Getting Big Trees on East Portland School Sites: A Teaching and Climate-Smart Opportunity

A Portland Urban Forestry program, free to schools, is helping to get more large-canopy trees of the kind we need for climate resilience onto big private-property sites. We’d like to see this done on a larger scale because the bulk of our canopy potential lies on private land, not in the public right-of-way.

By Kyna Rubin

Students, guided by Urban Forestry’s Allison O’Sullivan, on right, inspecting a coast redwood root ball before planting. All photos: Trees for Life Oregon.

On a cool, sunny day last month at the Franciscan Montessori Earth School, some 170 first- to eighth-grade students learned about the mechanics of planting trees and helped safely get 30 big-at-maturity trees into the ground. In a time of climate crisis, the young ponderosa pines, Oregon white oaks, coast redwoods, giant sequoias, and dawn redwoods they planted are the kinds of large-canopy, climate-resilient, long-lived trees that Portland needs more of to protect and improve human and environmental health.

The school is north of Powell Butte Nature Park, at SE Clinton and 148th Avenue in the Centennial neighborhood. It’s on a capacious, 9-acre, L-shaped campus that was built as a public elementary school in the 1950s. The Franciscan Montessori Earth School currently enrolls 280 students, drawing in the main from southeast Portland, Happy Valley, Gresham, and Sandy.

On December 13, on the northwest part of the site near the play area, the older kids wielded shovels to help fill the volunteer-dug tree holes. Learning Landscapes staff from Portland Parks & Recreation’s Urban Forestry, plus trained parent and other volunteers, talked them through every step of the process.

All maps courtesy of Urban Forestry’s Learning Landscapes.

As they mature, the roughly 65 total trees to be planted in two phases on the school grounds will provide shade, clean air, stormwater management, wildlife habitat, and plenty of education opportunities for generations of children at this nature-themed “earth” school. In addition to the trees planted in late 2023, in winter of the 2024-2025 school year other big-form trees such as silver lindens, incense-cedars, deodar cedars, a variety of both evergreen and deciduous oaks, and (for fall color) black tupelos and quaking aspens will be going in. They will find a home on the eastern border of the campus, along 148th Avenue, and on the site’s southern tip at the end of the school’s open field. For variety, several European beeches and magnolias will be placed around the playground.

A key benefit to the wider public of the planting is the extended row of California black oaks and black tupelos that will cool and shade 148th Avenue pedestrians from scorching western summer sun. This long street contains no street trees and, as currently designed, has a curb-tight sidewalk without planting strips. (Read here for a summary of a 2022 report on the paucity of street trees along 148th and other north-south arteries in East Portland.) As well, over time the canopy produced by the school’s new trees is likely to benefit nearby residents by cooling the air and trapping pollution from the busy avenue.

The absence of street trees on SE 148th, looking south to Powell Butte. The school’s campus is on right. 

Unfortunately, says the school’s garden specialist, Marc Boucher-Colbert, the campus itself will not generally be accessible to the public, owing to safety issues after previous problems with trash and vandalism.

Why Private-Land Trees Matter So Much

The current placement of trees to be planted next school year along the SE 148th boundary of the school and at the southern tip of the field. The final plan will work around the future "Tiny Forest," which is not a Learning Landscapes project.

Sixty-five new trees at one private school may not seem like a lot compared to the thousands of new trees the city will need to meet its current canopy target of 33 percent citywide coverage by 2035, as stated in a 2018 City report.

But here’s the thing: 62 percent of Portland’s potential to hold new canopy is on private land, based on that same report. A mere 16 percent of potential lies in our public right-of-way space, including our mostly narrow public curbside planting strips, which are too small for large-canopy trees.

SE 148th Avenue, like many East Portland and other main corridors, has been designed in such a way to leave no room for a public planting strip of any size. (Note that the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s updated Pedestrian Design Guide allows curb bump-outs to hold trees.  PBOT is piloting such a design along SE Duke Street. Other design changes such as creating medians for trees could help remedy the dearth of space for canopy along roads not originally designed to house it. To date, PBOT has not applied these design changes along 148th Avenue.)

The potential to get more big-canopy trees onto private land will likely never be fulfilled unless Portland landowners take action themselves. For legal and political reasons, the City won’t require property owners with space for large-form trees—which Trees for Life Oregon defines as 50 feet or taller—to plant these climate stalwarts anytime soon.

