Plateau Live Oak acorn seeds with their first leaves. Credit: Courtesy / Michael Eason
As Michael Eason drove along the banks of the Guadalupe River late last summer, amid places he had worked and photographed over the years, he couldn’t help but be moved by the devastation.
“Depending on where you were standing and where you’re counting, it was just gone,” he said.
Along with homes and businesses, iconic century-old bald cypress and American sycamore had been washed away and severely battered by the catastrophic flooding on July 4, 2025, and the ensuing cleanup.
A once bucolic river was left lined with mangled debris in a community also reeling from the loss of 119 lives. Thousands of homes and businesses washed away or were damaged.
“It was so devastating,” with deadwood extending from Hunt to Pasadena Point, and over half the tree canopy destroyed, said Eason, vice president of conservation and collection at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.
“When you drive down the highway, you look out and you see our oak trees, and you see our junipers, and there along the river, the bald cypress, and you think that they can never go away,” he said. “But they can.”
In fact, between 52% of the vegetation and tree canopy was lost within the floodway along 30 river miles from Hunt to Comfort, according to the Bandera County River Authority and Groundwater District. Some parcels lost as much as 99%.
“Some of the most impacted areas are below large impoundments, such as Ingram Dam and Nimitz Dam,” said Clinton Carter, watershed ecologist and field operations manager.
Before-and-after images from Carter’s vegetation loss analysis are published to a dashboard, and Carter said the River and Environmental Working Group and the City of Kerrville are now trying to acquire new aerial imagery and data to monitor changes over time.
The loss from the flooding is significant considering only about 1% of the land in Texas is considered riparian or along natural waterways, according to some estimates, said Katherine Romans, executive director of the nonprofit Hill Country Alliance.
”It’s a very small band of land alongside these water bodies, and at the same time it has an outsized impact on biodiversity on water resources, on our quality of life,” she said.
“When you think about where you want to be in the hottest months of the summer, it’s alongside the river.”
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For Eason, replanting trees seemed like the best way he could help.
Along with grasses and other plantings, the trees are critical to creating systems that are functional, he said, even helping to slow the water to prevent flooding, to clean the water and stabilize the riverbank.
They set a goal of planting 50,000 trees, and not just any trees — “native trees where the seed was collected locally there in the watershed … trees that in the long run will have the best chance of survival,” he said.
But they needed to move quickly to collect the seed when it became available at varying intervals last fall. A group began monitoring the trees for seed production.
Then for several weeks last fall, Eason led volunteers on a harvesting mission in the Texas Hill Country, plucking hardy native plant seeds from the riverbanks and the remaining trees on public and private land.
“Camp Stewart [for Boys] was one of the first properties we were able to access, and they were a great partner in this and have allowed us to collect quite a bit of seed from their property,” he said.
In all, the team collected more than 850,000 seeds from a variety of species, including cypress, sycamore, pecan, oak, walnut, red buckeye, and several herbaceous plants and grasses, including some that are not commercially available.
Prepared and then shipped to growers throughout the region, now those seeds have sprouted and made their way back to the botanical garden as saplings.
At least 30,000 plants are resting in cone-shaped containers under a makeshift shade structure waiting for the fall season when it’s optimal to plant.
Volunteers will be trained in the coming weeks and planting events are scheduled over several weekends, with 1,500 to 2,000 saplings sowed each time. Thirty sites along the river have been identified so far on both private property and public park space.
“Some of them will probably go through some sort of transplant shock [and] we will replace those, and so the goal isn’t just to plant 50,000 trees, the goal is to have 50,000 trees survive,” Eason said.
Consider this story to be a followup to this one from January that documented the damage to the area around the river. Michael Eason of the San Antonio Botanical Garden wrote about the vision and plan to remediate it around the same time. If you’re reading this and want to help I’d suggest contacting the San Antonio Botanical Garden or the Hill Country Alliance for more information. Kudos to all for making this happen.