After the storm: How collaboration is driving the Arboretum’s restoration
Red Oak seedling starting to return.
Ed Wright photos
When Drake Fowler returned to the North Carolina Arboretum after Hurricane Helene, the extent of the damage broke his heart.
“We lost 10,000 trees over 80 acres,” he said.
However, as the initial shock of grief subsided, Fowler, the arboretum’s executive director, considered how to find opportunity amid destruction.
He envisioned an intentional plan to restore the forest; one that would educate the community, promote conservation and honor Appalachia’s diverse ecosystems. Such a plan would require strategic management, and Fowler needed to look no further than Western Carolina University, his alma mater, and Ed Wright, his former business school professor.
“We started this project through a small mini-grant from Western Carolina University and used their business department to help document how we were going to make decisions about what we plan to put back,” Fowler explained.
“I asked Drake, ‘Could we help?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, let's figure out how to start, how to begin to get this place put back together.’ And so I think that's the role that that we played, was organizing the project,” Wright recalled.
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Alongside fellow WCU Professor Hollye Moss, Wright helped the staff choose eight arboretum zones as focal points for restoration. Fowler told The Smoky Mountain News that the team outlined top priorities for each — aesthetically pleasing, facilitates conservation, encourages species regeneration — to inform planting decisions.
Wright and Moss studied aerial maps showing normalized difference vegetation index, a method of documenting forest health based on light reflected and absorbed by different plants in satellite images. The two professors also studied “previous research done on reforestation projects all over the U.S.” to prepare for January 2025, and with it, “our first official meeting,” Wright said.
Admittedly, there was still a learning curve when combining the disparate disciplines of forestry and business.
“I'm smiling because [the beginning of the project] was a very interesting time for me,” he said.
Fowler’s former professor had shown up to the first partnership meeting in his typical work attire: loafers and dress pants. “And then I realized we were going out in the mud,” he said. On his way home, Wright said he made a pit stop at a discount store “and bought some decent boots.”
The boots proved essential.
He explained that meetings were split between a conference room and “the field,” where project members would take “the ATVs to the side of the mountain and [hike] down for a mile or two.” At the conclusion of the investigation, the team had evaluated all eight zones through 26 factors across six different categories to guide the arboretum’s plans for reforestation.
Phase two
With data from each focal zone, Fowler set his sights on a detailed, realistic guide to regenerating the arboretum’s forests — the next stage of the project.
The arboretum is being supported by grants from the Glass Foundation and Laura Jane Musser Fund. It aims to finish this stage of the plan “and show it to the public around Arbor Day of this year,” Fowler said.
A partner was also required for this subsequent step. While one might assume many arboretum employees fit the bill, that’s not exactly the case, the executive director said.
“Most of our staff are horticulturists … So, our staff is really good at taking care of individual plants. They definitely understand ecosystems. But forestry is its own practice, and [foresters are] looking at soil types, aspect, the shape of the land,” he said. An Asheville-based nonprofit called EcoForesters was selected.
“We do a lot of forest planning for private landowners, explained Andy Tait, the group’s senior forestry director.
Andy Tait, co-director at EcoForesters; Mac Franklin, director of horticulture at NC Arboretum; Drake Fowler, director at NC Arboretum survey the forest.
EcoForesters, Tait added, does “everything from full forest management planning to implementation,” including thinning dense thickets and controlling invasive plants. Not only did the arboretum find the conservation-focused nonprofit aligned with its mission, but EcoForesters had also been a steady collaborator. The group had already contributed its time and resources pro bono to the arboretum as a means of securing grant-based funding from the latter organization.
“This is a long-term relationship that we have with them,” Fowler told SMN, highlighting the group’s extensive work with local property owners.
Tait recalled he and Executive Director Lang Hornthal have been meeting with arboretum staff monthly throughout the past quarter to discuss goals and objectives, even though Nov. 21 marked the “first official date under contract.”
Planning ahead was a critical decision.
While Fowler said EcoForesters is tasked with drafting concrete action items for the eight aforementioned areas, “they’re actually doing a plan for our entire property.”
But Fowler, a landscape architect by trade, knew an implementable plan couldn’t solely consist of words. It needed drawings, too, hence the role of NC State University’s landscape architecture program as another partner.
Graduate student Liliana Teta and Professor Carla Delcambre, he explained, are “working in conjunction with EcoForesters to take their recommendations and actually start drawing circles and deciding… how to implement this plan.”
