Q&A with Jessica Sanders, Executive Director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation

Photo courtesy of the Sacramento Tree Foundation

Before you joined the Sacramento Tree Foundation three years ago, you were living in Washington, D.C. [Dr. Sanders is an arborist who previously served as director of science and policy at Casey Trees, a nonprofit that aims to restore and expand the tree canopy in our nation’s capital.] Did you know about Sacramento’s “City of Trees” moniker before you got here?

I did. There are three really big “Cities of Trees”: Sacramento, Washington, D.C., and Paris. But I had never seen such pride until I came to Sacramento. I came for an in-person job interview in October 2020, and I said, “I’m going to take Uber or Lyft.” I got in the car and the driver just started talking about the City of Trees. I didn’t tell them anything about me, but they asked me if this was my first time in Sacramento, and they just started spouting all of this tree knowledge. That is the coolest thing I think I’ve ever experienced. Usually you get in a car [as an out-of-towner] and they’re like, “Let me tell you about this restaurant or this sports team.” And they did talk about that, but they really talked about their deep love of Sacramento being the City of Trees. And that wasn’t a unique experience. I experienced that throughout my three-day stay. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a community love trees so inherently. If I hadn’t already really wanted the job, that would’ve sold me.

What did you most immediately notice about Sacramento’s trees themselves?

I went on a walk with a board member, and we were walking around Capitol Park, and there was a beautiful blooming magnolia and an orange tree right next to it. That was crazy to me, the concept that here I was, walking in a public park and there were fruit trees. In the Northeast, if we have fruit trees, it’s figs and some pawpaws, and you watch people wrap them in burlap every winter and baby these trees along. I recently bought a house—I live in Oak Park—and I have a lemon tree that I’ve already harvested, like, 500 lemons off. I have more lemons than I know what to do with. I’m begging friends to see if I can ship them to them, and I’m going to local businesses saying, “Do you want my lemons?” That is something that I’ve never experienced.

There are trees everywhere here, even when you’re flying in. You see these beautiful majestic trees, and you see the rivers coming together. Sacramento is a beautiful place in general, and then to think about the diversity of tree species is really amazing.

How did you first become interested in trees?

My mom had a deep love of trees—both my parents did. My family moved around a lot, and when we settled in New Jersey, it was really important to my mom to have trees. So we went to a plant nursery and we got four oaks and some other trees and planted them. That was pivotal. Growing up, there wasn’t an Arbor Day or Earth Day celebration that my mother didn’t drag me to, to get our free tree. We planted those free trees every time. I remember we had a Chinese elm in our backyard, and we brought in an arborist to prune it. But it had a lot of decay, and the tree care company said, “You know, you need to remove this. This is going to fall down on your house.” And my mother was in tears over losing that tree. She really did cultivate a love of trees—that deep, inherent connection with them.

I went to undergrad at a small state school in New Jersey, not far from Atlantic City, and [studied] environmental science. [Dr. Sanders went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Ecology and Evolution program at Rutgers University, where she focused on urban forestry.] And if you’ve never been to the New Jersey Pinelands, I would highly recommend it. It is one of the coolest ecosystems. They have very sandy soil, and pitch pines and Atlantic white cedar bogs, which are really majestic. You walk in and all of the trees are swaying together and the soil is sphagnum moss, so you feel like you’re on a natural trampoline. It’s just such a cool experience.

The Sacramento Tree Foundation brought you on board in large part because of your work building and sustaining urban forests in D.C. What exactly is an urban forest? 

Urban forestry in general is the intersection of trees and people. When you think about an urban area, it has a higher population density, which is why, like up in Tahoe, we call that a natural forest as opposed to an urban forest.

I feel like nature shouldn’t be a destination. That’s really how I got into urban forestry. I thought, “OK, how do we make someone who’s living in a city feel like nature is a part of their everyday life?” You don’t go to Yosemite every day. And whether people recognize it or not, I think it is one of the beautiful things about our trees: You can appreciate them without ever really knowing that they’re there. If you go outside on a hot summer day and you see people walking down the street, they’re under the trees. They’re not in the blazing hot sun. That’s beautiful. For me, our trees are infrastructure. When you think about infrastructure, you think about roads. You drive on them, but they don’t really make you happy. You get angry that you’re in traffic. You get angry that there’s a pothole. Trees provide critical infrastructure too—they make our city livable. But they also make it lovable.

Sacramento is currently developing a new Urban Forest Master Plan, with the support of the Tree Foundation. What will that plan consist of?

The plan is focused on equity, which is wonderful. We have areas of the city that are devoid of trees. How do we get trees in those areas? Is it a public planning thing? Do they not have trees because they’ve historically been redlined? And when there’s no space between the curb and the sidewalk, when that tree space doesn’t exist, how do we create mechanisms so that those areas can have trees?

Also, do the areas that historically have had trees now have a declining urban forest? How do we create mechanisms so that there are programs for maintenance for trees? It’s really about caring for what we have overall. So much funding goes into tree planting because it’s sexy. A lot more funding needs to go into maintenance and long-term care, because that’s really how we’re going to grow our urban forest. The Tree Foundation will help to facilitate public meetings and community meetings so that people can comment. Rather than saying, “I’m from the Tree Foundation,” or “I’m from the City of Sacramento, and I know what goes here and what’s best,” the city is really taking a wonderful approach of saying, “What does your neighborhood look like? How do we make this neighborhood for you?”—rather than for the people that could potentially move in.

You just said something crucial: Maintenance of the trees that we have is very important. What is the current condition of our urban forest?

