Get To Know Leaf & Limb: Meet Katie

Nora: Introduce yourself however you would like.

Katie: I am Katie, and I am a crew member at Leaf & Limb, a lifelong Raleigh native who started climbing trees about three years ago.

And what made you want to get into this kind of work?

Most of my working life since college has been in food service. And I was really good at it, but then COVID happened and everything shut down. While everything was shut down, I had the opportunity to slow down with the rest of the world and get more connected to gardening, Nature, and the state of our world as it sat suspended in animation. I just really got in tune with the more natural side of things in the world.

When it was finally time to go back to work, I started with what I knew – food service, and had lots of interviews that went really well. But I just couldn’t get excited about that work. And I’d been gardening and taking longer hikes and noticing the trees and shrubs and birds and bees around me. I chose to go out on a limb (nice pun Katie!) and wanted to look for a job that put me outdoors in Nature.

It took about a month and a half to come across the Leaf & Limb job posting online after an arduous search. The job posting started off like, “Have you ever climbed trees before? If you haven’t, we’ll teach you how”. That was a really exciting hook for me.

And I got an interview with Leaf & Limb. I thought I completely bombed it, and I would never hear from Leaf & Limb again. And right before the holidays back in ‘23 I got a call from Andrea, saying that you guys were going to teach me how to climb trees!

What was the most surprising thing about Leaf & Limb when you got here?

I think from the outset, I could tell that things were done differently here.

Coming from food service, especially a lot of the fast casual I did, much of it was driven by the bottom line. Though they claimed their workspace was employee-focused and employee-driven, it really wasn’t.

The Leaf & Limb interview was intense! It was eight people I’d never met before, asking me really in-depth questions that you just don’t normally get into when you first meet people. One thing that I noticed was that everyone seemed connected by the mission and the purpose that Leaf & Limb has, which is caring for trees and plants and flowers because we love our planet. And that just struck such a deep chord with me after going through the motions in the food service industry.

I thought, wow, these people do put that first and are approaching the world we find ourselves in right now with this really positive outlook on how we can make a difference. And that’s really cool to me. And I feel that way to this day.

What’s the one thing, of all the things that we do at Leaf and Limb that you really like the best?

When I first started, just the idea of getting into the canopy of a tree was mind-blowing. Some of the stuff we do up there is really intricate. It’s a lot of puzzle-solving. It’s really kind of “rock star”. You go to a client’s house. And you put this rope in a tree, and you get out there with a chainsaw, and you bring down hazard limbs without wrecking their roof.

The more I do this work, the more amazed I am by what we do at the ground level. Soil health has fascinated me since I started here. Of course, we need to address proper tree structure and weight reduction, but none of that really matters if the foundation isn’t in good health. So much land is still just dirt, and trees need our help. I’ve seen the results of compost tea treatments and soil improvements after only one growing season. Seeing it with my own eyes shows me how much it really matters. When you see a tree thriving a year after you’ve cared for its roots, and the client is excited by it, it keeps me hopeful about doing this work. It’s better than sitting around, hopelessly watching the state of the planet. The work is direct and actionable, and I get to do it every day.

It benefits me on all levels, but it also benefits the client I am working for and my team members, and in a more ethereal, overarching, universal way at the same time.

Tell me a couple of things you’d like people to know about you.

I call myself a witch by practice. My house is littered with trinkets from things I found around job sites or hikes, whether they be little raccoon vertebrae found on a trail or given to me by a friend, or pieces of already hatched robin’s eggs. I have a couple of those. I have a fully preserved Eastern Hercules beetle that met its end in a parking lot in Apex. I couldn’t just leave him there on the sidewalk. Now he sits in the little corner with the rest of my little treasures. That’s one thing. Another thing is, I’m a music major by study.

What instruments do you play?

I started with piano when I was really young. And then I did French horn. And that’s what my scholarship was for in college.

It’s a funny story because I did both drama and music in middle school. I hadn’t really done a lot of research into what different instruments there were. I only knew that I didn’t want to play what everybody else was choosing, but I also didn’t want anything big. I wanted it to be compact. I wanted to be able to carry it everywhere. I had no idea what a French horn was. When he called my name and asked what I wanted to play, I panicked and said French horn. He was like, ‘Great, that’s awesome, yeah, because nobody plays it.’ And it is a heavy instrument, after all. But I really did fall in love with the voice that it has in most ensembles, which is a supportive role that kind of blooms out to echo melodies of whatever is the main voice, be it a trumpet or a saxophone or flute or an oboe. But its register, tenor, and sound really resonated with me as a middle schooler. So I love the sound of it. It’s a beautiful instrument. I just recently got it out of storage and dusted the old girl off, and I’m starting to warm up the chops again. Hopefully I’ll be able to start playing with groups again. I think that would be really fun as an adult.

There are a lot of musicians at Leaf & Limb. And they’re all really talented! We should start a punk bluegrass one that includes French horn, because nobody else has that vibe!

Yes!

Last quick question. What would you tell another person on their first day at Leaf & Limb?

In the most loving, optimistic, supportive way possible, it would be buckle up, buttercup, because it’s a wild ride! I don’t think I’ve ever been challenged more physically, mentally, emotionally, interpersonally before in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such growth from an occupation before as I have here. And growth in ways that you wouldn’t really think about on the outside. I learned when to push myself and when to pull back. Whether it’s a challenging day that you fight to the bitter end through, or whether it’s a day in which your team’s plans work out and everybody leaves happy and healthy, and the client is more than pleased. Both of those days are really big gifts. And I get to do that every single day. So, yes, buckle up and hang on because we’ll get you there, but it’s going to be a wild ride on the way.