About a year after the little green bugs first were spotted west of St. Charles, Paul Pedersen gave the order to kill 6,500 ash trees.

"We didn't really have a choice," said Pedersen, who with his partners, owns PP&O Nursery in central Kane County near Elburn. "Knowing this was going to be a big problem, we took the beating and the loss at that time, and we figured there would be replacement programs later."

However, in the five years since making that decision, Pedersen said the payoff expected from that decision has just now begun to materialize, as local city officials, homeowners and just ordinary people walking about on public streets and in public parks begin to come to grips with the devastation being wrought by the emerald ash borer.

"It's bad, and it's getting worse," said Pedersen. "We expect that in the next year or two, people are really going to notice and want to do something."

Since the middle years of the last decade, the tiny green beetle known as the emerald ash borer has infested ash trees of all varieties in Kane County and elsewhere in northern Illinois.

The exotic pest, believed to have been imported on wooden packing crates from China, was first detected in North America in about 2002 in Michigan. From there, the insect has spread rapidly throughout the Great Lakes region, arriving in northern Illinois around 2006.

The damage wrought by the emerald ash borer has been stark.

"How bad is it? Well, there are no ash trees left around Detroit," said Edith Makra Kusnierz, community trees advocate at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. "And the losses everywhere the emerald ash borer has gone are dramatic."

Makra Kusnierz noted that ash trees have no natural resistance to the emerald ash borer, which infests ash trees as a place to lay its eggs. When the young larval borers hatch, they feed on the trees' matter just below the bark, effectively starving the tree of water and nutrients and killing the tree.

Additionally, the emerald ash borer, which is native to East Asia, has no known predators in North America, meaning there is no check on the growth of the insect's population other than a readily available stock of healthy ash trees.

"That's not to say there aren't things here that will eat emerald ash borer," Makra Kusnierz said. "We are studying some options, and something might emerge.

"But there's nothing really slowing down the emerald ash borer right now."

She said some treatments have shown success. But she questioned whether those treatments were reducing the impact of emerald ash borer.

But the vast majority of ash trees will fall prey to the insects, she said, eventually reducing their populations to a dangerously low level.

However, while the insect has been known to be in Kane County for the last half a decade, Makra Kusnierz and others in the business of growing and tending to trees said the damage produced by the emerald ash borer is just now beginning to be detected.

Initially, physical losses were limited to a few pockets of ash trees that were found to be infested or to those that were at immediate risk of becoming infested.

However, economic losses to nursery operators in the region were more widespread.

Scott Grams, executive director of the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association, said nursery operators throughout the state moved to cut down or burn stands of thousands of ash trees that they had grown, anticipating future sales.

Grams said nursery growers had for years maintained a large stock of ash trees to meet the needs of those wishing to plant ash trees, prized by developers of new subdivisions and others as an economical and otherwise hardy species with which to line new streets and lend shade to new parks and backyards.

By the time of the onset of the emerald ash borer, Grams said ash tree populations had grown to account for about 20 percent of all trees standing in northern Illinois' communities.

In other communities, however, ash trees accounted for far more, said Makra Kuniersz. Particularly in communities in which the majority of neighborhoods had been built in the last three decades, such as many of the neighborhoods in the Tri-Cities and elsewhere in Kane County, she said ash trees could account for as much as 35-50 percent of the tree canopy.

"And in some neighborhoods, it could be as high as 80 percent," she said.

Matt Zerby, co-owner of the Wasco Nursery and Garden Center near Campton Hills, said the market for ash trees collapsed shortly after the discovery of emerald ash borers in the region.

Like other nursery owners, he ordered Wasco Nursery's stands of almost 800 ash trees "bulldozed."

"It was sad, but we couldn't afford to keep them," he said. "No one was going to buy an ash tree any more."

Instead, Zerby, like Pedersen at PP&O, reoriented his business to be ready for an expected boom in the market for different tree species to replace felled ash trees.

He said Wasco's business strategy has begun to bear fruit, as ash tree replacement has grown to account for about 25 percent of his business' shade tree sales.

At PP&O, ash tree replacements still account for just about 5 percent of the tree sales, said Pedersen.

But both Zerby and Pedersen said they anticipate sales to grow in the next year or two.

"Until now, the damage was pretty much out of sight, out of mind," Zerby said. "But this year, and even more so next year, it's going to be front and center."

However, the expected boom in planting replacements for ash trees could be slowed by economic realities.

Grams said many nursery operators, like Pedersen, had been anticipating strong business from cities seeking to reforest their urban and suburban interiors, that may have been left barren by the death of rows of hundreds or thousands of ash trees.

But those cities, because of the sustained economic recession, have "budget problems, just like everyone else," Grams said. That also has put a damper on their ability to buy more trees.

"They've been removing them [the ash trees], for sure," Grams said. "But they're not replenishing as fast as they are removing.

"People are going to be dealing with some barren corners for a while, we think."

Public works officials in local cities conceded it has been difficult to keep up with the emerald ash borer.

In Elburn, Public Works Director John Nevenhoven said his crews have removed hundreds of ash trees, but have been very limited in how many they can replace.

Elburn residents wanting a new tree planted along the street in front of their homes to replace a lost ash tree have two options, Nevenhoven said. They can pay half the $300 cost for a replacement tree and get it planted now. Or they can place their name on the list for a "free tree" and wait perhaps years for the village to get the money to plant it, he said.

"Unfortunately, there's only so much money that we can dedicate to this right now," Nevenhoven said.

In St. Charles, officials have replaced almost all of the 1,500 ash trees they have felled, said city arborist Ben Deutsch. But that will become increasingly difficult as the dead trees pile up, he said.

"Our priority is to get infested trees down," Deutsch said. "But that's becoming harder and harder to keep up with.

"And this year and next year, we're projecting are going to be the worst years yet."

Zerby said he understands that, just as local cities are strapped for cash, homeowners also might be reluctant to fork over the money to replace a tree.

"For some people, there is a real emotional attachment to these trees, we know," Zerby said. "But the money may not be there, and so there just may be some trees that never get replaced."

Removing trees

Want to replace the ash tree that died on your property? There is no assistance available to remove or replace ash trees on private property that have succumbed to the emerald ash borer.

But for homeowners willing to pay the price, Edith Makra Kusnierz at the Morton Arboretum recommends certain tree species as viable alternatives to ash, all of which will offer similar amenities as ash:

• Hackberry

• Hybrid elm

• Oak

• Kentucky coffee tree

• Maple

She also recommended that homeowners consider the tree populations in their neighborhood before planting a new tree, potentially holding off on planting a maple tree in an area in which there are many maple trees already.

"We ask people to plant the right tree in the right place," Makra Kusniersz said.