Harold (L) and Taylor Walker Credit: Photo by Linda Saul-Sena

Harold Walker was a dynamic leader. In 2013, he saw a man walking down the street with a clipboard and a city nametag. When Harold asked the man about his mission, he discovered that the laurel oaks lining the streets of his Hyde Park neighborhood were coming to the end of their lives.

The man said that the city was planning to remove all the laurels in this neighborhood. When Walker asked if there was a replacement plan, the man shrugged. He asked the City of Tampa staffer to hold off on the removals for a few months while he created a plan to replace them with live oaks.

For the next 10 years, Walker successfully led his neighborhood organization’s effort to reforest the streets with specimen live oaks, thus improving the environmental quality of the area. He worked with neighbors to get them to pay $1,000 each for particularly robust oak trees; the trees’ circumference was 10-12 inches—or as tree people say, four-to-five inches measured by calipers.

Walker elicited his neighbors’ cooperation, having them sign a contract in which they promised to water these newly planted trees daily for four months at five gallons per caliper of trunk size. Daily. The result of his exacting program is the thriving ecosystem of trees on a dozen Hyde Park streets with names like Delaware, Morrison, S Boulevard and Newport. These trees will provide shade, clean air, and beautify the neighborhood for hopefully the next 150 years.

Walker explained his strategy of tree planting to an interested group of neighborhood leaders in February of 2025 for an event organized by the Tampa Bay Community Design Center (which in full disclosure is a group this writer participates in). Bill Carlson and Lynn Hurtak, two Tampa City Council members, joined the lively presentation by Walker and his son Taylor, who is the chief horticulturist for Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales.

The presentation was inspiring, and Harold created a handout for each participant with information on how to successfully replicate this program in other neighborhoods. Dad spoke for 30 minutes, with Taylor expanding on the extraordinary contributions of live oaks to the local ecosystem.

“In addition to the oak’s beauty and shade,” Taylor explained “each tree creates its own microenvironment for insects and animals. When a row of oaks is planted, they literally support each other, sharing nutrients and growing roots which reach out to the fellow trees.”

Harold researched a commercial grower in central Florida whose trees were field-grown and placed into heavy gauge wire baskets lined with burlap. He personally hand-tagged the healthiest trees and supervised their delivery and installation. Harold—who was also the voice of Plant High School football for 15 years—worked with the Hyde Park Preservation Inc. to contribute funds toward the transport and installation of the trees and to help publicize the program which started in 2013.

These trees will provide shade, clean air, and beautify the neighborhood for hopefully the next 150 years. Credit: Photo by Linda Saul-Sena

For the talk, Walker and his son had planned a route along Hyde Park’s oak-lined streets to show the results of his tree planting campaign. They led the way down the block, explaining other trees in the area and how they interacted with the new oaks. But Harold sadly suffered a heart attack on the same day and did not survive. His legacy, those 201 glorious live oaks, will serve our community forever as a tribute to his vision and work.

Councilman Carlson told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, “He showed that neighborhoods can work closely with the City to plant more trees and enhance our parks. We need to build on his legacy. The tree canopy in neighborhoods beyond Hyde Park could use a leader like Harold Walker.”

Just a mile away on Davis Islands, one of Tampa’s storied neighborhoods is rapidly losing shade trees. True, the Islands suffered massive losses with the hurricanes last fall. However, the denuding of trees is due to more than the flooding. When Davis Islands was pumped out of the Hillsborough Bay 100 years ago, it had virtually no native vegetation because it had been a mud flat.

All of the landscaping has been created by homeowners who wanted a shady neighborhood. The iconic trees on Davis Islands were the Washingtonian Palms, which grew and grew and grew until they resembled something created by Dr. Seuss with a few palm fronds on top of a tremendously tall trunk.

Things started to change for Davis Islands 35 years ago when the City of Tampa began offering free street trees in an effort to beautify the city. Residents took advantage of these programs and the neighborhood’s canopy began to grow. Most anyone might recognize one of these trees by their height today, from 20-30 feet.

Unfortunately, as real estate values have climbed, the size of the homes on Davis Islands has also grown disproportionately, filling the average lot from stem to stern. Current laws allow neighbors to be seven feet apart, but air conditioners, often massive and raised in the air to avoid flooding, can be three feet from the property line. Front setbacks are 20 feet and rear setbacks are often less, crowding every possible buildable inch of the lots.

Tampa Electric Company forbids oak trees to be planted under their wires, so even though the City of Tampa’s free tree program allows residents to select from a list of five potential trees, four of the five species offered are puny and provide little shade.

As climate change increasingly destabilizes our expectations for weather events, the roots of our trees are literally also destabilized. The result of shifting temperatures and flooding has resulted in a dramatic and painful loss of tree canopy on Davis Islands. Despite the efforts of the Tree Committee for the Davis Islands Civic Association, there has been a wretched net loss of shade and tree canopy.

Harold Walker proved that a focused, organized approach to installing specimen oak trees can be successful. It takes leadership, organization and neighbors willing to invest in the planting of the trees and their willingness to keep the trees watered. The City of Tampa has proven to be a solid partner with Hyde Park, and has indicated that it would extend the same level of cooperation to any neighborhood.

As a result of Trump’s budget cuts, the City of Tampa lost $1.6 million which had been awarded for tree-planting under the federal program for environmental justice. The loss could be made up in local funds and would be a strong investment in a sustainable future.

In June 2024, the Tampa Heat Resilience Playbook was published online by the City of Tampa. It explains the dangers of extreme heat which is measured as over 90 degrees with high humidity. The numbers are mounting rapidly with 89 dangerous days with the heat index exceeding 100 degrees in 2022 and 100 dangerous days in 2024. Ugh!

This thoughtful analysis recommends planting shade trees throughout our neighborhoods because they create cooling corridors, lowering the air temperature up to 25%. Live oak trees are a “Keystone species” supporting more life forms than any other tree genus including fungi, insects, birds and mammals. These oaks stabilize soil, purify air and filter water. Live oaks rock!

Taryn Sabia, the Assistant Dean for Research at University of South Florida’s College of Design, Art and Performance, who led the Heat Resilience Playbook initiative observed,”we know the course of action we need but it takes leadership to get the trees planted.”

As everyone knows, a decent tree takes a long time to grow and the best time to plant it was 20 years ago. The next best time to plant it is today.

UPDATED 04/15/25 4:42 p.m. Updated to remove details of Harold Walker’s death.

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This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2025.