Robin Sasseville’s vintage blue cottage and wooded yard stood out amid the tide of development in Nashville. She had carefully transplanted daffodils from yards of neighboring homes before they were torn down, planted young trees and kept watch over a towering hackberry as it outlasted others and became the largest tree on the block.
Then the winter storm late last month brought sheets of frozen rain and days of bitter cold. The mulberry tree, just big enough to start bearing fruit, peeled. It is still too early to know whether the hackberry, limbs collapsed over her roof, will survive its wounds.
“Trees are just one of those generational type things you could always count on,” said Ms. Sasseville, 42, pausing between clipping branches. Now, she added, they are “just one more thing that’s going to be gone.”
Communities across the South are grieving the loss of dozens of people in connection with the storm, which paralyzed much of the region with snow and ice. Thousands more are slowly recovering from the expensive toll of going more than a week without power or heat, and filing insurance claims for mangled roofs, cars and other property.
But the most visible damage is to the trees.
Limbs cracked and snapped during and after the storms, sounding like gunfire. Trunks plummeted through sheds and fences, dragged down power lines and shed buds petrified in ice.
The weight of the ice was unsparing, ravaging wealthy suburban enclaves, rural outposts and urban parks. Trees that had survived decades of unpredictable weather and outlived the people who planted them were reduced to piles of logs and ragged stumps lining the roads.
It will take months for the damage to be cleared, and as much as a generation to replace thousands of trees that were lost or fatally injured. The destruction has exposed a contradiction of the extreme weather that increasingly plagues the South: Trees that provide crucial shade in intense heat could become a liability when ice accumulates.
The day after the storm hit Nashville, when it was still too icy to go outside, all Meghann Zolan could do was “just sit and try not to cry” as she listened to trees crack and fall all around her home.
Ms. Zolan, an employee of the landscape company Full Circle Tree and Shrub, said that she and her co-workers remained “shell shocked and devastated” by the damage to the landscape.
In northeastern Louisiana, Kerry Heafner, a horticulturist at the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, said the state’s timber industry had already been struggling to recoup after a flash freeze in 2022, followed by record heat. Now the pines, he said, had taken another hard hit.
“There are people who have lived here in the Deep South, the Gulf South, their whole lives and just can’t imagine life without our live oaks and our pines and our Southern magnolias,” he said. “There’s a deep emotional attachment.”
More than 2,000 trees were lost in Warner Parks in Nashville, according to estimates. The city zoo is mourning a hackberry tree, believed to be more than 150 years old, central to its grounds. And at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, a 1930s mansion with sprawling botanical gardens on the outskirts of the city, an ice-inflicted crack in the trunk of a century-old red oak is now splitting, dashing initial hopes that it had survived the storm.
“An inch of ice doesn’t sound like a lot, but if your entire body was coated in an inch of ice, that is going to be so heavy,” said Sage McClain, Cheekwood’s plant collections manager. As she stood near the oak, chains keeping it secure, she added, “It’s heartbreaking.”
At Rowan Oak, the home of the author William Faulkner in Oxford, Miss., at least two trees believed to have been there while he lived on the property from 1930 until his death in 1962 cannot be salvaged. Century-old trees in the heart of the city, known as the Square, had to be taken down because of ice damage.
“You were more than trees; you were the frame through which we viewed our lives,” city officials wrote in a eulogy shared online. “Rest easy, old friends. The Square will feel a little brighter, a little hotter, and a lot emptier without you.”
At the University of Mississippi in Oxford, which closed for nearly two weeks after the storm, the chancellor assured students that two “champion trees” — a Northern catalpa and an Osage orange, the largest of their species in the state — had survived. He pledged to quickly replace the dozens of trees that had to be removed, a fraction of the entire campus landscape, noting that “they provide a sense of connection for all who have gathered beneath them.”
Some of the storm’s most common victims were not surprising: hackberry trees, sometimes derided as junk. Southern magnolias, whose broad leaves allowed for even more ice to pile up. Red oaks and maples, which are less likely to heal over time and were thus deemed too dangerous to stay standing.
In Nashville, criticism of the local public utility, which took nearly two weeks to fully restore power to its customers, has turned to on whether it failed to trim trees sufficiently in recent years.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor, has accused the agency of prioritizing “woke politics” over tree trimming, pointing to its spending on diversity, equity and inclusion training. Cameron Sexton, the Republican speaker of the State House of Representatives, has criticized what he called a “pro-tree canopy policy.”
“How much of this was avoidable?” Mr. Sexton asked in an interview. He pointed to remarks that Teresa Broyles-Aplin, the chief executive of Nashville Electric Service, made last fall highlighting the agency’s sensitivity toward protecting the tree canopy.
Agency documents show that the agency spent about 35 percent less on tree trimming in the 2024 fiscal year than in the previous one — about $13.8 million compared with $21 million. Spending increased slightly during the 2025 fiscal year. An internal audit, shared at a board meeting last November, warned that “inadequate vegetation management” had raised the risk of “increasing frequency and duration of outages.”
Ms. Broyles-Aplin, speaking at a news conference on Saturday, said the utility would consider changes, including “ways we can be more aggressive with tree trimming.”
Some arborists in the Nashville area said that homeowners are often reluctant to invest in necessary tree maintenance, while others resist it on aesthetic grounds. But now, they added, they are fielding constant panicked messages and trying to curb what they described as a knee-jerk rush to aggressively trim surviving trees.
“They get scared,” Michael Davie, an arborist at Bartlett Tree Experts, said of homeowners who lose power or property when trees or their branches fall. “A lot of people are just going to cut down everything,” he added.
Come spring, new trees will be planted across the region — a start at replacing what was lost. But the holes in the canopy will likely take decades to fill in.
“There’s definitely a pang in my heart,” said Eric Brace, 65, a musician in East Nashville. Limbs from his American elm plummeted to the ground during the storms, and stabilizing cables are still roped around some of the highest branches, which soar above his backyard.
Quoting the Joni Mitchell song, he added, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
The post Across the South, Residents Grieve for Thousands of Storm-Ravaged Trees appeared first on New York Times.
