Trees of Significance: Planting for Community Healing
Jaala Smith. Photo credit: Julia Wolf
After buying trees for this year’s Green Blocks: Hilltop program, held in March, TTF’s Planting Director, Jaala Smith (she/they), had an intense moment of recognition when the European beech tree saplings began to leaf out.
They remember thinking: “I know this tree, what is this tree? I’m having memories of this tree.”
They soon realized that the saplings were the same species of tree that they had grown up climbing and sitting in as a kid. “There’s two giant ones in my [parents’] backyard and my dad built a platform treehouse across them. I remember learning how to use tools, I remember doing risky things like climbing and building. I spent so much of my childhood in those trees.”
The European beech tree is native to Scandinavia, Britain, parts of Spain and the Balkans as well as west Asia. Beeches have been cultivated in Europe for hundreds of years and used as natural fences, for furniture, food, and during the Roman empire, the bark as an early form of paper. It has multiple cultivars: the trees in Jaala’s childhood home are the green variety, called common beeches, but there are others around Tacoma, specifically in Wright Park that are the purple or copper beech variety and have wine-colored foliage. “They have huge seed pods and when it gets warm enough they pop… I remember being in the trees with tons of squirrels,” recalls Jaala. Beech nuts, the fruit of the tree, were historically an important source of food for early Europeans, and continue to be so for wildlife.
Purple beech in wright park. Photo credit: Eden Standley
The canopies of these trees are so dense that in beech forests other plants struggle to grow at all because of the near absolute lack of sunlight in the understory, leading to barren undergrowth. Looking at a picture of a beech forest one might begin to understand how stories like the Grimm fairy tales came about. In real life, though, their dense canopies make them an excellent shade tree for urban forests. I recommend locating some of the massive purple beeches in Tacoma’s Wright Park and standing under them on a warm day. It's how I imagine wearing an invisibility cloak might feel because of the deep shade and understory: here, the light cannot touch you and you feel hidden from the outside world.
This dense canopy gave Jaala a safe space to be alone. “All of my impactful memories are of alone time, solitude and quiet, no technology,” Jaala recalls. “No one could see me up there. It was not a tree house with walls, it was just a platform…I would just sit there and just stare. And I would be so quiet. The squirrels would be like ‘Whoa! What are you doing?’”
Beech forest Europe in summer. Photo credit: Wikimedia commons
Trees affect how human and non-human creatures feel within any given space, whether it is a built environment or a naturally occurring environment. “A tree is so intense” Jaala says, intense because they can shape our entire experience of a place. In built environments, like towns and cities, trees have historically been used to either include or exclude people from certain spaces. Trees can be planted to create welcoming open spaces for everyone, or be used as barriers, or to make a space uncomfortable for some folks.
Jaala grew up in Tacoma. After a career working as an arts educator, social worker, and gardener in other cities around the Puget Sound, they returned to their hometown. In 2023, Jaala joined TTF as Planting Coordinator, and has been the Planting Director since January 2025.
Jaala loves the work they do at the Tacoma Tree Foundation. “I really love talking to the community. I love being in their yards. I love meeting their families and dogs, and hearing their stories. Yeah, I love all of it!”
Art made in a high school class on the history of protest signs and civil rights through art. Photo credit: Jaala Smith
But their work goes deeper than the day to day interactions, as they can see the importance of the long-term services trees provide to the Tacoma Community. “To be able to directly impact the city that I grew up in and directly engage with residents that I live next to, is really powerful.” For Jaala, the connection between their work and their community often arises when ordering trees for a planting project, as it happened when planning Green Blocks: Hilltop this year. “It hit me that I was picking trees that are going to be old in my city. When I’m old, these trees are going to be old with me. I had to step back because it was overwhelming” they shared.
Jaala’s passion for community service began when she was an undergrad at the Evergreen State College: “I went to school just to make art. I didn't know what my plan was. I wanted to make art and read books and dance and be in the woods, which I did, which was amazing.” The first class Jaala took at Evergreen taught her about American identities and cultures through film and other art forms. They were introduced to the painful legacies of colonization, systemic racism, and the resulting social justice movements. “It really radicalized me.”
A mural designed and painted by middle schoolers depicting unity of voice and collective action. Photo credit: Jaala Smith
From college Jaala went into education and social work where they designed art projects with young people aimed at exploring their own cultural and individual identities. The projects ranged from preschool play productions to high school street art. But things really changed for Jaala when they were hired at an afterschool program in south Seattle, and a supervisor sent them to an anti-racist workshop for educators: “That was when I really learned about whiteness, and white privilege, and the power that white folks have to address racism and our blind spots.” After this moment they realized that they were well positioned to address racism by incorporating anti-racist practices into their educational approaches and other mediums they already worked with: “I always used gardening and art to build community and trust,” they said. These experiences positioned them well to work with wealthy white families and institutions to address racism and anti-racist practices. What they didn’t know yet was that trees would bring everything they were doing full circle.
Jaala finds TTF to be a supportive space to continue practicing anti-racist environmental work: “I definitely was drawn to this organization because of its openness to talk about oppression and environmental racism and queerness, and to being self-reflective on the systems that we're contributing to. And not claiming to be doing it right, but just claiming to be aware and be adaptable to the communities that we're serving.”
Being Planting Director is intimately connected to their commitment to support Tacoma’s collective healing from a history of environmental racism that stems, in part, from historic redlining practices. Jaala understands that planting trees is only one way out of many ways to move towards healing the past harm of racialized violence. In their position at TTF, they work to address this issue through tree planting which gives them an opportunity to transform the city’s infrastructure towards equity. When planting beeches in Hilltop back in March, Jaala was able to plant the very same species of tree that cared for them during their childhood in a neighborhood that has been historically redlined.
Hilltop green blocks group planting. Photo credit: Julia
Based solely on race, Hilltop was systematically restricted in receiving the benefits of development and financial investments that other richer, whiter, less diverse communities were allowed to receive, a practice which was completely legal at the time. Decades of environmental disinvestment have left Hilltop residents at higher risk for heat-related illness. Communities with low tree canopy can be 10 or more degrees hotter than those with trees. In addition, a low tree canopy neighborhood also experiences social isolation, and its residents are more vulnerable to illness. All this is not even mentioning the generational trauma communities of color may associate with trees due to green gentrification.
The new beech trees Jaala ordered, and which volunteers helped plant for Green Blocks: Hilltop, will do a lot to mitigate heat and lack of green space in the area. They are one of the largest species we acquired for the program. While at the moment the newly planted beeches are small, over the years they could grow to be over 75 ft, providing much needed shade and beauty to the neighborhood.
Teenage Jaala in Front of the Beech trees at their parent's house. Photo credit: Jaala
Jaala believes that trees have an amazing power to bridge the perceived barriers that divide various groups of people: “Trees can surpass that [perceived barrier] and connect people, which I feel about art, and I feel about food and gardening as well.” They also say the position of Planting Director feels similar to some of the social work positions they have held before: “I'm like the social worker for the trees, or is it for the people? It's probably all of them, right?” Part of Jaala’s work is to ensure that trees go to good homes, and that the people in those homes feel well equipped to care for their tree. The tree, in turn, will care for them in many ways over the years, just as the European beeches cared for Jaala when they were growing up.
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