How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature

by Nicole Walker

When Nicole Walker was molested and had an abortion at age 11, the distance between her and the world grew until she couldn't imagine a future place for her anywhere.

In How to Plant a Billion Trees, Walker tries to understand why her whole life didn't fall apart, as was predicted. As she pieces together her story, she finds that it was thanks in no small part to her mother, her sisters, her friends who did not let the sexual abuse to define her. In this candid portrayal of a young girl, Nicole Walker writes about how, thanks to her family, her friends, and the mountains of the Wasatch, Cascades, and San Francisco Peaks, she reknit herself into the fabric of a supportive culture.

Employing the forest as a model to understand how to reconnect her life with the world, Nicole studies the way that ecosystems anticipate, react, and support each small part of the whole. As she learns more about ecology, she discovers that in a healthy forest, even the gritty, decaying elements contribute to the health of the forest. The process of rebuilding the self into a community parallels the process of a forest's growth. To apply that lesson to the human ecosystem, Nicole realizes that even the hard-to-stomach stories need to be told, and, with air, that grit is transformed into something alive and new.

Genres: Memoir

224 pages, Hardcover

Published February 19, 2026

Reviews

[Rachel Sides · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was more interested in the memoir, not planting trees.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's my second-favorite passage, on the arts of storytelling, painting, healing, and planting:
"What I wanted from telling my story is what I want from a painting. I want to move into the paint itself and become part of the image. This is a kind of hiding but it’s also a kind of presence.In this painting of my dreams, I want to part the brushstrokes, open them wide, and step between their oily certainty. I want to be part but not the whole of the story. I want to be on even ground with the other figures in the painting—tree, human, stone. I want to be configured. Smoothed and readied and wet but unlike as with sex, my becoming only means what it means in light of the color and shapes and chiaroscuro around me. The tree in the painting—it shades me from too harsh of light, but it also promises that there is another way to be part of the story—some way that is broad and rich and wide enough that others can come into the story too. We could be sheltered by the story of the tree. Color me understory. One strip of color next to another, next to another. You and me, in this story, a river of cellulose and pigment, lines of electrons and protons as real as energy from the sun. We are photosynthesizing all right in here."
And my favorite, this magical love letter from the very conclusion:
"I’ve been looking for you, dear soils, dear microbes, amaranths, Douglas firs, fungi, western red cedars, ponderosa pines, chanterelles, cigarettes, paintings, stories of walking, baby dolls and real babies, men who were trees and men who were parts of forests. A mother of mycelia and a mother of girls. A collection of collectives. What is the collective term for snow? What is the collective term for stories? What is the collective term for microorganisms? What does it mean to start again. We are the end of progress and the beginning. What an ancient forest we are building."

[Bridget Lyons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicole Walker is a master of the braided essay, and this is a masterfully braided book, weaving the narrator's personal history and healing process into the larger narrative of climate change and ecological fragmentation to inspire readers to explore their own ideas about both. She positions anecdotes from her life alongside observations and facts about the natural world. She entertains multitudes of metaphors and deftly calls back numerous references. And she reveals one person's humanity bravely and authentically. All of this cooperates in a mycelial fashion to illustrate the entangled nature of the narratives both humans and trees live within. This book is sad and joyful and depressing and hopeful all at once—and that, I think is the point. We live in a complex world, Walker reminds us, and our task is to hold and respect that complexity while trying our best to be empathetic and heal from wounds past and present. Oh, and to make art that celebrates and helps us better understand it. Which she is doing.