Trees, Please: Big Plant harnesses the power of trees to combat Climate Change

The Big Plant harnesses the power of community and trees. “Everybody is so happy picking up their trees,” said Jeff Lutsey, CCCDC executive director. Photos by Jeff Lutsey.

Residents of Door County are “arboreal” beings; we live among trees. And although we may take our towering neighbors for granted, it’s hard to imagine our landscape or our lives without them. 

If the Door County Big Plant has anything to say about it, we won’t need to. 

This year alone, the Big Plant, a county-wide reforestation project coordinated by the Climate Change Coalition of Door County (CCCDC), will introduce 10,000 new trees into the peninsula’s soil. And in the process, it will celebrate an important milestone. 

During the 2025 planting season, one of the Big Plants’ many volunteers will put the 50,000th seedling into the ground. Even accounting for die-off, this event means that there are tens of thousands more trees protecting our environment than existed only a decade ago. These trees will spend their lives sequestering carbon, filtering pollutants from our air and water, mitigating flood damage, feeding and providing habitat for native insects and birds, and furnishing shade and beauty to our landscapes. That’s a hefty workload.

Trees are considered a front-line defense against a warming climate and lately there’s been a revolution in how we think about them. This is thanks, in part, to German forester and scientist Peter Wohlleben’s best-selling book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries From a Secret World. Wohlleben argues, and research supports, that trees survive and thrive not as competing individuals, but as part of an interdependent collective, a community of collaborators. 

“They depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks,” he wrote. 

Hand Out 200 Trees, and You Have 200 Conversations About Trees

The same could be said for the Door County Big Plant. According to Jeff Lutsey, executive director of CCCDC and coordinator of the Big Plant, the initiative grew out of planting parties organized by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in the 1990s. 

Four years ago, the CCCDC started the Big Plant, hoping to inspire and organize groups across the county to plant trees, said CCCDC Advisory Board co-chair, Roy Thilly, during the Big Plant’s inaugural year in 2021. 

“It’s expanded and gotten stronger over the years through cooperation, collaboration and knowledge-sharing,” Lutsey said. 

The Big Plant is now a multi-pronged effort led by CCCDC, Crossroads at Big Creek, the Door County Land Trust, The Ridges and TNC. 

The Big Plant was created to take decisive climate action, restore ecosystems and inspire community collaboration. Lutsey credits progress on the first two goals to the success of the third. “The Big Plant is everybody’s Big Plant,” he said. “It’s organized, but it’s also organic. Individuals and families attend the free, public Community Plant Days. They meet other people, receive training, and plant some saplings together. And they leave with a tree they can plant at home, knowledge on how to plant it, and also a feeling that they’ve helped the earth.”

In addition to Community Plant Days, the Big Plant gives away hundreds of trees at farmers markets. The reach of the program is one of the things that excites Lutsey most. 

“Handing out 200 trees means having 200 conversations about trees,” he said. “These interactions result in learning and sharing and more people planting more trees and that’s an awesome thing.”

Selecting Trees, Monitoring Survivability

Although preparation happens year-round, the Big Plant kicks off each planting season with a potluck celebration in late March. Trees arrive at Lutsey’s home in Baileys Harbor in mid-April. Planting begins immediately and extends over a six-week period. Dozens of opportunities are offered for people to participate across the county. The Big Plant attracts hundreds of partners, including private landowners, families, churches, service groups, nonprofit conservation organizations, sponsoring businesses and schools. 

The majority of Big Plant saplings are sourced from the Evergreen Nursery in Sturgeon Bay. All native, they are selected based on five criteria: carbon sequestration in pounds, according to the USDA Forest Service; weather adaptability; biodiversity support for native insects and birds; “growability” (nursery-grown, inexpensive and easy-to-plant); and survivability. Over the years, the variety of trees planted have included oaks, maples, birches, cedars, American plums, tamaracks, firs, pines, and spruces.  

Keeping a tally of trees going into the ground is relatively easy. Monitoring the long-term survival rate, Lutsey admits, is more difficult. 

“We’re all trying to get better at that,” he said. “We know that if a seedling can make it through its first summer, its chances of survival are high. That’s the danger point, especially in years with little rain or a summer seasonal drought.” 

Lutsey cited one informal study made at the Wisconsin DNR’s Mud Lake State Natural Area in Baileys Harbor. Trees were planted there by CCCDC, the Northern Door Rotary Club, Girl Scouts, and other “tree angel” volunteers, over a three-year period. With monitoring and periodic watering, survivability has been observed to be 92%. 

“This is excellent, but it may not be indicative of other tree-planting areas,” he said. “If you look at something often, as you do in a study, you can’t help but save it. Some of our planting is done in pretty remote areas where it’s impractical to visit often or water. That affects results.” 

Knowing that they need more information on survivability, the Big Plant is working with The Ridges to plant and monitor 3,000 trees in half-acre plots as part of the Boreal and Temperate Mesic Forest Climate Survivability Project. This project, in partnership with the Daybreak Fund, will mark and monitor individual trees over a 10-year-plus period and will include key environmental inputs like moisture levels and temperature. It will also capture other key environmental metrics using technology such as acoustic monitoring. The project begins this spring. 

“Information gleaned from this study will inform and improve the Big Plant going forward,” Lutsey said.

A tiny tree dropped into a hole and given a little mulch and water looks fragile given all it’s expected to do for our climate. Even hundreds of trees in a large field can appear insignificant. “I remember planting seedlings with Mike Grimm, one of the conservation ecologists who organized the early planting parties for TNC,” Lutsey recalled. “We had just finished a hard morning’s work, hauling, digging, planting and watering. The new trees in the grassy field looked so small, but then Mike pointed across the field to an immense stand of 30-foot conifers he had helped plant 25 years earlier. That was some awesome and powerful reinforcement for the work we were doing that day.”

The Big Plant welcomes new partners and places to plant. Contact and schedule information is available at climatechangedoorcounty.com.