ash trees here, too, though emerald borers have had their way with them. London planes bulge with a girth of 30 or more inches like satisfied Buddhas. And there are the pink and green infant samaras so delicately dangling from the branches of the sycamore maples.
Here are some whirligigs posed in the palm of the landscaper’s son, a millenial who knows how to wield a chainsaw and has already received his tree climbing certification. Still, he prefers to surf.
One resident left her love on the bark of a juvenile london plane.
Spring comes to the highways of New York, just as it does everywhere else, and it is brought there by trees above all.
Jean Zimmerman 
Who is “the landscaper’s son”?
City trees have a miraculous vibe and I don;t mean the park trees. In Victorian Flatbush the trees are spectacular but not gritty. When I was a kid and the mimosas bloomed in the alley’s, I believed that the fairies had something to do with the wispy pink flowers.