Does the health of our trees reflect the health of our communities? In this post, Joey Hulbert, PhD, Forest Health Watch Program Director, and his team explain why diversifying the trees in our urban forest is an important means of keeping trees, like the beloved native Bigleaf Maple, and other maple varieties, healthy and thriving.

What does Tacoma need to do in order to confront the health threats posed by the urban heat island effect and the overall challenges of climate change? In this post, Executive Director of the Tacoma Tree Foundation, Lowell Wyse, explains the health and environmental effects of urban heat island, how the Foundation and city and county partners are working to confront these challenges, and the urgent steps that leaders and governments must take today to ensure trees are an essential component of urban infrastructure tomorrow.

In this essay, Eden Standley interviews TTF partners, Robb Krehbiel and Vivian deZwager about their alternative yards, and explains why it is actually greener on the other side—when there’s no lawn. The post provides numerous tips for anyone curious about creating an alternative yard, as well as ways to start small.

How learning about sense of place can help us understand the reasons why neighborhoods either have or lack trees, and how we can draw on place awareness to grow a fairer and healthier urban forest.

Our guide to tree propagation!

This year was our biggest year ever! We distributed 2,276 trees with the help of 154 volunteers and we have so many memories to share, here are just a few of our highlights!

New buildings are required to plant trees but what happens after they’re planted?

New data from our Branch Out event this February offers a promising look at our impact.

Two proposed projects within a mile of each other, in Fircrest and South Tacoma, highlight how different city policies are affecting tree coverage and quality of life in neighboring communities.

At Tacoma Tree Foundation, we believe that community and trees grow together. South Tacoma will be a neighborhood of focus for us in 2022–2023 thanks to a unique collaboration known as G.R.I.T.: Greening Research in Tacoma.

Tacoma Tree Foundation is getting a boost in the new year thanks to the Puyallup Watershed Initiative (PWI).

On a rainy Monday in October, I loaded an Oregon white oak seedling into the back of my car and headed down the road from Tacoma to Portland. It’s not a host gift I would give to just anyone, but the Garry oak prairies form a biological connection across Cascadia, and I did not want to show up at Friends of Trees empty-handed!

Some good stories start in the middle.
This one starts on a rainy day in February 2019, when I first met Sarah Low in a Tacoma coffee shop. Sarah had recently created the Tacoma Tree Foundation, and I was dying to know more.

Walking through the forest at Point Defiance Park, you experience the forest around you as a cohesive system made up of many individual parts. Firs, cedars, madrones, maples, huckleberries, ferns, lichens, mosses, and fungi all exist in chaotic harmony, perfectly suited to the part they play in the health and well-being of the forest. Together, it all works. Together, it’s beautiful.

A recent study by the American Forests Foundation calculated that to maintain the current levels of urban forest, each urban resident needs to plant approximately 7 trees in their lifetime. To grow our urban forests, that number grows to about 11 trees per person. But planting trees is only part of the story--a big part of maintaining and growing canopy coverage is actually preserving the trees we already have.

Last month Tacoma (and the entire PNW) felt first-hand how climate change is already affecting us and changing the seasons as we know them. Summers have been getting drier, hotter, and more uncomfortable—and will continue to do so. But if your house was shaded by mature trees, you were probably a little less hot than most of us.

You might be tired of hearing about what a long and challenging year it has been, but it has been a long and challenging year. We still need to help each other out. Thankfully, helping others also helps you.

If we could nominate an official tree for Cascadia, we’d put down Douglas fir in a heartbeat. To us, Douglas-firs are synonymous with the Pacific Northwest. They’re rugged, beautiful, and durable--and have been useful companions to the inhabitants of the PNW for thousands of years.

As any quick internet search will tell you, pruning is both an art and a science. Whole courses and workshops are taught on pruning. There are a lot of fine details on proper pruning, with different techniques being taught for different kinds of trees. We’re not here to get that complicated. Most of us don’t need to be pruning pros in order to take care of our trees properly. But there is one critical thing everyone needs to know: topping trees is bad.