Earlier this week the Workingman Collective—local artists Janis Goodman, Tom Ashcraft, and Peter Winant—installed 30 bird habitats on 14th Street NW between P and U Streets. The project, titled Site, Cite, Sight, was commissioned by WPA/Corcoran as part of SiteProjects DC, which places a variety of art projects onto that stretch of 14th. You can see the collective’s members in that picture on the right. What’s with the orange jumpsuits? It’s about “interaction with the community,” says Goodman. “When we’re out there in our coveralls, people can come to us and ask us what we’re doing.” Adds Winant: “We’re recognized as doing something that’s an art piece, rather than graffiti artists.”

Site, Cite, Sight, Ashcraft says, is meant to draw city dwellers’ attention to the distinctions between “the environment and the built environment”: the habitats are designed for the Eastern Bluebird, the Black-capped Chickadee, and the Downy Woodpecker, three of the hardest-hit species from the West Nile Virus. (Specific habitat designs are “mainly a matter of the size of the openings,” says Goodman.) The Workingman Collective specializes in work that deals in this sort of urban-natural intersection. In April 2006 the group went to Butte, Mont., to draw a five-mile chalk line that “represents commitment, delineates territory and marks what’s cut and what’s kept.” Earlier this year Ashcraft and Winant headed to the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., to install Pine, a wooden ping-pong table intended in part to revitalize a little-used campus quad.

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I belong to one formal organization: the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. I’m not really a joiner, but it would be kind of rotten to not at least fork over membership dues to the PATC since I spend most weekends hiking the trails its members built and maintain. (In addition to taking care of 240 miles of the A.T., the PATC maintains just about all the trails in both Rock Creek Park and Shenandoah National Park, in addition to other popular spots, like Billy Goat).

So when my boyfriend and I started getting the newsletter advertising all the trails that need “overseers,” guilt got the better of us and we signed up to clean the mucky, garbage-ridden River Trail in Great Falls Park. But not because we are of pure heart. The greatest benefit of joining the PATC, we found out, is being able to rent the club’s members-only cabins. And the biggest benefit of signing up to clean the mucky, garbage-ridden River Trail is being able to get to the best ones first. (Trail overseers get, at least once a year, a good head start on dibs.)

Exhibit A: Glass House, a lovingly maintained cabin built in 1950 and donated to the PATC by noted D.C. geologist Jewell J. Glass, a club member from 1930 until her death in 1966. The cabin (there are twin bunks that sleep eight) inside George Washington National Forest is wrapped by a fantastic deck and a giant screened-in porch. The view’s better than TV, trust me, and great hiking starts right outside the door. We did a nice 12-miler to Signal Knob on Saturday and returned to the best reward: ice-cold beer from the cabin’s new fridge and an appreciative toast to the River Trail…and Dr. Glass.

In April, thousands of cherry trees on the banks of the Potomac will open their petals.

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We’ve always known that Mayor Adrian Fenty is a first-rate promoter. As councilmember, he got to crime scenes along with the police cruisers. As mayoral candidate, he traveled around to meet with other big-city mayors to talk about governing, as if the job were already his. And as honeymooning mayor, he’s coming up with more PR magic.

The latest trick came via the front page of last Thursday’s Washington Post: 200 initiatives for the first 100 days in office. Constituents had to be impressed: Two initiatives per day!

Sure, the story quoted an anonymous councilmember saying that there was nothing new in many of the initiatives. But that detail got buried after the jump, deep in the story. Among the ambitious plans touted on the Post’s front page was the notion that Fenty & Co. would plant 3,000 trees.

Perhaps this particular goal should have been included in the mayor’s recycling chapter. After all, those 3,000 trees are already “in the pipeline,” according to Dan Smith, senior director of communications for the Casey Trees Endowment Fund, a group that is assisting the District with its canopy. Smith notes that the city’s Urban Forestry Administration had ordered the trees prior to Fenty’s ascension.