This is why the few, limited programs that the City engages in to find individuals and institutions eager to host big, climate-appropriate trees on their private grounds matter. (Elsewhere, Trees for Life Oregon has written about how the Bureau of Environment Services’ tree program partners with willing owners of commercial and other private lots to plant large, climate-resilient trees.) Both Urban Forestry’s Learning Landscapes program and BES’s private-land plantings can be used as inspirational models for scaling up similar efforts.

How Learning Landscapes Works

The big, great bang-for-the-buck trees the Montessori Earth School kids helped plant are the kinds of trees that Urban Forestry likes to plant on school grounds through its Learning Landscapes (LL) program, says Urban Forestry’s Molly Wilson, who until last year managed the initiative before turning it over to Urban Forestry’s Allison O’Sullivan, LL’s current program manager.

A volunteer, on right, helping students plant a ponderosa pine on the northwest part of the school grounds.

Learning Landscapes is about three decades old. Its purpose, says Wilson, is to provide beauty, shade, and educational opportunities on school grounds. Portland Public Schools is one of its biggest partners. But any Portland-based interested public or private school from pre-K through university can reach out to the program.

Program staff do initiate outreach to some schools within high-need neighborhoods. They leave it up to schools to contact Learning Landscapes if they are willing and have the space and capacity to work with Urban Forestry staff, who suggest tree species that will do best on the site. UF staff recruit adult volunteers to help on planting day.

Last year Learning Landscapes planted 100 trees, and in the 2023-2024 school year it will get 230 trees into the ground across 13 sites. Numbers are growing, says O’Sullivan, as interest in climate solutions is rising.

The more than five dozen trees the program is planting at the Franciscan Montessori Earth School is one of LL’s largest student-involved plantings to date. (For economies of scale, the program has a 12-tree minimum due to costs of time and establishment.) In March, staff finish planting and review new applications; they plan for the next year’s projects throughout the year.

Not all schools jump at the opportunity. Learning Landscapes is not at capacity for school requests. “We don’t currently turn anyone away,” says Wilson. But if more schools start applying, LL staff say they will prioritize locations with an equity lens based on factors such as low canopy and high percentage of low-income residents.

Program staff also work with the nonprofit Depave, which sometimes finds schools that want its services to remove asphalt and plant green landscape in its place. In 2023 Urban Forestry’s LL program partnered with Depave on two projects.

A Propitious Storm of Circumstances

Marc Boucher-Colbert briefing students on the morning planting plan.

The Franciscan Montessori Earth School is an especially good fit for the Learning Landscapes program. It is run by Franciscan nuns, who hew to St. Francis’s love of nature. The school also has some unique assets—large grounds, including a former soccer field no longer used for sports, and Marc Boucher-Colbert, its gardening instructor. It was he who reached out to Learning Landscapes. On Earth Day 2023 he had already involved the students in planting on campus a London plane tree and two ponderosa pines that he’d secured from the Urban Forestry Yard Tree Giveaway program.

Boucher-Colbert teaches hands-on gardening at the school, including plant botany. The seventh- and eighth-graders tend a large market garden, selling their produce to school families year-round. The school has a greenhouse mostly for vegetable starts for the garden, and he includes students in other on-site planting projects.

A farmer-educator who years ago started Zenger Farm and also ran a CSA, Boucher-Colbert values big trees, is knowledgeable about their needs, and came with a vision about their placement and their ecological and curricular role.

Learning Landscape’s then manager Molly Wilson first met Boucher-Colbert on site in April 2023, to get a feel for the grounds and his vision for what kinds of trees he wanted where. During the 17 years he has taught at the school, he has become intimately familiar with the site’s soil and ground conditions for planting. In summer 2023 LL staff worked with him based on both sides’ initial thoughts about species and placement to create a draft tree list and placement map.  

Making Give-and-Take Adjustments

Treeless SE 148th Avenue is to the left of the school fence. New shade trees will fill in the spaces between several Norway maples, shown here. When planted next school year, the trees along the distant south edge of the field will complement the view up to Powell Butte.

In September 2023 Wilson and incoming LL manager Allison O’Sullivan sat with Boucher-Colbert around a table at the school to get his feedback on the plan. As with other school “clients” with whom LL works, friendly back and forth ensued about some of the specifics.

