Shawn Bennett, owner of Grace Tree Service, has spent years blending Idaho’s forestry heritage with hands-on care for the trees that shade North Idaho’s neighborhoods. 

In the past, Grace Tree Service would give out saplings as part of promotional events and marketing pushes. Those early seedlings planted lasting connections between the company and the community, and according to Bennett, that focus continues. 

“We gave out a lot of blue spruce trees that, you know, years later, someone’s like, ‘You remember that tree?’ I’m like, “‘No, not at all,’” he said. “They’re like, well, you gave it to me. 25 years ago, there it is.” 

Education, he insists, is essential. Young minds absorb the lessons of “right tree, right place,” proper planting, and formative pruning. Without them, he said, “for every, you know, 50 trees that are planted, 25 of them might mature.” 

Over 75 percent of the problems he sees as a consulting arborist start below ground. Small things like trees planted too deep, still in wire baskets and drowning in poorly drained soil.

North Idaho’s arborists cannot separate themselves from the region’s logging history. The state tree, western white pine, once dominated. 

“It was decimated by this disease called white pine blister rust,” Bennett said. “Our state tree was decimated to the point we thought we were going to, they were going to become extinct.” 

His own entry into tree work came through a Forest Service genetics program: bagging female flowers, collecting pollen from resistant parent trees, and creating blister-rust-resistant pine. 

“If you go to the silver valley, look up the gondola, all that hillside going up to the ski hill there, is now all 35-year-old white pines that are blister rust resistant,” he said. 

The old black-and-white photos that still hang in old cafés that show the boom days, today, those same forests sit at the edge of expanding five-acre home sites. As the land use has changed so have other aspects. With homes in the area, fire philosophy is different, causing more windfall and deadfall. Bark beetles surge after wind events. 

“North Idaho is like the lungs of the West too,” Bennett said. “We’ve got to be careful with our resources.”

Asked to name the benefits of trees, Bennett laughed. 

“It’s probably easier to list the things that trees don’t provide,” he said.  

Shade, privacy, habitat for birds and squirrels, cleaner air, cooler streets, and the quiet pleasure of watching a canopy mature across generations, to Bennett and many in North Idaho, all of it matters. He has long wanted two T-shirts printed: “Tree lives matter” and “Bee lives matter.” Pollinators and trees, he believes, “keep the planet kind of ticking.”

In a region where the forest begins at the city limits, arborists occupy a transitional place. They are the modern stewards of a timber past, translating the old ways of trees and soil into urban canopies that still carry the spirit of North Idaho’s past.

As Bennett puts it, when visitors from Alberta praise Coeur d’Alene’s beauty and its trees: “That’s about the best compliment you can give an arborist. Tell them their town looks good.”

    Bennett has gone from the first employee of Grace Tree Service to owner. From left: Mike, Nick, Derek, Elijah, Devon, Shawn, Christopher, Chris, Chad, Zeb and Chase.
  

    Bennett