Planting trees can be an intimate experience of creativity, of healing the earth and ourselves.

That’s why The Naturalist School plants with poets instead of skid loaders, with artists instead of augers, with bare hands instead of backhoes, with kids instead of crews. We plant small trees grown from locally-wild and native seed collected by our friends and members.

Planting wildly connects us to our local ecosystems and nourishes the living communities in which we live. And of course we write poems, compose songs and do art. Every act of curiosity and every act of creativity can draw us more deeply into the wild energies of the cosmos. That’s what being a naturalist means to us!

— Jack Phillips

Here’s a music video by our friends Dan McCarthy and James Maakestad planting one of our wild red oaks: https://youtu.be/JrutNT_LZ7w

*Jack Phillips with McCarthy Trenching, photo by Harrison Martin. Top: planting trees in Omaha’s Old Market and Prospect Hill Cemetery with TNS members, artists-in-residence from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and staff from Union for Contemporary Art. Middle: Nebraska State Senator Megan Hunt; precocious native sapling from our neighborhood. Photos by Rachel Kolb, Megan Hunt, Troy Soderberg and Chelsea Balzer.