I would say we have a healthy urban forest. The storms from a year ago were devastating for a lot of people, but they also took out some trees that probably would’ve been removed [due to disease, pest infestation and other concerns] within the next five years. So that’s helpful. We have more planting spaces to fill—more potential for trees.

We also have a diverse urban forest, which is when you have a lot of different tree species. You want that. If you have an urban forest that is a hundred percent ash, it’s very beautiful. But when you have one pest like the emerald ash borer come in, your entire urban forest is gone. We’ve seen entire [urban forests] just leveled to the ground.

In terms of filling more planting spaces, the Tree Foundation has its “Shady 80” list to help folks select the right tree for the right spot. But when you look at that list of 80 varieties, it can be overwhelming, especially for a newbie. How do you recommend people get started with identifying the right tree for the right spot in Sacramento’s urban forest? 

You can always call the Sacramento Tree Foundation. This is what we love to do. If you are in Sacramento County, you can get up to 10 free shade trees through our partnership with SMUD. We actually either come to you, or we can consult with you virtually now, which is kind of great. We look at your property with you and we talk about what you are looking to do.

For me [personally], the first thing I do is stop and look at the space. I look at how much soil is there, and then I think about what else I want to do there. Do I want to grow a garden there? Because if I have a really tall, shady tree, I’m not going to be able to necessarily grow the tomatoes that I want to. I’m also looking up to see if there are power lines. And if you have a porch that comes out, you don’t really want to plant a tree under a porch. Do I imagine sitting under that space and it being really shaded and dark? Do I imagine sitting under that space and there are lights and shadows coming in? Looking at how much space you have—both on the ground and above you—is the best way to start.

Then ask yourself: “What do I want that space to look like over time?” If you’re older and you’re thinking about maintenance, maybe raking up acorns [from a large oak tree] isn’t a great outcome for you. So it’s really about individual choices. That’s why I always say you can absolutely go and figure this out on your own, but we’re also here to help.

At the opposite end of a tree’s life cycle, the foundation also works with fallen wood. Can you tell us about that? 

Our Urban Wood Rescue program is one where if a tree comes down—whether it comes down in a storm or whether it’s being removed—that tree can come to the Tree Foundation. We mill it, we kiln-dry it and we track it, and then you can buy it, or we make it available to other nonprofits—like we do wood donations to schools so they can do school gardens. I have an end table from an elm in McKinley Park. The program is taking something that would normally go to the dump or become wood chips and turning it into something that’s usable, functional and part of Sacramento. And I think that’s lovely.

We focus on the entire life cycle of the tree, from seed—meaning harvesting acorns—to slab. When a tree comes down, we don’t say, “OK, we’re done.” We take it and we create something out of it. I call it “holistic urban forestry.” I think that’s what drew me to the Sacramento Tree Foundation.

Both California Arbor Day (March 7) and National Arbor Day (April 26) are coming up soon. What does the Sacramento Tree Foundation have planned to observe or celebrate the occasions?

For California Arbor Day, typically it’s treated as a week of Arbor Day. [California Arbor Week runs March 7–14 every year.] We’ll have a tree bike tour in Rancho Cordova. We’ll have a River District spring planting. We’ll have a reforestation event. For National Arbor Day, we have a proposed reforestation planting in Elk Grove. So that’ll be a really cool reforestation of smaller trees, from acorns and native trees that we grow ourselves. We’ll plant probably about 150 trees that day, just reforesting that area mile by mile.

What’s the status of the Hanami Line, the eagerly awaited installation of cherry blossom trees and public gathering space under construction at Robert T. Matsui Waterfront Park [along the Sacramento River north of Old Sacramento]? Is it still set to open this spring?

Yes, it will be done by April. [Editors’ note: After publication of this story, the Sacramento Tree Foundation announced that due to construction delays and winter storms, the park’s opening has been pushed back to late June or early July.]

Will the cherry blossom trees bloom this first year? [They typically bloom in late March or early April.]

They will likely bloom this year, but it’ll be a smaller bloom. I want to give everyone that caveat. Cherry tree blossoms are really fascinating because they bloom for about two weeks every year. So it’ll be fun every year to see when that happens for us and have a bloom watch.

What kind of programming or events can people expect when the Hanami Line opens?

We’ve been working with the SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity next door to make sure that they can utilize the space for children’s activities. We’ll have tree pruning and blossom watch festivals [in future years]. And we’re going to have this very big, beautiful sculpture of a cherry blossom tree. It has dichroic glass and plays with all these different elements of movement and light. I imagine it’ll become iconic, sort of like the rabbit at the airport.

After two or three years when everything is established, are we going to be able to have a full-blown cherry blossom festival of our own, like the popular festivals in cities like Washington, D.C., and Tokyo?

I think that that’s the goal: to make this an iconic park for the people who live here, as well as for [visitors]. One of the thoughts that Joe Rodota and Lon Hatamiya [who spearheaded the Hanami Line endeavor and teamed up with the Tree Foundation on the project] have is that for a month, instead of Sacramento, we could be Sakuramento. Sakura is the [cherry blossom] flower.

When people visit New York and go to the High Line, that’s a part of their day. And that’s what I imagine the Hanami Line to be. It’ll be part of your experience in Sacramento. You’re going to go to it between visiting museums, and you’re going to have your lunch there, and you’re just going to sit outside on these beautiful benches that are made from trees that fell down in Sacramento. And you’ll get to really experience what it means to be part of the Sacramento urban forest. It’s all about people feeling connected to a space and to a part of their city. That’s what I hope the Hanami Line becomes. It’s a love letter to our city. 

This interview has been edited for length, flow and clarity.

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