Examining the printed-out tree list and planting map, Boucher-Colbert requested to scratch the Western hemlock in the northwest part of campus and add giant sequoias and more dawn redwoods. Some of his adjustments were to ensure species variety where the school already had planted UF Yard Giveway trees the previous spring.  He quashed, for now, the allée of trees along the path running just south of the southern-most school building.

For aesthetic and practical reasons—given the right site, space, and soil, grouped urban trees tend to thrive better than those planted in isolation—Boucher-Colbert favors grove plantings. Eyeing the tree plan, he was fine with the European beeches. But, inspired by Hoyt Arboretum’s beech section, he wanted them to be placed together, where the kids can “really feel the trees.” He asked that the quaking aspens at the end of the field be grouped together to magnify their bright fall color from afar, as they’ll be visible from some of the classrooms. He said yes to LL staff’s suggestion to bring in black tupelos to add autumn foliage spark.  

At that southern end of the property, he envisioned masses of clustered species, including deodar cedars and incense-cedars, whose expansive evergreen effect will provide a continuity of view as the eye runs from the end of the field up to trees on Powell Butte. He requested and got a cork oak to go in the oak grove at the site’s southeast corner, to be able to show his students where cork comes from.  He leans toward eucalyptus because of its hardiness, but LL’s Wilson told him this species takes up a lot of water, so they agree to scratch it. He saw a valley oak at Rigler Arboretum he likes and there are now two in the plan.

Keenly aware of the lack of trees along SE 148th, he wanted the campus trees lining that corridor to offer shade, fragrance, and fall color for pedestrians on the other side of the school fence. The California black oaks and tupelos will do that.

Since the school and LL staff first started meeting to create a planting plan, Boucher-Colbert agreed to have the Oregon Institute for Creative Research:E4 use a 1,000-square-foot rectangular space along SE 148th to plant what the group’s Nic Tarter calls a “tiny forest.” LL manager Allison O’Sullivan says Urban Forestry and the school will stick to the tree species agreed upon along the 148th Avenue site boundary, but she will tweak the design to work around the 50-foot by 20-foot plot for the tiny forest project.

The fall color of black tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica, above, and of California black oak, Quercus kelloggi, below. Courtesy of Oregon State University.

In the Long Term

Crucially, Urban Forestry waters, weeds, and mulches new Learning Landscapes trees for three years and prunes them in year four.  After that, maintenance rests on the school. But LL staff select trees for their minimum long-term needs. “We choose species we know are of good stock and will do well” over time, says Wilson.  Still, the school will need to monitor the trees and, depending on climate conditions, may have to do occasional watering after three years.

Boucher-Colbert is the sole caretaker of the campus’s trees, assisted by parent volunteers. After the three-year establishment period, he plans to factor into the school’s maintenance budget the possibility of caring for tree damage from high wind or ice storms.

Boucher-Colbert says he is considering eventually holding an annual open house for the public to enjoy the campus’s trees. A looping pathway just south of the school’s buildings makes it easy for people to access many of the trees. And he certainly plans to incorporate the new trees into the school curriculum. He’ll likely involve the students in tree walkabouts to inform Urban Forestry of any tree damage in the first three years, and to record their differing leafing-out, bloom, and growth times. He also plans to do something like a “poetry pole” next to each tree cluster to post student-designed fact sheets for each species.

“We hope this [project] encourages private landowners in the neighborhood—businesses and property owners—to do something so together we can make a difference,” says Boucher-Colbert, “because in the public right-of-way out here, power and phone lines preclude the planting of large trees.” As, of course, does current street design, mentioned earlier.  He accurately observes that “Other parts of the city may be better designed for trees in public rights-of-way.”

The Franciscan Montessori Earth School may be an ideal host for Learning Landscapes’ big trees. But other public and private schools in Portland’s high heat index areas east of I-205 take note. People living or working in low-canopy areas often have the most health benefits to gain from being around big trees. Importantly, school sites don’t need as much space as the Earth School has or a resident gardening expert to be able to successfully partner with the Learning Landscapes program. The result is a win for everyone—climate-smart, aesthetically pleasing large-canopy trees in roomy sites that will yield health, environmental, and aesthetic benefits for generations to come.