Memorial roots

Millstone nursery growing trees for WTC project

By: Cara Latham
   MILLSTONE — The Smithsonian Institute, the World War II memorial, the Korean Memorial, the White House and all of the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorials, are just some of the sites that are a little greener because of a local farmer.
   Township farmer Chet Halka and his family have been involved in some way with high-profile projects such as these and trees from his farm are en route to becoming part of yet another one, the World Trade Center memorial in Manhattan, set to open in a couple years.
   Mr. Halka, owner of Halka Nurseries, won’t be planting or taking care of the trees, but his site will be used to raise about 400 of them. Some 150 come from his farm. They head to ground zero in about two years, depending on whether there are construction delays on the memorial itself, he said.
   Environmental Design of Houston, which is working with the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, purchased 150 of the trees. Most of them are white swamp oak and some are sweet gum and are being raised on 14 acres of Halka Nurseries’ Patterson farm at the corner of Stillhouse and Backbone Hill roads.
   Three bidders for the memorial site included Environmental Design, one other company from Houston and one from New York. Environmental Design needed to purchase and raise the trees on a site within 50 miles of ground zero as part of the bid specifications, Mr. Halka said.
   Because of Mr. Halka’s past work and reputation, including with the National Park Service, he was asked if he had a site that was available for the project. He joined on, as his nurseries are 38 nautical miles from Manhattan, he said.
   "They asked me to bid the job, but it’s something we’ve never done before," he said. With the kind of national exposure on the future memorial, "I had no desire to learn on the job," he added.
   The site where Environmental Designs is raising the trees totals 40 acres, but they’re using about 14, he said. The company needed fencing around the site, so Mr. Halka set up those fences last winter, and the company came in and started building boxes for the trees early this spring.
   And it’s that form of boxing the trees that Mr. Halka said is the most interesting and educational aspect of the project. The company planted the trees in big boxes so the trees could be transported to Manhattan once the memorial construction is complete.
   "They want to be able to move the trees to the site whatever time of the year the project is ready," he said. "Being they’re in boxes, it’s just like moving a potted plant. This way, they can be grown and moved without any stress."
   The boxes are designed to be placed on tractor-trailers to be transported and the trees will be placed at the memorial site with a crane. Once they are set in their spots, workers will fill in the sports where they were planted with soil, so "the tree will never know it was moved."
   This process, popular in Texas and California, is something that Mr. Halka and his family are not used to, but something he and his two daughters, who are coming into the business with him, can learn from, he said.
   "I’ve never really seen it on the East Coast," he said. "It’s an education for us now — watching and learning what they’re doing," he said.
   Still, he said, he does feel "honored" that his site is being used and that he has received a good recommendation from other projects he’s done in the past.
   And it seems that the Twin Towers, from their original construction and now with their memorial, have also been connected with Mr. Halka’s family. His father actually supplied trees to the site when the towers were originally built, he said.
   Mr. Halka said working on large projects like these is normal, it’s just a part of business as usual.
   "It’s basically what we do — we try to sell a product and a service," he said. "It’s also stress on you because it doesn’t leave you too much room for screwing up."
   Next, Mr. Halka will be growing trees — on the same site where the WTC Memorial trees are being grown — for the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the mall in Washington, D.C., he said.
   He did have to purchase American elms from Georgia and willow oaks from the Trees Now nursery in Upper Freehold for the project. He is also supplying his own flowering cherries and red maples for the project. That job will require two to three years on his farm before completed.