LEAFING OUT
How to turn 1 sapling into 2.8 million trees
In December 1988, six friends crouched around a bonfire on a large farm near Cedar Park. Austinites Ken Gaede, David Kettler and Mark Dameron were part of that small party celebrating the winter solstice.
Global warming came up, as did the widespread destruction of the rainforests. Yet the conversation among those huddled around the campfire, who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, moved inextricably from world affairs to local action.
“We were ruing the loss of trees from all the construction around town,” says Kettler, who recently retired from a roofing company that bears his name. “Bulldozers knocking things down left and right. We agreed that there was not much we could do about it. But at least we could each plant one tree.” That’s what they did. “We decided to plant one tree each on our own properties, one in our neighborhoods and one in the community,” says Gaede, a retired architect who lives in the Bouldin area. “I planted a red oak at home, then a shade tree at Travis Heights Elementary, then one at a nursing home in Bastrop, which was our first big group planting.”
Not all the original trees from the 1980s survived. Yet from those scattered plantings grew a solidly rooted nonprofit called TreeFolks, which not only puts saplings into the ground but also sustains them afterwards. Lots of trees. During the past 30 years, TreeFolks has set down more than 2.8 million trees in the Austin area, many of them in response to the destruction wrought by the Bastrop County Complex Fire that scorched the land on Labor Day weekend in 2011, and the Memorial Day weekend floods along the Blanco River that stripped away not only countless tall cypresses but also the banks where they stood in 2015.