Workers removed more than 500 trees at a Washington, D.C., golf course over the weekend that President Donald Trump is working to remodel, and it happened like many of his other design projects in town: suddenly and without permission.
Preservationists asked a judge Sunday to halt the Trump administration after it removed 529 trees Saturday at East Potomac Park, a golf course managed by the National Park Service, and on Monday, a judge called the removal “inexcusable.”
The course is home to elms, oaks, pines, and willows, as well as some of the 3,000 Japanese flowering cherry trees gifted by the government of Japan in 1912. Together they told the story of golf’s rise in America from a mostly treeless game on the U.S. coasts to a sport known for its big, lush vegetation. Now, just like that, a century’s worth of landscape design history has been torn up.
The removal happened “faster than anticipated,” according to the lawsuit, and the Trump administration didn’t meet its obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act, attorneys representing the D.C. Preservation League and a pair of local golfers said in a filing seeking an emergency action to pause further tree removal.
“‘Pulling a fast one’ has become the model this administration uses to circumvent the laws intended to protect the environment and D.C. landmarks,” Abbe D. Lowell, a founding member of Lowell & Associates, which is representing the plaintiffs along with Democracy Forward and Democracy Defenders Fund, said in a statement. “It did so with the East Wing and the Kennedy Center and we are continuing our effort to stop them before they succeed in destroying D.C.’s historic public golf course.”
A brief history of parkland courses
The land that’s now East Potomac Park sits on a small island in the Potomac River south of the National Mall. The earliest known vegetation there was tall grass and willow trees, most of which were cleared to design the first course in 1917, but through the years, more trees were added to adapt to changing tastes. That’s according to a 2017 cultural landscape inventory of the course conducted by the Urban Heritage Project from the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design that tracked the park’s evolution.
The first course at East Potomac Park was designed by golf course architect Walter J. Travis who cleared the fairways of most willows but kept some existing trees along the course’s perimeter to separate the front and back nine. A new style of golf course design in the 1920s called parkland style, however, meant more trees would eventually be planted over the years.
As golf grew more popular and moved inland, parkland courses came to be known for their big, mature trees. The popularity of televised golf tournaments beginning in the 1950s and ’60s only made lush, green, gorgeous park-like backdrops that more appealing, according to the inventory, like the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, with its trees and plants imported from around the world in bloom.
At East Potomac Park, the Civilian Conservation Corps planted cedar trees in 1939 and additional trees in the 1960s and ’70s, including crabapple trees. The 2017 inventory also counted large wolf trees, large willow oaks, and a large American Elm.
Some trees were planted for reasons of gameplay, not just aesthetics. The park’s miniature golf course, for example, was designed around a limited number of trees that function as hazards, and the park’s White Course has few trees and open fairways and thus became popular with less competitive players.
The 2017 inventory noted that the park needed some care, including invasive vines and trees it said were damaging some cherry trees, and it said that a “piecemeal nature of planting” had resulted in “a variety of mature trees and shrubs scattered throughout the landscape” that had no overall harmony.
A “surprise demolition”
But those suing Trump’s Interior Department and National Park Service say the administration’s tree razing went far above routine maintenance or a thoughtful pruning and that the administration had even removed healthy, mature oaks and maple trees.
“Unleashing a surprise demolition razing over 500 historic trees in this public park and claiming it is part of maintenance from a dated, years old landscaping plan is yet another brazen, lawless power grab that has become routine for the Trump administration,” Democracy Defenders Fund executive chair Norm Eisen said in a statement.
Trump’s planned makeover of the park (he had rubble from the White House East Wing taken after demolishing it), is part of a larger takeover of the federal government golf course system. Trump is reportedly offering his Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach in Florida as an official U.S. government golf course for presidents that his family’s company would continue to operate.
Like the rings of a tree tell its story, the landscape design of East Potomac Park told a story of a game that grew up to appreciate the value of mature trees and ample vegetation as it became more popular. With the Trump administration’s sudden tree removal, a part of that history is now gone.