Columnist Susan Snyder: Saving life and limb on Pearl St.

Friday, Oct. 3, 2003 | 8:46 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

The Los Pecos senior apartment complex is still under construction, but its first resident has already taken root.

The resident is likely to be the oldest at Los Pecos, and the tallest.

It's a tree.

A lucky tree. This cat claw acacia in the Paradise area narrowly escaped a contractor's chainsaw.

"It's exceptionally large and exceptionally beautiful," said Norm Schilling, president of Schilling Horticulture Group and an arborist who estimates the tree at about 120 years old.

Cat claw acacia is a shrub that typically grows to a height of 15 feet. But this one towers 35 feet above the west side of Pearl Street, just north of Patrick Lane. And that alone seemed reason enough to save it, said Suzanne Lucas, a woman who lives next to the Los Pecos construction site.

"I've live here for 15 years, and this tree has been the only real landmark," she said. "It has stood there quiet and proud while the developers moved in."

Schilling noticed the tree in August. Lucas hired him to do an assessment of possible damage that could occur to trees on her property as a result of adjacent ones being cut down for construction.

From Lucas' yard, Schilling saw the acacia at the edge of the construction site. He notified Lisa Calderwood, Las Vegas community forester for the Nevada Division of Forestry. Calderwood keeps track of Southern Nevada's biggest trees and records them as champions in hopes of protecting them. This one is a whopper.

"You usually don't find them that big at all," Calderwood said.

New developments typically have strict landscaping guidelines that include a required number of trees and shrubs so that the areas will have suitable, thriving vegetation in the future. But few, if any rules, consider old trees.

"We have a lot of ordinances that look to the future," Calderwood said. "But a lot of the old parts of town are being re-developed. We never have really put in ordinances that look back. The urban forest is a treasure that is going unrecognized."

Not on Pearl Street. Lucas called Schilling who called Calderwood who called Jack Zunino, the landscape architect working on the Los Pecos project. He spoke with the Oregon contractor and convinced him to erect a fence around it.

Zunino called the decision a "no-brainer." The tree stands in what is to be a 20-foot-wide landscaping bed. Besides, it has earned a reprieve.

"It's a hardy tree," Zunino said. "It's been living there without supplemental water forever."

But it needs a little pruning. Schilling said he and other volunteers of the Southern Nevada Arborist Group will clip the dead branches Oct. 18 as part of their regular meeting.

As development continues to encompass the valley's landscape, architects and contractors should consider saving and using existing plant life whenever possible.

"We're going to be running into more plants that are of specimen quality," Zunino said. "We need to salvage them. You can't buy time."

And you can't underestimate the inspiration of a little victory. Lucas lost her war against the apartment complex construction, but she won her battle for the tree.

"Knowing she's going to remain, even though everything else around her changes, brings me a lot of comfort."