KERR COUNTY, Texas – For Kerrville native Nancy Alford, returning to help after the Hill Country floods has been emotional and meaningful.
“It was profound,” Alford said.
Alford helped with cleanup after the Fourth of July flooding. Now, she’s one of hundreds of volunteers at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, breaking apart cedar cones to collect seeds — a small task that’s part of a massive restoration effort.
“It makes my hands hurt,” Alford said. “But it’s rewarding.”
The San Antonio Botanical Garden has partnered with more than a dozen agencies, nurseries and volunteers to restore trees destroyed along the Guadalupe River.
“Nature left to its own devices will heal itself. We are giving it a helping hand,” San Antonio Botanical Garden CEO Katherine Trumble said.
A major focus bald cypress trees, a cornerstone of the Guadalupe’s ecosystem.
“They are an essential part of the ecosystem,” Andrew Labay, San Antonio Botanical Garden chief mission officer, said. “Helping stabilize banks, foster wildlife and helping form that surrounding ecosystem that surrounds this watershed.”
In the fall, Labay and experts collected 300,000 seeds. Now volunteers are breaking those seeds apart — one cone at a time.
“It’s a conifer, it’s truly that cone and separating, in each cone you can get about a dozen to twenty seeds,” Labay said. “So separating the pieces from that cone.”
Once separated, the seeds are sent to about a dozen nurseries to be potted, including at the Botanical Garden, and then the waiting begins.
It can take six months to a year for the trees to be ready to plant. The goal is to plant 25,000 trees within the next year, and 50,000 within the next three years.
And while it might seem faster to bring in trees from out of state, Labay said local adaptation matters.
“Nothing wrong with those trees,” Labay said. “They are not well-adapted to the area we plant.”
It’s slow, careful work, but supporters say restoring the river’s natural canopy is critical to protecting the Hill Country’s future.
More Hill Country flood coverage on KSAT