Cherry Blossoms on Hughes Place: A New Haven Story

The cherry blossoms on Hughes Place had one more moment of beauty to give. Wanda Bubriski made sure it wasn’t wasted.

A day after hundreds of New Haveners gathered beneath the pink canopy lining that short stretch of street just north of Wooster Square, a two-person crew from Lewis Tree Service arrived Monday morning with chainsaws. United Illuminating had hired the crew to clear branches away from primary and secondary power lines. By midday, petals and limbs were falling to the pavement.

Bubriski, a retired architectural historian who moved to the Townhouses on the Square complex from Branford last fall, watched from nearby. Then she did something about it. She hauled out a garbage can and began collecting the severed branches, still heavy with pink blossoms, saving them from the wood chipper. She kept some for her patio. She offered the rest to neighbors.

“They’re beautiful. They’re still in blossom. It seems a shame to just toss them,” she said, stopping to flag down a passing neighbor. “Diana, do you want some?”

The timing was hard to ignore. The annual Cherry Blossom Festival had drawn its usual crowds to Wooster Square Park just the day before, on Sunday. Hughes Place, the tree-lined street running along the park’s northern edge, is a reliable highlight of the event. This spring, the blossoms held on long enough to impress, staying in full pink bloom while trees a few blocks away had already begun leafing out green. Sunday’s crowds thinned and dispersed. Monday, the chainsaws came.

Crew member Pablo Pieneda explained that the trimming was a routine utility job, scheduled to keep the lines clear. That kind of work happens all over the city, all year. But the coincidence of dates, one day after the festival, turned a maintenance call into something that felt more pointed.

Bubriski wasn’t angry at the crew. She understood the logic. Still, watching the branches fall, she found herself asking a larger question: why can’t New Haven bury its power lines? Underground infrastructure would spare the city’s street trees from the regular amputations that utilites require. It’s an argument that urban foresters and preservationists have made for years in cities across the country, and it’s not a cheap fix. But standing on Hughes Place with an armful of blossoms, the tradeoff felt vivid.

“It just breaks my heart that these trees have to be subjected to the wills of the power lines,” she said.

She’s not giving up on the trees, or on the neighborhood. Since moving from Branford last fall, she has planted 201 bulbs on her property, tulips and daffodils and hyacinths, the kind of patient investment that signals someone planning to stay. She knows the cherry trees will come back. The trimmed branches will be replaced by new growth. By next April, the canopy will be fuller again, if shaped differently.

There’s something instructive in the way Bubriski handled Monday morning. She could have watched from a window. Instead she went outside, grabbed a garbage can, and found a way to extend the season a little further for herself and her neighbors. A few branches on a patio, a few more passed over a fence, the blossoms opening in a different spot than they’d expected to.

Hughes Place will be back in full color next spring, assuming the trees recover the way they usually do. The festival will draw its crowds again. And United Illuminating will eventually need to send another crew through, because that’s how above-ground infrastructure works. The cycle isn’t going to change without a much more expensive decision by the city, the utilities, or both.

Until then, New Haven has people like Bubriski, willing to stand between beauty and the wood chipper and ask whether it has to be this way.