Sacramento Shade program offers free trees, more shade

Sacramento loves its trees. During our recent heat wave, we’re especially thankful for their shade.

Here’s an opportunity to add to your own shade with free trees: Sacramento Shade.

Sacramento Shade is a partnership between the Sacramento Tree Foundation and SMUD, our local municipal utility. The program offers free trees to all SMUD customers. The extra shade can lower electricity consumption (and power bills) during intense summer heat. Urban trees also clean air and help cool neighborhoods.

Sacramento Shade can help SMUD customers add (or replace) valuable trees, says Alex Binck, community arborist for the Sacramento Tree Foundation.

Our intense winter storms took a dramatic toll on many trees particularly eucalyptus and elms, Binck notes. This year is a good time to put the right tree in the right place.

Binck has a special relationship with hundreds of Sacramento-area trees; he played a direct role in their planting. As a community forester, he helped residents pick out and site trees as part of the Sacramento Shade program.

SacTree experts such as Binck are currently studying which Sacramento trees did best (and worst) after our wet winter. They’re also trialing new tree varieties. Their observations will help shape recommendations for the Sacramento Shade program.

“With wild weather swings, we’re really trying to look at which trees are doing well and which are not,” Binck says. “It’s not only heat, but flood adapted, too. Even if it doesn’t ‘flood’ – flooding that impacts people – it can still be very, very wet soil.”

That wet aspect can be bad for trees native to dry habitats. Sacramento area trees have to withstand too much rain as well as too little.

“If you experiment with desert species, be careful,” he says. “Even if heat and drought adapted; wet soil can be challenging, especially wet clay soil. They just don’t like it.”

Desert Museum palo verde, for example, demands excellent drainage and sandy soil; that species does not like standing water.

Binck’s observations so far? Valley oaks are loving this year. “They tolerate both drought and wetter conditions. They can stand in four feet deep of water for weeks, then be bone dry in August. They’re big trees, though, and do need some space.”

California live oaks are doing well, too, as are olives. Binck recommends both of those trees; they’re well adapted to our climate but can take the weather swings, too. They also keep their foliage year round.

“Originally, we only had deciduous trees in the shade program and concentrated on energy savings,” Binck says, “but we now consider the holistic benefits of trees and added a few evergreens such as olive and live oak.”

Trees with intense fall color are popular in the Sacramento Shade program.

“Sacramento Shade’s most popular tree is the Shantung maple; people love its fall color,” Binck says. “It’s medium size, a little larger than a Japanese maple.”

Binck likes to recommend trees he knows will grow well here, not just now but for years to come.

“The reasons I like them: They’re adapted to our climate,” he says.

Binck’s short list of favorites: Zelkova (Zelkova serrata), a tough urban shade tree with great fall color; fern pine (Afrocarpus falcatus), a graceful African evergreen ornamental tree that’s neither fern nor pine; and desert willow (Chilopsis linearis), a small tree native to Southern California with beautiful trumpet-shaped blooms.

About two dozen varieties of trees are currently available via the Sacramento Shade program.

“When you meet with a community forester, you come up with a plan together and decide where each tree should go and the appropriate type for each area,” Binck.