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.”
After the flooding, the alliance stepped up to help residents clear mud and muck from their homes. Then it soon became apparent the alliance and other groups needed to raise awareness about being good stewards of the land while debris removal was taking place, which also affected the riverbank.
But the flood’s footprint wasn’t uniform, said Jay Brimhall, director of parks and recreation for the City of Kerrville. While one bridge acted as shield from the rushing waters, other stretches of the riverbank were completely laid bare.
“Today, you can see nature’s patience at work,” Brimhall said. “Affected areas are already healing themselves with native grasses and wildflowers that are naturally stabilizing the soil. Nature knows how to repair itself; our job is to respect that process and help it along where we can.”
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.
Seed collection
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.
The Hill Country Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists also has been testing a variety of methods for protecting the young plants from deer herbivory.
‘At the top’
Eason said he’s worked on several large projects in his career as a conservation botanist, but “this one is at the top.”
“The community support, the number of partners that are involved in this, including private landowners, has just been amazing,” he said.
Other groups have jumped in to also distribute or plant hundreds of trees and thousands of plants, according to a report by the Kerr County River Foundation (KCRF), established soon after last year’s floods.
After the Community Foundation prioritized its funding to help first responders and individuals in need, the River Foundation set out to address the river itself, “our greatest asset,” said Jeremy Walter, a founding director of KCRF and owner of the Pint & Plow brewpub in Kerrville.
In the hours after the floods wreaked havoc, the restaurateur and others like him directed their efforts at making food to support the recovery efforts.
With that need met and exceeded in those early days, “it was a horrible feeling, of having no purpose, no direction,” said Walther, a resident of Center Point. “We see this happening, unfolding before our eyes, but we cannot physically get down there because we’re not trained in search and rescue.”
KCRF and its seven-member board soon formed the Adopt-a-River Trail program and a plan for how volunteer groups can pitch in to maintain, restore and replant an adopted section of the River Trail.
Walther applauded the botanical garden’s trees initiative.
“What they brought was a plan that was very, very distinct from other plans,” he said, in terms of replanting trees native to the area and with the same genetics. But there’s another “human side” as well, he added.
“Think of all of those people that come to Kerrville and Kerr County and the Guadalupe River year after year, generation after generation, and that have stories of experiences underneath those giant towering cypress trees that really informed and shaped their lives forever,” Walther said.
“Think of all the first kisses under cypress trees that are no longer there, and first dates, and family picnics,” he said.
“That’s not just replanting trees, it’s replanting trees in a way that ties to the real story, our unique story of this community.”
Bringing back the canopy is a slow, generational process, but Brimhall called it a noble one.
When community and nonprofit groups step in, it completely changes the dynamic for the city, he said, by stretching federal dollars, cutting red tape and gaining local buy-in, he said.
“Transitioning from emergency cleanup to this community-driven restoration shows what real civic resilience looks like,” Brimhall said. “It proves that protecting a city requires local pride, quick thinking, and strong partnerships alongside our traditional master plans.”
The Hill Country Alliance also has distributed thousands of saplings for replanting along the river and has been holding workshops for landowners. Getting them involved has been a positive experience, Romans said.
“Healing the river is a part of healing the individuals and the communities that suffered so much loss as a result of the flood,” she said. “It’s really just a helpful step forward to a more hopeful, more positive future in which we know the river will come back stronger than ever.”
