“Don’t fix that fence till you cut down that tree,” our new best friend, an arborist from the Davey Tree Expert Company, warned us. My husband and I were like so many Houstonians recalibrating from two storms just several weeks apart: the derecho of May 16 and Hurricane Beryl, which hit July 8, both of which brought black skies and drenching rain and upended Houston’s luxurious tree canopy like nothing we’d seen in our decades in the city. Now, like most of our neighbors, we were trying to assess the damage.
The cost of the derecho is estimated at between $5 billion and $8 billion—four thousand windows were knocked out of downtown buildings alone. Beryl left 2.2 million homes, schools, and businesses without power, in some cases for weeks, and caused—at last count—38 deaths in and around Houston. Moody’s put its price tag at anywhere from $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion. (For comparison, Hurricane Harvey’s bill came in at $160 billion, but it’s hard to see any damage ranked in the billions as a bargain.) We were luckier than most—no branches crashed into our house—though a limb from one of our tallest pecans broke off and pierced a neighbor’s roof so deeply that inside, it dangled from her living room ceiling like a pendulum of doom. Otherwise, we suffered only a downed fence and the listing of our forty-foot chinaberry tree at a 75-degree angle, half the roots exposed. It would have to go, according to the arborists’ diagnosis. At a cost in the low four figures. Not covered by insurance.
As I surveyed our collapsed fence and my rapidly depleting bank account, I realized that climate change had come into our lives in a whole new way. Hurricane season was nearing the end of its most threatening period, from August through September, and in the last few days, some of the most ardent weather Cassandras revised their estimates of seasonal doom downward—Xanax for those with weather-induced PTSD. (As soon as they did, a new storm, Francine, started building in the Gulf.) My husband and I have good-naturedly endured many storms in the last few decades—sleeping in a movie theater parking lot when flooded roads blocked our way home, marveling at highway dips turned into shimmering lakes—but somehow these last two storms found us, if not heading for the exits, at least locating them. We became one of many shell-shocked couples who, to paraphrase a recent Houston Chronicle editorial, had endured two power outages in two months, Mumbai-like temperatures during the day, and sleepless, sweltering nights—we too lost AC for a while—along with “tedious and expensive cleanup chores and repairs.” The same editorial cited a 2023 University of Houston survey that found that 57 percent of its respondents wondered whether they should be getting out of here for good. It sounded like our breakfast-table conversation.
The latest series of climate disasters also brought a new realization: The trees that have long sheltered me are now also a threat to my health and safety. This isn’t exactly a new insight—every hurricane brought a downed tree or two in the neighborhood, and every time the city subsequently tried to cut branches away from power lines, house-to-house fighting broke out between arbor-loving residents and the guys with the wood-chipper trucks. (And yes, I know what happened to Governor Abbott on one windy Houston day.) But the damage to the trees, and the subsequent damage they caused this time around, seemed like a direct threat from nature itself. I wasn’t imagining things: Texas A&M Forest Service estimated that half of the “urbanized area” trees were impacted by Beryl. Translated, that means trees weakened by recent storms could become a bigger threat the next time around. In Houston, there is always a next time around.
The streets of my inner-city neighborhood have been lined with live oaks and sycamores since the area was developed, in 1907, with the then-new trees described by one history as “essential to a viable modern neighborhood.” Ours was envisioned not as a fancy quarter of Houston, but as one where middle-class people could enjoy shady streets similar to those in the far tonier Broadacres and River Oaks. For close to 120 years, the trees have been profoundly generous to us all, regardless of social, racial, ethnic, or economic status: Even in the middle of August, we can walk under the canopy provided by the gnarled branches of the live oaks on our main drag. Every summer, we welcome the return of the night herons that nest in those branches and their progeny, who tiptoe across our paths on late-night strolls. Humans with children of their own hang rope swings from low boughs and, at Christmas, embrace the trunks with multicolored LEDs. (That activity has become a lot more involved and a lot more expensive with gentrification, but only a grinch could complain about the resulting light shows.) To love the neighborhood has long been to love the trees; cutting one down to make room for a sprawling Chip and Joanna Gaines–type farmhouse could get you excommunicated from community events on the esplanade.
