Our Cities Need More Trees 

If you were to walk down one of your neighborhood’s streets, you might be able to recognize some of the trees that provide shade: honey locust, red maple or even gingko trees, just to name a few. While they’re beautiful to look at, it’s the work they’re doing around the clock to cool our neighborhoods, reduce heat-related illnesses and lower utility costs that makes trees vital to our urban spaces. 

There aren’t enough trees in our cities, and the trees we do have aren’t distributed equally across zip codes, socioeconomic status or race. To bring enough shade and the many benefits trees provide to every community – to reach Tree Equity nationwide – we need to plant 500 million more trees in all areas with inadequate tree cover. These trees need to come from nurseries, where they are grown from seeds into seedlings or saplings into young trees that are ready to plant and be resilient to the everyday stressors of urban and suburban life.  

We recently spoke with Becky Schwartz, Director of Urban Forestry Innovation at American Forests, who works on urban forestry projects that trace the beginning to the end of a tree’s lifecycle. We asked her about the unique hurdles nurseries face and potential solutions that may enable nurseries to expand this critical work. 

What are urban nurseries? 

Urban nurseries supply a city’s tree needs. There are some nurseries that are a large, full-scale operations. In this case they may harvest and process seeds that are then grown into seedlings and then saplings. Other nurseries may only be charged with growing trees for part of their life cycles – for example, some facilities only grow saplings into young trees that are then sent on to another nursery to continue to grow. They can be owned by a variety of entities – including municipal governments, nonprofits, private and family owners, or large corporations. 

Why are urban tree nurseries important for urban and suburban communities? 

Lower income neighborhoods and communities of color are more likely to have less tree canopy cover, and as a result can be much hotter than their shaded counterparts. We’re working with partners to expand Tree Equity and address heat disparity in these neighborhoods by increasing access to the urban nurseries that grow trees for these communities. 

Are there enough urban nurseries across the U.S.? 

Many cities used to have their own municipal tree nurseries, but a lot of that changed in the last few decades because of shifting demographics and funding priorities. Today, we desperately need more urban nurseries, people to work for them and sources of funding to support them. All of this is critical for Tree Equity, making sure to not just plant trees, but also care for trees in areas that need it the most around the U.S. 

What kinds of challenges are urban nurseries facing right now? 

There are different pressures on local nurseries: 

Trained workforces 

When employees leave or retire and when nurseries are sold or go bankrupt, knowledge can be lost, significantly setting back nursery operations. These disruptions can affect the entire nursery supply chain. Nurseries are often smaller businesses that are vulnerable to collapse during economic downturns – which makes equipping and training the next generation of nursery workers and urban foresters even more important, so we can retain those skills.

Supply and demand 

There are not enough of the right kind of trees growing in a nursery, based on supply and demand. This affects the suitability of trees that will be planted in urban neighborhoods. Most people in cities buy trees from privately-owned nurseries, where the species stocked are not decided by urban foresters or the community; they’re driven by the biggest buyers like large developers, which may order different trees than those that are best for the environment. As a result, a nursery may not have enough demand to afford to stock the right kind of trees needed for climate-ready neighborhood plantings.  

Lack of resources 

On their own, individual nurseries often don’t have the funding, supply and demand, or staffing capacity to fully invest in finding, growing and sustaining trees that can adapt to climate change, pests, and diseases. Researching different seeds and seedlings takes a lot of time, equipment and workers with specialized knowledge that most nurseries can’t afford. Seedlings take years to grow into trees and nurseries are often driven by changing demands, which can make investing in this long-term, climate-resilience research difficult. 

Availability of affordable nursery space 

There is also the physical locations where nurseries operate – in an urban setting, nurseries, especially those owned by nonprofits or municipals, can’t always afford expansion into larger spaces, if they can find space at all. 

What can be done to support urban nurseries? 

We can expand capacity by helping nurseries and organizations get connected with each other and any available resources. For example, local nurseries can carry different species to help boost diversity and demand for different types of trees – creating a larger, more diverse available supply for planting in urban communities. Additionally, finding climate-resilient seeds and growing those takes a lot of time. By working with the U.S. Forest Service, nearby universities, state forestry or horticultural associations, we can bring those resources and research to local nurseries and communities that probably wouldn’t have these resources otherwise. 

What is American Forests doing to address these challenges for urban nurseries? 

We’re already working with partners to address each of these challenges. We’re involved in workforce development for urban forestry. We are also creating opportunities to those who face barriers to employment, developing research with the U.S. Forest Service and other partners on climate-resilient tree species, and helping achieve Tree Equity through place-based partnerships. Our Catalyst Initiative is redistributing funds that American Forests secured in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to frontline community programs and equipping those teams with our best resources. But we’re expanding this work, too: 

This Seed September, we’re launching our Tree Equity Nurseries Initiative. That initiative involves: 

1. Increasing the number of preferred tree species 

2. Facilitating research to identify and support diverse genetics of the trees we are planting 

3. Developing workforce opportunities to connect people with careers in nurseries  

4. Building tree nurseries and growing capacity with local partner 

Through this initiative, my hope is that we can help increase the capacity of these nurseries so they can grow and expand the number of trees available to the communities that need them most.  

This Seed September, you can support urban nurseries and the development of climate-resilient seedlings by giving to American Forests. Your contribution will support the people, research and nurseries needed to scale up our efforts. This month, we have a goal to raise the funds to collect and grow one million seeds and trees that will help regrow our forests and cool our communities.