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<\/p>\nTen thousand times, Jim Crouch has picked up an acorn. Ten thousand times, he\u2019s planted that acorn. And 10,000 is about the number of oak seedlings he\u2019s entrusted to the hands of people who pledged to care for the tree that has become his mission and obsession. <\/p>\n
It began after he retired. For years, he\u2019d been a classroom science teacher in suburban San Diego County, and now, with that chapter behind him, the trees have become his life. He hopes to meaningfully contribute to the regrowth of burned Altadena. <\/p>\n
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California has Thousand Oaks, Sherman Oaks, Oak Park, Fair Oaks, even Oakland. That\u2019s just in English. Consider Encino, Encinitas and Paso Robles. They paint a picture of a California covered in oaks. But many regions have lost their oak canopy. Some trees succumbed to insects after being weakened by drought. Some were cut for developments, some were cut down illegally. Some oaks have been cut after fire. <\/p>\n
Crouch witnessed this loss. He felt it. He took to collecting acorns \u2014 the seeds of oak trees. He planted them in deep pots. For the first eight years, he was a one-man operation working out of his backyard He began handing off the seedlings to others. Then many seedlings, to many others. <\/p>\n
He began opening small nurseries, staffed by volunteers. He named his organization Re-Oak California after a group in the Bay Area with the same name. His motivation \u201cstarted with climate, but then I learned you can\u2019t do anything better for nature than protect the best keystone species.\u201d <\/p>\n
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Englemann oak acorns at the Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve. <\/p>\n
(Sandy Huffaker \/ For the Los Angeles Times )<\/p>\n
Oaks support a wide range of organisms, anchoring entire ecosystems, and also serve the vital task of storing carbon on a warming planet. <\/p>\n
In a kind of treasure hunt, Crouch gathers all the acorns on private lands. He uses a hunting app to identify who owns which patch of remote land, then mails the property owner a letter asking for permission to gather.<\/p>\n
A growing cadre of volunteers increasingly helps with the next step, the actual harvest, scooping acorns off the ground and into bags and buckets. That\u2019s in part because Crouch is 75, and a bicycle accident has him using a cane. \u201cMy constant companion,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n
Recently, one volunteer leveled up Crouch\u2019s game by making him a mapping app that includes not only the property ownership information but also tree locations from the app iNaturalist, layered together with research from Victoria Sork, a UCLA professor and dean of life sciences, who has studied oak trees for more than 30 years.
Sork\u2019s lab, along with the Nature Conservancy, is sequencing oak DNA to identify which trees are best built to survive a hotter, drier California. The goal is to put those findings to work on the ground by planting acorns from trauma-affected trees that still survive. In other words, the toughest oaks could help produce the next generation.
It\u2019s a strategy Sork hopes can make California\u2019s forests more resilient to climate change \u2014 something she\u2019s hoping Crouch can help her with. For Crouch, it\u2019s a partnership he\u2019s still a little starstruck about. He compares getting a call from Sork to being asked for shooting tips from NBA star Stephen Curry.
Sork sees the value in the partnership too.
\u201cMy best role is to generate knowledge and then partner with the people who are trying to get things going,\u201d she says. Crouch, she adds, is one of the keys to getting her research \u201cout from the ivory tower to the practitioners.\u201d<\/p>\n
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On a recent Tuesday, Crouch steered his 2011 Nissan Frontier from his home in Escondido up to La Ca\u00f1ada High School off the 210 Freeway. This is where Re-Oak is opening its first nursery in the Los Angeles area, intended to serve hard-hit Altadena. It will be the group\u2019s sixth, on Oak Grove Drive.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a bit of a challenge because I can\u2019t be there every day, you know?\u201d Crouch says. But \u201cAltadena needs more trees, [and] we\u2019ll give them whatever they need.\u201d The new La Ca\u00f1ada nursery is going up in the high school\u2019s garden: a crescent-shaped plot between the track and field and tennis courts, carpeted with mulch and sectioned off with native plants, annuals and edibles. It was started three years ago by English teacher Daryl Bilandzija, a former student of Crouch\u2019s who saw that handing over the plot to his old teacher would mean learning for his students. \u201cIf we could get them to put a couple of acorns in the ground wherever they go, it could start to have an effect on the local environment,\u201d Bilandzija said. \u201cAnd before you know it, you\u2019ve re-oaked a neighborhood.\u201d <\/p>\n
Some Altadena trees survived the 2025 fire there, yet those that remain are more vulnerable because of the overall loss of what arborists call \u201cfriction\u201d that helped them weather storms as a group. More trees are vital to the overall health of the remaining population in Altadena. This nursery joins several other tree efforts in the community.<\/p>\n
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