Even so, says Smith, inclusion in the 100-day plan is a nice gesture. “[W]e do welcome the attention the Mayor is giving to trees by including them in the 100-days goals, by his support for trees that was clear in his campaign platform and in statements he made during the campaign, including at one of our fall community planting events,” writes Smith via e-mail.

And hizzoner has extra incentive to meet his 100-day goal: If Team Fenty waits much beyond its self-imposed deadline (mid-April), D.C.’s tree-planting season (October to early May) will be over.

On the 1000 block of Connecticut Avenue NW, among the exhaust and the crowds, you can find inner peace. Two small cedars, no more than 3 feet tall, are planted by the curb, and they resemble the miniature trees grown for the Japanese art of bonsai.

Aarin Packard of the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum doubts that they’re bonsai, though. “I don’t know; it’s not very common, I think, for people to discard bonsai in that manner,” he said. After examining a photo of the trees, he’s sure: “Just in terms of the basic style of bonsai, that doesn’t look like bonsai.”

Doubts about their bonsai-ness accompany doubts about their provenance. A guard at the closest office building suspected the Golden Triangle Business Improvement District was the culprit. Golden Triangle said to try the city. The city denied planting the trees—an arborist said they’re too small for their 4-foot-by-4-foot boxes—but is looking for whoever did.

“We’ll do an investigation into who planted the trees, if they had a permit, if they did not have the permit,” says Erik Linden, spokesperson for D.C.’s transportation department, which manages the city’s tree boxes. “But we’re not gonna go out and cut the trees down. We’re not in the business of doing that.”

A tree fell on a female pedestrian near the corner of 20th Street and Connecticut Avenue NW this afternoon. But it was less a freak accident than preventable one—the tree fell two hours after police were notified.

At around 10:30 a.m., a Chipotle delivery truck collided with the tree, leaving it hanging at a 45-degree angle, witnesses say. Police responded after the collision and completed a report, but none were present when the tree crashed to the sidewalk about two hours later.

“People in Cosi were screaming,” says Brett Freeman, manager of a local store, describing onlookers’ attempts to prevent the initial crash. The delivery truck backed up and hit the tree again. “The driver didn’t care.…We called city services, but they never came,” Freeman says.

An employee of a nearby sandwich shop who saw the incident, Hannah Tesman, confirms that the police had abandoned the scene. “The police came out, but no one fixed it.…[N]o one was there when the tree came down.”

Karen Reyes, manager of the Chipotle, did not witness the collision or see the tree fall, but confirms that the driver came in to use the telephone. Reyes would not provide the number of the delivery company.

Police spokesperson Ofc. Israel James says that a branch of the tree struck the woman—according to witnesses, in her mid-20s—on the arm. An ambulance was called, and she was treated on the scene, he says. James could not comment on why police left the scene before the tree was secured. “I wasn’t told what caused the branch to strike the person,” he says.

According to Eric Lindon Erik Linden of the D.C. Department of Transportation, the agency’s Urban Foresty Administration didn’t hear about the tree until after it fell, at 12:55 p.m. “We immediately dispatched our emergency crews to the scene,” he says.

On Saturday, Ward 8 activist Retta Gilliam would have turned 44. Instead, because of a tragic traffic accident last spring, a small crowd gathered in Anacostia Park to honor her memory, along with that of James Banks, another departed Ward 8 leader. Main Street Anacostia, the community group that organized the ceremony, has been planting trees for fallen comrades since 2004; this year, two cherry trees were planted for Banks and Gilliam.

But divining which of the 15 trees is in honor of which activist is not yet possible—the group has no money for nameplates, which cost about $100 each. “We’re trying to do some fundraising for that,” says Main Street’s executive director, Yavocka Young, standing by Banks’ tree. Or Gilliam’s.

Ward 3 Councilmember Kathy Patterson, on hand beefing up her east-of-the-river cred, says she wasn’t aware of the fiscal shortage, but thinks her fellow councilmembers might be able to help out. “But not with public funds,” she says. “Maybe a hundred bucks a councilmember.”