As she walked between tables of people in a conference room at Mission: St. Louis on North Grand Boulevard, Rebeccah Bennett posed a question.
“Who remembers where they were on May 16?”
The crowd of about 40 murmured in recognition — they hardly needed a reminder. Even months later, the day a powerful tornado hit their homes and neighborhoods was still at the top of everyone’s mind.
The group was gathered for a daylong retreat called Go Deeper. It aimed to address pain and trauma participants have related to green spaces and trees. The retreat was held by Forest ReLeaf, a nonprofit that grows and plants trees in Missouri, and community healing organizations InPower Institute and Black Healers Collective.
“We want to hold the paradox today … for a reverence for nature and for the fear that is caused by nature,” said Bennett, the founder and executive director of InPower Institute.
Over the course of hours, participants shared their personal experiences on the day of the tornado, recounting how the winds churned up debris and uprooted trees that ripped apart their homes and senses of normalcy.
They also talked over the many ways trees and green spaces benefit cities — providing cleaner air, cooler homes and beauty. And they participated in breathing exercises and guided meditations, imagining treelike roots that connect them to their communities.
In St. Louis, trees don’t cover neighborhoods equally; there are fewer trees shading lower-income and majority-Black neighborhoods than there are in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.
After years of disinvestment and both historic and recent sources of trauma related to trees, the road to a healthier urban canopy in St. Louis is not simple. The tornado made the tree inequity worse and eroded trust in trees in majority-Black neighborhoods, but Forest ReLeaf is working to rebuild trust with an innovative program.
Unequal canopy
Thousands of trees were lost across the path of the tornado, and officials are still working to understand the true toll of the storm.
Many of the trees planted in north St. Louis were varieties that grow fast but have weak wood, said Forest ReLeaf Partnership Manager Rebecca Hankins.
“No tree is immune to a tornado,” Hankins said. “Even the most healthy, sturdy oak tree can come down in such a significant storm. But we know that trees that have defects [and] are [poorly] structured – are weaker trees. We affectionately call those weed trees. Those are more likely to come down in a storm.”
Improper care can leave trees vulnerable to damage, with dead, dying or diseased trees in need of pruning or even removal.
The tree species can also contribute. Hankins said Tree of Heaven, Siberian elms and silver maples grow quickly in their natural forest environment, but those same species can become problems in cities. Instead, Forest ReLeaf focuses on growing and planting trees that are native to the region.
In predominantly Black neighborhoods, there are fewer trees. According to the Tree Equity Score National Explorer, about a fifth of the Fairground Park census area had tree canopy before the tornado. In wealthier, whiter St. Louis County neighborhoods, tree canopy can more than double that.
There are policies that cities can adopt to protect trees, said Missouri Coalition for the Environment Policy Coordinator Elyse Schaeffer.
“Ladue and Webster Groves have really fantastic tree preservation policies, and it would be fantastic to see the City of St. Louis take this moment and say, ‘We really need something in place to help protect our city trees, too,’” Schaeffer said.
In divested areas like north St. Louis, many trees are not planted in the right location and don’t have enough space to grow and live out full lives, Hankins said. In tight spaces, they can suffer from root rot or other diseases and die.
“The root structure of a tree is what anchors it into the ground and keeps it really stable because the canopy on top can be really large and make it unbalanced, and so you need that balance below the surface,” Hankins said. “When you have a really small planting space, it doesn't allow for that root to grow as big as it should, to really support the canopy on top that we see.”
In the 150 mph-plus winds St. Louis saw on May 16, even stronger, healthier trees were ripped from their roots, and almost no trees remain unscathed in the path of the storm.
Barriers to embracing trees
A few days after the Go Deeper retreat, Diana Fluellen raked a big pile of mulch in her front yard in the Fairground Park neighborhood.
The mulch is what’s left of a giant sweet gum tree that her family planted decades ago. It split in the tornado, falling on Fluellen’s roof and the building next to her, causing drywall damage in Fluellen’s house and scattering bricks in her and her neighbor’s yard.
Fluellen’s family moved to this house in 1972, and she recently came back to care for her 84-year-old mother.
She said that despite the damage the old tree caused, she hasn’t been scared off from trees.
“I will put one back in for the environment,” Fluellen said. “I'm learning more about climate change and stuff like this, going to these different programs.”
Fluellen has been learning about the benefits of trees through Forest ReLeaf’s Treesilience program. She’s become a community stakeholder in the program and now advocates for trees. But she said many of her neighbors don’t want trees.
“They don't want nothing in their yard,” Fluellen said. “They don't want a tree near them because they fall and break stuff and then they fall on the lines, and they have no electric for a week or so. Trees do a lot, but they cause a lot of damage.”
Fluellen had firsthand experience with that recently. Her insurance covered paying a company to remove her tree, and she was shocked by the price.
“They took part of the tree off, and part of some of the little limbs that was left, and they charged State Farm 24,000 and something dollars,” she said.
Cost is a big factor in people’s relationships with trees, said Kelly Hicks. She’s the Environmental Justice Lead at Forest ReLeaf and coordinates the Treesilience program.
“We know that the cost of tree removal and often even tree pruning, can be really expensive,” Hicks said. “What we all realized is, that also became a barrier between people wanting to plant trees and have trees.”
That’s why Treesilience offers free tree removal, pruning, workshops and saplings to plant. Hicks said people are often drawn in by free services to address problem trees, but then they get hooked.
