Immediate Action Plan After the 2026 Ice Storm
Recommendations from a Middle Tennessee horticulturist, garden designer, and nurseryman with expertise in woody trees and woody ornamentals
Purpose
This is an immediate action plan from my desk as a 20-year Middle Tennessee horticulturist, garden designer, and nurseryman, specifically with an expertise in woody trees and woody ornamentals. After the 2026 ice storm, these are my recommendations on how to proceed.
After emergency vegetation cleanup is completed, right-of-ways, private property owners, commercial property owners, and agricultural farmland will still show the scars, fallen trees, and debris of this event.
1) Activate community dumping and processing sites
Recommendation
Local parks and city-owned vacant lots should be activated for vegetation dumping.
Side note about vegetation dumping
All of this wood material is the base of compost. The basic ingredient of compost is carbon—wood, limbs, twigs, all of it, down to the stumps—and green stuff: grass clippings, leaves.
Operational plan
If financially plausible and budget allowing, these locations should have city, county, state, or contracted partners with wood chippers available on-site.
Local arborists, tree service and cleanup crews, and local residents should be able to bring their tree debris to these locations. One of the on-site crew members from the wood chippers then chips this organic material into as fine and sharp a blade chip as possible after it’s cutting.
Mounds should be strategically positioned to maximize the amount able to fit onto the lot.
24-month compost plan
Within the next 24 months, all of these wood chips should also then receive a dumping of leaf litter gathered in the fall and should essentially become mini-compost organic matter collection sites for the next 18 months.
At the end of the 18 months, each of these locations with proper stewardship would provide ample compost to turn the existing lot into a native herbaceous perennial planted garden—turning what was a disaster into future beauty—and also, if volume is high enough, be able to provide organic matter, mulch, and compost to local community and citizens who were so deeply impacted by this event.
Again, reminding them that out of the most difficult circumstances, positive outcomes can arise.
2) Immediate action on damaged standing trees
Recommendation
Immediate action for damage in standing trees: I would highly encourage these trees to be removed.
Many of them are exactly what nature has already been doing, in need of a thinning, a culling. The Nashville tree canopy is not something that can live without stewardship.
These large trees that have gone through damage have exposed vascular root systems, poorly shaped crowns, and will become a risk in the next weather event—be that a spring storm, a summer storm, or again, a winter precipitation, ice, or snow event.
Use removed material for function and beauty
The same process should be followed for these trees once they are removed.
The stumps from these trees can be cut to create borders for these community park compost centers at lengths of 24 inches, stood next to each other, creating a symmetrical row.
All of these community compost organic matter centers could not only be functional, but the use of these larger trees coming down and using their trunks could also make them aesthetically pleasing as well during their buildup to becoming gardens and intentional planting zones.
3) A language and safety note for neighborhoods
Horticulturalist note: please do not allow the word snags, often used in the circles of sustainability and ecology, to be left through the community. A snag is something that is beautiful in a forest, but not in a neighborhood.
Again, we’re trying to correct a problem that was long in coming in there being a large uncapped Nashville tree canopy for decades that was susceptible to these type events. Intentional stewardship is needed now more than ever.
4) Maximize efficiency while crews are already mobilized
To maximize efficiency, trees that are on their way to becoming the next cycle of problem—that grow two feet a year or more—that are within 20 feet of existing crews working on removing vegetation should also be removed.
Forestry service devices used by the forestry industry to clamp, cut, and quickly remove large trees should be utilized as opposed to individual crew arborists with chainsaw, if possible, when budget and resource availability allows.
5) Long-term moving forward: stewardship is the flagship
This 2026 ICE event is a reminder of how important stewardship is. Native plants, ecology, naturalism, sustainability—none of these words trumps stewardship.
Stewardship is the epitome and the flagship that I’ve built my business and professional career around.
Allowing large-growing native trees that eventually become skyscraper giants amongst communities is not a positive for the community.
What is a positive is the lengthy and nearly infinite choice of options that we have that do not grow to be large.
Capital costs will increase upfront because you are spending more money on a slower-growing tree. The savings comes in the lack of maintenance down the road—or in this case, after catastrophic failure of a tree.
Smaller growing trees with beautiful canopies are more likely to be flowering plants that attract pollinators, produce strong wood, habitat, and offer all of the positives that people who are passionate about ecology and sustainability want and require, but at the same time not posing risk of safety to community members because of their out-of-scale size growing proportions.
This event is a reminder—an opportunity to pop into action—and most importantly, to not make the same mistakes again, to allow stewardship to become the call.
And stewardship involves active people and professionals making decisions to change the Nashville tree canopy as those professionals see fit.
Supporting documents already in hand