The human need for wilderness landscapes seems obvious: trees and wild spaces restore our feelings of connection to the natural world and bring us in contact with birth, death and renewal. For city dwellers, a little bit of green may have the same effect. Increasing numbers of sociologists, urban ecologists and foresters are finding that trees, green spaces and even tiny plots of flowers growing in unlikely crannies provide not only aesthetic respite but also balm for the souls of urbanites.

Scientists are recognizing the sanctity and restorative power in trees and wild spaces, even spaces no bigger than a sidewalk planting well or an impromptu wildflower garden planted beneath a highway overpass.

Erika Svendsen, an urban forester for the U.S. Forest Service, noticed that when people were provided with plants and greenery, they connected with each other more often. Through her work with Green Thumb, an organization dedicated to creating urban gardens in underserved New York City communities, she saw that trees provided a focal point for community unity.

In Coney Island, for instance, where there are huge city-subsidized housing projects, high crime rates and drug use rates that have been among the highest in New York City, Svendsen saw significant changes in the way neighbors interacted with each other. She found that with the creation of pocket parks, nothing more than tiny plots of ground where people could plant vegetable and flower gardens, residents’ attitudes toward their neighbors, their neighborhoods and themselves were more positive.

As people became involved with the process of planting and nurturing green spaces, residents who had never spoken to each other began to get to know one another; they began to take ownership of their community.

“The way communities look expresses the way people who live in them feel and are with their world,” Svendsen said. “When people are degraded, the neighborhood is degraded.”

Svendsen also found that when city dwellers seek green space, there is almost always a trauma involved. A father goes to a park to visit a tree because his daughter who died ten years ago liked to play near there, for example. Or people plant flowers in a window box or an empty lot to memorialize a death. Once people start re-creating nature and taking a role in natural cycles, their feelings and attitudes toward life’s processes change, as does their relationship with the passage of time.

In light of this new understanding about the healing effects of green spaces on people in urban environments, the Forest Service (Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry and the Northeastern Research Station) initiated the Living Memorials Project, which will sponsor tree planting and memorial groves to commemorate September 11 and create tributes to those who lost their lives that day. The purpose of the project, says Matt Arnn, director of the New York City Metropolitan Initiative, is to respond to the needs of the communities traumatized by September 11 and the days of chaos and confusion that followed. “[The symbolism of trees] resonates with people,” Arnn said. “Trees reaffirm life.”

Arnn and Svendsen, both employees in Manhattan Forest Service offices—they are the agency’s only Manhattan-based employees—are technical advisers to community groups applying for the grants. Arnn said that community members’ involvement will be a critical part of the process. They will plant the bare-root trees at planned community events.

The memorials are more than decorations on urban streets; the plan is for them to become integral parts of the communities.

Among the groups applying for Forest Service Living Memorial Project grants is the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition, a community group in the area of Brooklyn overlooking the East River and lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center towers stood. The coalition and groups like it are acquiring derelict piers and docks in Brooklyn with the intention of turning them into parks and open space. Through a series of grants from state, local and private trusts, the coalition negotiated the sale or gift of several parcels that once belonged to the Port of New York Authority. The coalition and other neighborhood groups want to create a greenbelt along the East River.

The Forest Service will award approximately $1.1 million in grant money that will be divided between several groups in the greater New York area; one or two groups in the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, area, where Flight 93 crash landed; and one group in Washington, D.C.

The Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, another community group, hopes eventually to establish a greenbelt along the entire Manhattan waterfront. Because land values in the New York boroughs are so high, land dedicated for use as green space, open space and parkland has to be acquired slowly, square foot by square foot.

For the most part, creation of green spaces has been a grassroots process in which individuals or neighborhoods reclaim abandoned lots to plant flowers or vegetables and then find themselves engaged in elaborate negotiations with landowners.

In Shanksville, the proposed location of the Living Memorial is the crash site. Because the site is on private land, the National Park Service is negotiating the purchase of the site from seven landowners with the hopes of turning the property into a memorial park.

Tom Grote, director of the Kiski Basin Initiative, part of a larger regional rural conservancy organization in the area, applied for the Forest Service grant on behalf of a Flight 93 taskforce formed by the Somerset County Commission. The county has already commemorated the eight local volunteer fire departments first to arrive at the crash scene.

Washington, D.C., like New York City, suffers from a land shortage. There is virtually no place to put a large grove of trees. The original idea for the D.C. memorial was, says Mark Buscaino, chief state forester for the District of Columbia, to create a centralized Living Memorial and later add smaller satellite groves throughout the city.

The site proposed for the initial large grove is Heritage-Kingman Island, a dredge island in the Anacostia River, which has been deeded to D.C. government and is under the jurisdiction of the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation. Although Buscaino thinks the initial site is likely to receive funding, he does not think there will be sufficient funds for the satellite sites.

Grant awards will have been finalized by the end of the summer. Groundbreaking is scheduled for September 11, 2003. In New York City, which is otherwise a morass of concrete and steel, “a grove of trees represents wilderness to people,” Arnn said. “The presence of trees increases the quality of life for all people here.”