“We don't have a really big problem trying to sell the tree removal, right? It's free tree removal,” Hicks said. “But then when they're part of the program, they realize, ‘Oh, now we're getting lessons on how to maintain our trees. We get access to tree tools. We have the opportunity to participate in a tree stipend program that can pay us for helping our neighborhood to water their trees for the next two years.’”
The Treesilience program has helped close to 100 homeowners and continues to grow.
Growing tree advocates
The day before the tornado, Hicks and her team won an award at Focus St. Louis' What's Right with the Region ceremony.
A day later, the tornado cut a mile-wide path through the neighborhoods they had been working in.
“I realized, ‘Oh my God, that is the exact location where we just planted all those trees with our stakeholders,’” Hicks said. “It was just like blown away, literally.”
At first, Hicks asked her coworkers to take a step back, reminding them they are “just the tree people.”
“I told my organization, don't bother them,” she remembered. “Let them have a break. Everybody on the north side needs to be left alone.”
But after a week, Hicks started getting calls asking for trees to replace the ones that were lost.
“After hearing that two or three more times, we realized, ‘Wow, the program, it works,’” Hicks said. “Because even when this storm, this tornado, affected houses, neighborhoods, businesses, streets, people, people's lives, in ways that were extremely devastating, they were like, ‘Hey, tree folk, we'd like more trees. We recognize the benefits.’”
Forest ReLeaf and Hicks want to grow their group of tree advocates in St. Louis, and they’re hoping to find funding to do more Go Deeper retreats to heal the emotional scars of the tornado.
“We recognize now that it needs to be specifically focused on the tornado as well,” Hicks said. “We need to keep doing it after the storm.”
The cooling power of trees
Decades-old trees provide shade in hot and humid St. Louis summers, but trees also cool in other ways. Through the process of evapotranspiration, trees act as natural air conditioning, using the water in their root systems, vaporizing it and releasing microscopic water vapors through leaves to cool the air around them. Trees can even reduce energy costs.
That’s especially important in the city, where temperatures are measurably higher, a phenomenon called the urban heat island, Schaeffer said.
“Trees do a massive amount to help combat that,” Schaeffer said. “Depending on the density of trees that are planted and how old those trees are, we can see between 2 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit of cooling just from trees.”
With Ameren's moratorium on electricity disconnections for nonpayment having ended, residents impacted by the tornado now have the added worry of how to pay rising energy bills.
“Imagine that your house is under the hot, hot sun with no tree to cover it,” Schaeffer said. “I know my Ameren bill was $400 last month. If I had a big old shade tree in front of my house helping to cool it down, that might have lowered my bill significantly.”
Trees are a cost-effective way to combat rising temperatures related to climate change, both bringing temperatures down and absorbing planet-warming carbon, but without proper replanting, north St. Louis could see an increase in heat-related deaths.
It is important to come up with creative solutions to replanting trees instead of reverting to old ways, Hankins said. Intergenerational tree planting, or planting slow growing trees that are a bit older mixed in with fast-growing trees helps to nurture the urban canopy.
It can take decades to recover and replant these trees. The city and Forest ReLeaf are collaborating closely to plant strategically and partnering with the community to ensure trees are planted to stay.
A changed landscape
Well before the tornado, trees were not always a symbol of safety or comfort for Black people, Bennett said. The African American experience has been defined by displacement, especially during slavery — a time that turned relationships with the land from something sacred to pure production.
“Those trees have been places of great pain and trauma, where we have been lynched, and hurt,” Bennett said. “Increasingly, in an environment that's defined by climate crisis and climate catastrophe, nature isn't just our ally anymore.”
At the same time, Bennett said, trees represented a path to freedom.
“Forested places … could give us the kind of cover where we could try to make our ways to better life or to freedom as we imagined it,” Bennett said.
As the city looks to the future of trees in affected areas, it is impossible to step out of the shade of the trees communities lost, trees that were an integral part of the places people grew up.
“I don't think we understand tree trauma or our relationships with trees without understanding the significance of place and how place shapes the human experience,” Bennett said. “Place gives us security. Place provides food. Place is a source of community and community connections. Place connects us to history. Place is significant.”
For some, that sense of place is connected to a specific tree — one that became like a family member over generations.
Sheila Davis lives in her Big Mama’s house, which her grandmother bought in 1940, a block from Fountain Park. About six generations of her family have lived in the brick home.
Out front, a large walnut tree casts an uneven shadow — it has just a few limbs left and is marked by recent damage.
“That tree is a part of my heritage,” Davis said. “It has been here as long as I can remember. Over 100 years old, part of the family history.”
When Davis’ children were young, she would bake with the walnuts from the tree, making cookies, brittle, banana nut bread and ice cream. She said the walnut tree is a symbol of strength, mobility and legacy.
Before the tornado, Forest ReLeaf pruned the tree for Davis, which she said made it look much healthier. But the tornado tore the top of it off. Davis said the tree will have to be removed, and Forest ReLeaf will help.
The streets around Fountain Park have been completely changed — piles of brick lay next to what is left of homes, and large root balls show where trees came down. Davis said it’s so unbelievable, she sometimes sits in her car and just stares at her block.
After the walnut tree is gone, Davis plans to plant again. But this time she wants something that won’t grow quite as big.
“Something maybe that blooms flowers,” Davis said, “something pretty to take my mind off of things.”
