On a recent Sunday morning, 25 Angelenos gathered under a large rusty leaf fig tree for a walking tree tour in a local Culver City park that was also playing host to an outdoor tai chi class as well as a group of yogis.
As we walked past Chinese elm trees, coast live oaks and Brazilian pepper trees, Stephanie Carrie shared the history of the city’s celebrated palm trees with a rapt audience. Many of today’s trees, planted in the 1930s, are approaching the end of their lives – and while they have become symbols of the city, they also guzzle water, fueling calls to replace them with drought-resistant trees.
“The most important thing about LA is our natural environment and our community, and the best way to provide for that community is different types of trees that will give back and protect us moving into the future,” said Carrie.
She’s not a professional photographer or an arborist, but Carrie and her popular Instagram account, Trees of LA (@treesofla), help people identify some of the 700,000 street trees that make up the world’s most diverse urban forest. Offline, the New Zealand-born, southern California-raised creator hosts a variety of city tree tours that educate attendees about environmental sustainability, canopy inequality and the countless benefits of paying attention to the trees around us.
“It’s so joyful to take something that started on a screen and bring it into the real world,” said Carrie, who uses her storytelling background as an actor and screenwriter to engage followers. “Living in urban environments isn’t a natural situation for human beings, so we’re kind of reconnecting to something we took for granted when we did not live in urban environments.”
There are nearly 1,000 kinds of street trees in Los Angeles. Some local favorites include the flowering jacaranda, which turn places like Pasadena, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica into seas of purple in the late spring. Saucer magnolia trees in West Los Angeles and Westwood produce large pink and white blossoms in the winter, while gold medallion trees bloom vivid clusters of yellow flowers that are seen throughout the city in late spring and into summer.
The trees most associated with LA are, of course, its palms. They were first brought to California in the 18th century by Spanish missionaries who wanted to use the fronds in religious services. Real estate developers later imported more to help sell the city as an exotic tropical paradise. Then, before the 1932 Olympics, 25,000 were planted to beautify streets and an additional 40,000 were added as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration project.
The palm trees planted in the 1930s are now considered “senior citizens”; an invasive insect, the red palm weevil, has already killed others. Along with using vast amounts of groundwater, the palms are prone to disease and don’t offer shade. As they die off, environmentalists say other species should take their place, though it would alter the image of a city known for caring deeply about its appearance.
While Carrie supports diversifying LA’s canopy – the trees that offer shade across a city – she believes it would be ideal to keep palms in a few locations to celebrate their place in the city’s history.
For years, Carrie, like numerous other city residents, suffered from a phenomenon known as “tree blindness”, and hadn’t paid much attention to the urban forest around her. It wasn’t until 2016, when she took maternity leave with her first child, that she started taking regular walks in a local park and had an epiphany.
“When I started to notice and focus my attention on a tree and the details of that tree, my brain was just filled with what felt like incredibly positive chemicals,” said Carrie. “It really felt like a meditation. My anxiety went away and I was truly in the moment.”
It’s proven that spending time around trees helps us reduce stress, lower blood pressure and screen out noise pollution. Experts say that looking at trees, or simply watching leaves blow in the wind, helps replenish our cognitive reserve, the brain’s ability to solve problems and deal with challenges (especially important for those of us who stare at screens all day.) Studies have found that hospital patients who can see trees from their beds recover faster than those who can’t see them.
Trees are not only good for our mental and physical health, but they often serve as a first line of defense against air pollution and combating heat, making them key to fighting the climate crisis around the globe.
City trees reduce energy usage, shade our streets and homes, and minimize the “heat island effect”, common in cities where roads, buildings and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit heat at higher levels compared to forests and bodies of water. Trees clean our air, store carbon, serve as a wildlife habitat and soak up storm water, which reduces runoff and soil erosion.
But decades of environmental injustice means that while Los Angeles’ average canopy cover is 21%, South Los Angeles’ is 13% – and only 5% in some parts of the region. The city of Los Angeles’ Green New Deal was designed to increase trees primarily in low-income communities disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. It set out to plant 90,000 trees by the end of 2021, but the pandemic and other challenges slowed planting rates; by 2022, only 65,000 trees had been planted.
TreePeople, an environmental non-profit, has identified 28 climate-resilient tree species for Los Angeles’ urban forest and advocates for increasing their presence in the canopy. Trees such as weeping bottle brush, silverleaf oak and rosewood offer serious cooling benefits, use little water, are resistant to major pests and diseases, and reduce air pollution – all key attributes for an environment facing increased heat and long-term drought.
A new study authored by the University of Southern California and the South LA Tree Coalition found that while people were aware of the real harms caused by tree inequity and the role trees play in cooling neighborhoods, they were also concerned about the ways tree planting intersects with homelessness and gentrification, since the arrival of new trees can be associated with rising rents. “It’s important to work with communities rather than just coming in and having strangers planting a bunch of trees,” said Carrie.
Experts say that messaging about trees being critical infrastructure for communities needs to be clearer, and that people must also plant trees on their own property since residences make up a large majority of plantable space in the city (the narrow planter strips that run along streets are typically occupied by utility lines both above and below ground).
By sharing their love of trees, Carrie and other like-minded tree content creators are helping to spread that message to people all over the world, and connecting with one another.
When she traveled to Mexico City in 2022, Carrie spent the day looking at trees with Francisco Arjona of Árboles de la CDMX. She’s also met up in real life with Paul Wood, author of London Is a Forest, who runs the Street Tree account, to gaze at trees in London, and is friendly with the creators of Trees of Delhi, Trees of Barcelona and Trees of Cambridge, among many others.
“There’s a special bond between people who are trying to photograph trees during the perfect time of day so we can bring the majesty of that day to a tiny square on Instagram and share with people,” said Carrie. “It’s almost like a beautiful language of love.”
