J. Adam Fenster/The Gazette Washington Grove Town Councilman Darrell Anderson is spearheading an inventory of trees.

To ensure that its characteristic slogan, "a town within a forest," will still apply to the rustic town of Washington Grove 50 years down the road, residents have been examining each and every tree on the town's public property, assessing each one's health and life span.

The project -- to make an inventory of all the trees on public property and enter them into a database -- started two years ago "because we're losing a lot of trees," said Darrell Anderson, a town councilman who is overseeing the process.

With the database, the town will be able to keep track of when each tree is pruned, loses branches, or reaches the end of its expected life span.

According to the data from the inventory, which lists more than 1,000 trees, the town will set up a planting rotation for up to 50 years.

By systematically replanting trees as they die, the town's goal is to preserve its distinctive canopy of trees, Anderson said.

"There was always a program [to buy new trees]," he said, "but no system to guarantee that we maintain the canopy of trees above Washington Grove."

A five-year plan should be ready by the end June, he said. The town will then make a 20-year plan and eventually expand it to 50 years.

Since the town started putting the inventory together, it has almost doubled the number of trees it buys and plants each year, Anderson said.

One of the most prominent problems for trees in Washington Grove is their root loss, when the roots die back because of construction, said Dan Landry, the town's forestry consultant.

The problem was not a surprise, he said, because Washington Grove is congested and "surrounded by Montgomery County."

Still, "We found that we're actually not in bad shape -- we were surprised by that," said Anderson, who has a background in biology and botany. "... A lot of our trees are 200 years old, and they're squashed between houses or something, but they're still pretty healthy."

Landry said it's "fairly common" for municipalities to develop a tree inventory.

Municipalities sometimes use a geographic information system or a global positioning system to collect data, he added.

In Washington Grove, residents volunteered to examine trees and mark them on a paper map. Landry held a few training sessions to teach volunteers how to assess the trees, and gave them forms on which they rated the trees' roots, foliage, trunks and other features.

The inventory only includes trees on public property and does not include trees in the 50 acres of woods on the east and west edges of the town, Anderson said.

Those trees could have problems, however, because they are all about the same age, so they will die around the same time, he said. The trees on the west side, for example, are mostly poplars, which last about 100 years, Anderson said, "and we're almost there now."

The town plans to focus mostly on buying native trees, such as white oaks. Because deer tend to eat small trees, they are also buying bigger ones, which are more expensive, he said.

The town will also add some ornamental trees and build a gateway over Washington Grove Lane.