By Lisa Eckelbecker

Telegram & Gazette Staff

    LINDEN, New Jersey – Jeffrey A. Tandul’s friends like to joke that he’s a “dead tree savant,” able to spot dying trees from blocks away, but on a gray June day he’s more focused on the living.

    Mr. Tandul, chairman of the Shade Tree Commission in this community about 20 miles outside New York City, peers through the windshield of his car as he steers down streets lined with young trees lush with leaves.

    “Before the planting it was pretty bare, but I’m pleased to see that these are established pretty well,” he said, after turning into a neighborhood surrounded by vast industrial properties. “These zelcovas have really taken off.”

    “Before” refers to the days after 2002 when contractors descended on Linden’s neighborhoods to remove trees infested with or endangered by the Asian longhorned beetle, the same invasive insect identified in Worcester in 2008.

    State, federal and local officials are still hunting the bug and removing trees in a 110-square-mile plot of Central Massachusetts that includes Worcester, West Boylston, Boylston, Shrewsbury and parts of Holden and Auburn. But in New Jersey, authorities declared the tree-chewing beetle eradicated in 2013 after removing 21,981 trees from Jersey City, Carteret, Woodbridge, Rahway and Linden.

    Trees planted in the wake of those removals have begun to shoot up in Linden, the New Jersey community where about 15,000 trees were removed. Some of the replacements now reach about 15 feet high. It’s a suggestion of what lies ahead for the Massachusetts neighborhoods that lost beloved shade trees and now nurse slender replacements.

    Already plantings in Worcester’s hard-hit Burncoat neighborhood, said Worcester Department of Public Works and Parks Commissioner Paul J. Moosey, are “starting to look like something other than twigs of new trees. I expect five years from now they’ll have really filled out.”

    The Asian longhorned beetle is an unforgiving pest originally from China. Females lay eggs in the bark of hardwood trees. Larvae bore into the trees. After maturing, the insects tunnel out, leaving a path of destruction.

    To wipe out the bugs, workers cut down infested and vulnerable trees, grind the wood into chips and then incinerate the wood.

    In the Massachusetts beetle zone, 34,862 trees had been taken down as of June 30, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Sixty-two trees were known to be infested.

    About 100 USDA workers continue to “survey” trees for infestation. Their ongoing discoveries of trouble spots mean the USDA does not know how many more years the eradication effort may require.

    “I can tell you that we don’t have an end time. We are still finding infested trees, and until we stop finding infested trees, we won’t be able to,” said Rhonda J. Santos, a spokeswoman for the eradication program.

    In Linden, the Asian longhorned beetle hasn’t been the only challenge facing trees. Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 flung wind and water at the city, which is home to both snug residential neighborhoods and sprawling industrial complexes.

    Mr. Tandul, a licensed landscape architect, said Linden tapped public grants to pay for new trees. To replace the many Norway maples removed, the city planted dogwood, swamp white oak, thornless honeylocust, Japanese tree lilacs, evergreens such as Norway spruce and more. It chose smaller trees to fit under utility lines, and Mr. Tandul has not been averse to a bit of guerrilla planting.

    “If I see a for-sale sign, that is a planting site,” he said. “The people who are leaving don’t care, and the people who are coming in, it’s there when they get there.”

    Mr. Tandul estimates Linden has replaced one-third to two-thirds of the trees lost to the Asian longhorned beetle. Linden’s urban forest now holds more diverse species than before the beetle, and more age diversity, as well, he said.

    “Even though we lost those (infested trees), we have a much better management program in place,” he said.

    In Massachusetts, about 31,000 new trees have been planted to replace the 34,862 trees cut down in Central Massachusetts, according to the Worcester Tree Initiative, a group created after the beetle was identified in Worcester.

    Reforestation has been a slow process.

    “The little rhyme people say about trees is, ‘The first year they sleep, the second year they creep and the third year they leap,’ " said Ruth A. Seward, executive director of the Worcester Tree Initiative.

    The group created a database to track almost all trees planted by itself and city, state and federal authorities since eradication started. It also gives away trees from a range of species.

    In some places, few trees have been planted. In others, trees are taking root.

    On Mayflower Circle in Worcester, a dead-end street in the Burncoat neighborhood that was stripped of trees, eight tulip trees planted along one side of the street about five years ago now rise about 25 feet high. On the opposite side of the road, seven ornamental serviceberry trees sit beneath utility lines and will never grow much higher.

    The Worcester Tree Initiative secured a grant to pay for the trees, and residents agreed on the species. All were planted in the public grassy strip between sidewalks and the street.

    “I think everybody we talk to on the street is happy,” said resident Paula J. Cooney. “We’re making great progress.”

    Bill O’Neil, a neighbor, said when he first saw the street after the tree cutting, “it looked like a brand-new development. Now they’ve come up, and they look pretty nice.”

    Tony D’Orazio, who lost four trees on his property at the end of Mayflower Circle during the cutting but planted four new ornamental trees, also gave the young trees a positive review.

    “I think the road looks nice,” Mr. D’Orazio said.

 Brutal though the Asian longhorned beetle may be to trees and neighborhoods, the pest does shine a light on what can happen when an urban forest becomes filled with too few species and gets too little attention, said Richard W. Harper, extension assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

     “It’s brought attention to the idea that a monoculture is a bad thing to establish, and that you really do need to have a plan going forward for something like greening your urban setting,” he said.