By Joanne Degnan, Staff Writer
MILLSTONE — The 16 white swamp oak trees now taking root at the World Trade Center’s Memorial Plaza are the first of 400 shade trees from Millstone’s Halka Nurseries that are helping to usher in the rebirth of ground zero.
A portion of the 1,000-acre tree nursery in Millstone has been the holding facility for the 400 specially tagged World Trade Center trees since 2007. Now the 30-foot-tall oaks are gradually being transported to the World Trade Center site, where they will form a living memorial to those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as well as the Feb. 26, 1993, truck bombing of the North Tower.
Chet Halka Jr, says about 150 of the 400 memorial trees are from his own stock, and the rest were brought to his nursery from states within a 500-mile radius of ground zero. For symbolic reasons, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum also wanted trees from New York, Pennsylvania and the Washington, D.C., area — all places directly affected by the terrorist attacks.
”They collected trees from all over, but they wanted a site within 50 nautical miles of ground zero to keep the trees until they were ready to plant them,” Mr. Halka said Tuesday. The trees needed to be acclimated to weather conditions similar to their future permanent home in Manhattan, he said.
The first 16 trees left Halka Nurseries for the hour-long trip to Manhattan on flatbed tractor-trailers almost two weeks ago and were transplanted on the western side of the memorial Aug. 28. Another group of trees is expected to ship out later this month, Mr. Halka said.
The transplanting process will continue through next year, as construction work and landscaping progresses at the World Trade Center site, until all of the white swamp oaks have been transplanted.
In the meantime, the remaining trees are growing in large above- ground containers on a 40-acre plot of land that the National September 11 Memorial and Museum is leasing from Mr. Halka. Outside arborists were hired to care for the trees while they are waiting to be shipped to New York City, he said.
”They’ve got a pretty elaborate water system that they’ve set up,” Mr. Halka said. “There are high-tech sensors in the root balls, which monitor the moisture level in the soil.”
Mr. Halka says his company, a third-generation family business that has supplied the large-caliper trees planted at many of the nation’s monuments, museums and government buildings, has roots that go back to the construction of the original World Trade Center in the 1970s.
”When the original World Trade Center was built, my father supplied the London plane trees that were planted there,” Mr. Halka said.
”Now, because of the Asian long-horned beetle problem, they chose to use oaks because the oaks are less susceptible to the beetles,” he said.
The 400 oaks will grow to form an 80-foot-tall canopy over a plaza that will surround two huge reflecting pools built on the footprints of the destroyed towers, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the nonprofit group in charge of the design, fundraising, programming and operation of the memorial and museum.
The granite-tiled reflecting pools, when completed, will be the largest man-made waterfalls in the country, pumping 52,000 gallons of recycled water per minute, according to the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which owns the 16-acre World Trade Center site.
Several tons of a special gravel and soil mixture were brought to the site earlier this year to nourish the trees and an underground watering system has been put in place to keep them healthy as the construction work continues.
The Port Authority has said it is committed to having Memorial Plaza open to the public by the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

