The Giving Trees
Urban forests are dying. Baltimore shows us how to bring them back.
Walk through Baltimore’s neighborhoods, and look up. The fan-shaped ginkgo leaves and ruby-red pearls dangling from cherry branches are the literal fruits of how Gene DeSantis has spent the predominant part of his life. On Saturdays, the slight, cap-wearing 57-year-old plants trees. By his count, 15,223 of them over the past 40 years.
For DeSantis, an MVP to local greening outfits, the routine began as a form of therapy. The Baltimore native spent some of his childhood in Los Angeles, with an alcoholic stepfather and drug-addicted mother. On the nights his stepfather’s drunkenness turned violent, the young DeSantis climbed trees in the yard to find peace. “Trees became my friends,” he says. “You could say I kind of grew up there.”
One night in 1976, his stepfather shot and killed his mother and then himself. The following year, the 17-year-old moved in with his grandmother in the blue-collar corner of southeast Baltimore where he had been born. That was also the year he would plant his first tree, and discover the act was a way to cope. “I was angry inside because I thought the world was so unfair,” he says. “The picking and shoveling helped me reduce a lot of the anger that I had.”