And Teta is designing a plan of her own. While the arboretum reevaluates the specifics of its natural landscape, she’s questioning how to improve human access.
“One of the challenges that I get to try to figure out is how to make an ADA loop throughout this area, and what that could look like,” she said.
Teta said she’s also designing a tent structure for those “that might have not been able to enjoy the arboretum because they aren't able to walk as far.” It’s a “multi-flexible space” with a “fireplace component,” she said, adding that “we want to bring that naturalistic feel to it, while also making it accessible.”
Teta values the opportunity on Arbor Day to teach the audience about her project. And fowler said it’s important for the arboretum — part of the state university system — “to enable young folks like Liliana that are doing research to use us as a classroom and advance.”
The arboretum also benefits from this research.
“I think the project's better when we get more disciplines and brains around this,” he (fowler) said.
Classifying conditions
Now that it’s December, Tait said he and his coworkers are “clamping some formal inventory — going to go out there and actually record the mix of species, the composition of the forest,” while observing the size and structure of the trees.
According to Tait, that data provides insight into current conditions of the forest, which foresters can then compare to the “desired future conditions” and “determine what’s possible and what’s appropriate for each site.”
Current conditions at the arboretum are marked by significant post-Helene improvement — a testament to the work of another set of partners.
“FEMA contractors were there; Army Corps of Engineers were there. Volunteer organizations were there. There were chainsaws going for weeks,” Wright said.
And there’s still ongoing cleanup, which Fowler described as “a debate we wrestle with every day.”
“Some might argue, ‘hey, just leave all this downed timber. It’s habitat,’” he theorized, but excessive debris are a fire hazard, an overhead hazard and a fall hazard, especially since “we use our forests as our classrooms.”
Not to mention, he added, that “it looks really ugly” to have timber-covered trails. Though the opposite would also be brutal.
“We don’t necessarily want it like the Black Forest in Germany, where the ground level is manicured,” he said.
Fowler has settled on leaving “10 to 25% of that [timber] on the fourth floor for habitat but then getting out an inordinate amount of down.” It’s a balance — but the arboretum has found creative ways to recycle the wood. The Asheville Tool Library offered it freely to the public. A portion was milled by UNC-Asheville’s Team Lab and used as signage for the troll exhibit.
Now, Fowler said, it’s being processed as firewood for both Winter Lights and, through a partnership with rural organizations, “to people further out in the county that heat their homes with the wood.”
As with removing timber from the arboretum, multiple outlets are required to achieve the future conditions it desires. What might work for one location might be harmful to another, and a single zone can host an array of options, such as Willow Pond.
“The area adjacent to this pond was heavily impacted, and so we're starting to think about, ‘Okay, do we put that into forest, or should we extend this meadow ecosystem deeper into this disturbed area?’” Fowler said.
Though a key priority throughout the 99-acre property is the recultivation of oak.
“Oaks in particular are the keystone species for wildlife. They’re an incredibly important species that’s been declining for about 100 years,” said Tait, explaining that while oaks aren’t uncommon, they aren’t regenerating either.
For example, there tends to be a discrepancy between the composition of forest overstory and understory in this region. Fowler told SMN that “an oak sapling — the little one that you walk by on the trail — could be 10 years old,” noting that for it to start “cruising upward,” the missing ingredient is sun. This makes the process of oak regeneration “a bit ironic,” he said, because it largely consists of weeding maples, pines and tulip poplars — faster growers that will “shade out the oaks.”
“In some areas, we might be doing more removal than planting,” explained Fowler.
Tait noted the absence of another essential ingredient: flames.
Diverse forests were once plentiful because “Native Americans were burning this landscape for thousands of years,” he said. A controlled burn reduces the risk of an extreme wildfire by reducing fuel loads. According to Tait, it also “restores fire-adapted communities like oak and short leaf pine.”
“For the short leaf pine, it actually needs fire to regenerate, so it creates another more diverse, now very uncommon, habitat or forest type,” he said.
However, the arboretum doesn’t own the property; it has 99-year lease on the entirely Pisgah Forest land area. As a result, plans are dependent on approval by the Forest Service.
“We wouldn't be doing anything on the property that would conflict with that document,” Fowler said.
Still, he added, “we live in a pretty complicated little nexus because we're part of the university system in the state of North Carolina, but we're on federal land.”
