In early April, lightning streaked across the black clouds looming over my city, and thunder roared. I stood under a 100-year-old redwood with fellow tree planters caught off guard on a natural history walk and beamed with delight.
As someone who grew up on a bare street in an arid area near Los Angeles, I fell in love with the sound of the wind traveling through towering pines during family vacations in the mountains. At age 30, I went to live among the oaks and Douglas firs of Oregon, but seasonal affective disorder walloped me six months out of the year. I realized recently that this is prime time for tree planting, and if I committed wet, freezing mornings to this practice, I’d find my purpose and my people.
Winters in the Pacific Northwest can be long and dark, with a damp cold that settles into the bones and foments despair until Arbor Day. Pair sunsets at 4:30 p.m. with endless stories about the climate crisis, and it’s tempting to surrender to Netflix, the least helpful of coping strategies. But on Martin Luther King Jr. Day last January, my city invited the public to plant trees in parks and open spaces, and I felt my tightly budded heart crack open just a little.
That morning, I dressed in two layers against the chilly fog blowing in from the river and shivered in a grassy circle with volunteers whose ages spanned five generations. City employees told us we’d be planting saplings of maple, alder and oak. I pulled on gloves, grabbed a shovel and attached myself to a 70-year-old tree planter who showed me how to massage stubborn root balls with a pruning saw and who pointed out the trees’ root flares.
“Keep them visible above the soil line when you plant,” she cautioned about the flares, “or the trunk will rot.”
Rot had settled in my soggy brain. Despite a multitude of trees on my third of an acre at home, I knew little about them and nothing about the species we were planting alongside the river. I forgot about the cold in my eagerness to learn about the maples that would grow 100 feet tall along the river path. “An Oregon white oak is home to more than 2,000 species … birds and animals and insects and fungi,” my newly adopted mentor told me. “And a mature alder can pull almost 50 pounds of CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the air and sequester it in the soil.”
In short, trees are badass.
This winter, dendrology replaced my sadness. I read Douglas Tallamy’s “The Nature of Oaks” and learned about that magical five minutes in April that cynipid gall wasps inject an egg and hormones to induce a tree to form a gall that will protect the growing larva. I listened to the tree podcast “Completely Arbortrary” and learned that the redwood under which I had stood during the thunderstorm can grow to 300-plus feet from a 2-millimeter seed. I learned that the tree canopy can cool down a city block by 10 degrees while providing habitat for native insects, birds, squirrels and the raccoons that love to swim midnight laps in my husband’s koi pond.
Colleen Kujawa: Want a cure for cynicism? Try digging holes and planting trees.
Tree-planting nonprofits exist all over the U.S. You can plant with Openlands in Chicago, TreePeople in Southern California, Casey Trees in Washington, D.C., Tree Trust in Minnesota and The Greening of Detroit in Michigan. My city is home to an offshoot of the Portland-based Friends of Trees. Throughout the rainiest, muddiest months in winter and spring, staff members and volunteers spend Saturday mornings planting street trees and yard trees in city-owned and private lots. The organization also offers guided walks like the one I took in a thunderstorm; they’re open to anyone who wants their mind blown by stories of the trees we drive past every day.
This season, I’ve had little time to languish on my couch and doomscroll. I’ve joined a band of cheerful arborists and volunteers who — instead of wringing their hands over drought and warming temperatures — pull gloves over their cold, calloused hands and get to work.
What a joy it is now to bicycle past the trees I’ve helped plant and see their gleaming new leaves unfurled against blue sky.
Come November, I will myself unfurl, repeating poet W.S. Merwin’s words as I put on my boots and zip up my waterproof pants: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.”
Melissa Hart is a journalist and author whose latest book is “Find Your Nature: 40 Ways to Deepen Your Connection to Your Flora, Fauna and Neighborhood,” which will be published by Timber in 2027.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
