Letter: Majestic Norway Spruce is First Casualty of Library Project

On July 24, 2025 the beautiful Norway Spruce tree that graced the land between the Jones Library and Strong House for decades was felled in the relentless pursuit of the oversized, overpriced library demolition/expansion project. Only its very healthy looking grand stump remained next to the stone bench that sat under its branches.

The first anyone mentioned about the planned demise of this tree was at a Jones Library Building Committee meeting held a week ago. Then, Bob Peirent, Amherst Special Capital Projects Manager, announced that it would be taken down “at no cost” by the general contractors (Fontaine Brothers). Despite years of planning, including multiple rounds of landscape architectural consulting and millions of dollars in design and project management fees, no one had ever indicated that the spruce was in danger.

Peirent said, “as a result of one Fontaine’s arborist, we they [sic] were required to hire an independent arborist approved by the town to come in and assess the trees that we were planning to retain, and how to best manage those trees and and care for them during the construction, in consultation with the arborist that the Amherst Historic Society has hired.”

Peirent then described the spruce as “a relatively unsafe tree. If you look at the trunk, it looks great from a distance, but if you look about 40 feet up in the air, the trunk branches from a single stem to multiple stems, three or four stems, that make that tree inherently much weaker at that point and much more likely that one or more of those stems could split off and either drop to the ground and impact the Historic Society property or drop to the ground and impact the library property at some future date.”

He went on to say that “the most critical tree is the Sycamore. But the good news is the Sycamore is a long way away from the easement where Fontaine is going to be working. So partly as a show of good faith and partly to to help facilitate their construction Fontaine has agreed to take that Norway spruce down at no cost to the Historic Society or no cost to the town or the project.” 

There are two possibilities here. Either this tree has been “unsafe” for many years (that branching trunk didn’t just happen yesterday) and the Historic Society, Jones Library, and project team (OPM, designers, landscape consultants) all failed to identify the risk and take action long ago or it would simply be a lot more convenient for this project if that tree was out of the way rather than putting in the effort to protect it. Neither of these scenarios is acceptable, but the lack of transparency and incompetence they reveal is very much consistent with the rest of this ill-conceived project.

RIP, Norway Spruce. You will be sorely missed but you will no doubt have company soon as the town’s budget follows you into the abyss.

Maria Kopicki

Maria Kopicki is a resident of Amherst’s District 5