Starting earlier in the autumn and continuing into the springtime, the State Highway Administration has been on a mission to plant roughly 22,000 trees along Maryland roadways in Harford County.
The $1.6 million project isn't to improve the roads, but it can be expected to improve the quality of life over the long haul. The stated goal of the project is to improve water quality. As the trees – and at this point they're little more than saplings – mature, their roots will help prevent erosion and absorb excess nutrients that otherwise would end up in waterways.
Though the goal of the State Highway Administration isn't to improve water quality, it is fitting enough that the agency would spend $1.6 million – a figure that is a tiny fraction of the state's road budget – on such an effort because road construction repair work, especially around bridges, can be rather disruptive to water environments. Planting trees could be considered something of an offset for work that ends up being done elsewhere that results in soil inadvertently being pushed into a waterway.
The more striking quality of life improvement won't be particularly striking until many years pass, and is likely only to be noticed by people who move away and then return. That improvement will come – in 10 to 20 years - when the newly planted saplings can truly be called trees.
It's a sure bet that not all 22,000 of the trees will survive long enough to end up actually looking big enough to be trees, but the planting of so many will most likely result in enough of them becoming large enough to provide roadside shade.
And that'll be a big plus.