I rode out the derecho at the gym, watching the sky turn black from an elliptical that somehow kept running even when the power went out. The weather cleared within an hour, but the usual 10-minute drive home stretched to 45 and counting with all the felled trees blocking the roads. I’m not talking saplings: These were oaks five feet or more in diameter, impossible to move manually. Then came Beryl, which operated like some climate assassin brought in to finish the job. Hundred-year-old live oaks that had survived the first assault gave in to this one, their tangled roots stretching six to eight feet in the air as if pleading for mercy, the trunks blocking sidewalks like border checkpoints left unattended by fleeing guards. Nextdoor filled up with a photo record of crushed cars and caved-in roofs. The sound of chain saws greeted me each morning for weeks after, as men in hard hats climbed to enormous heights to perform slow-moving amputations on the wounded. They were followed by City of Houston employees patrolling the streets in huge open-bed trucks, loading up the remains.
I asked a former Houston Chronicle gardening writer why we lost so many trees that had stood firm during 2017’s Harvey and a host of other—many other—prior storms. “Was it the drought or too much rain?” I asked. “Yes,” was her answer. For more detail, I turned to Barry Ward, the director of Trees For Houston, a local nonprofit dedicated, as its website says, “to planting, protecting and promoting trees.” When I asked Ward why so many trees fell during the latest round of storms, he responded with the indulgent if slightly impatient tone of a professor who has dealt with too many students who don’t do their homework. “There are as many answers to that question as there are trees,” he told me. “Trees are complex physically, anatomically, and structurally. When you have a severe drought, they are playing catch-up from one, two, three years ago.”
So, too, with the freeze of 2021, among other climate crises. Ditto with overpopulation and overcrowding, which can be as hard on trees as it is on people, according to Ward. Urban trees have a rougher time than trees out in the country, because of more heat radiated by more concrete, people who plant trees in inhospitable areas, the perils of teenage and elderly drivers, et cetera. And don’t get Ward started on smart people who never have arborists attend to their trees: “I would argue you would never buy an automobile and wait till it was broke for a mechanic look at it,” he said. “You have these very expensive objects, and you have a tree next to it that is the height of a six-story building and weighs tens of thousands of pounds, and you’ve never had a professional look at it.” Ward is no optimist when it comes to future tree threats: “I would argue it’s going to get worse, because the city isn’t going to get smaller.”
Ward had suggestions for ameliorating disasters: Pick the right species for the right location, and provide regular maintenance (“The three r’s,” he called this rubric). That my husband and I had done all those things might explain why we suffered less damage than others, though I confess it was a neighbor’s pre-Beryl ceiling impalement that had caused us to spring into action. Even so, having been moderately responsible did nothing to soothe the emptiness I feel walking around my neighborhood now. The evidence of the carnage is still visible in sawed-off limbs and brighter, hotter streets. My husband had to change parts of his daily dog walk to keep the sun from killing our golden retriever.
It took me a while to recognize the emptiness for what it was: grief, of course. I missed the beauty that was gone forever, for sure. But I was grieving, too, for the markers of time the trees had become for me. Before they were downed, I walked or drove by the trees in my neighborhood every day; they had watched over me as they had others fifty, even a hundred years ago, and their absence—and, in retrospect, their fragility—added to the vulnerability that has become the norm for any sentient person of our day.
There’s a comfort in the way trees grow and thrive alongside us, and there’s pain and loss when they age and pass on. I used to wonder why I so miss the orange tree taken by the 2021 winter storm. It shaded our porch from the harsh Western sun in summer and gave us the sweetest fruit between Thanksgiving and Christmas. More important, it was planted by my son and his then-girlfriend before they both went away to college and their grown-up lives in 2009, separately and far from here. When the tree lived, just a glimpse of it in the middle of a harried day could make me stop and remember the day I watched them put it in the ground, their beautiful faces and hands smeared with mud, their delight at their arboreal ignorance. When the tree was there, a part of them was too.
Likewise, the oak we planted in front of the house my father lived in during his last years is still there, thriving, five years after Dad’s death. It was just a sapling when we planted it in front of the house next door to ours, the one we were lucky enough to buy for Dad to spend his last years in. He died in 2018, but the tree soars higher each season, and its branches reach wider, a comfort that is as strangely spiritual as it is physical.
I know it’s narcissistic to burden a tree with human emotions and human needs—they have enough trouble in this day and age, with more threatening weather to come, if not this season, then the next. Maybe the only benefit of all the damage I’ve seen in the last few months is that it has brought me to a place of better understanding—of the inevitability and irrevocability of many losses, of the value of just a little more stewardship of the world around me. These days, I’m keeping our tree guy on speed dial.
