_On a false spring day in early February, Brookelynn Moon-Anschutz and her husband Jacob Anschutz are riding together on a Kubota cart on the muddy roads between fields of magnolias, hollies, cedars, and the myriad other species grown by Moon’s Tree Farm. In greenhouses, the trees’ youngest siblings are developing roots and growing strong. A tree nursery on more than five hundred acres in the gentle hills of North Georgia’s Piedmont, the farm was founded by Brookelynn’s father, with the help of her grandfather and great-uncle. Despite summery afternoons, it’s still winter; some trees have glossy leaves or thick needles, but many others are bare. Only a few weeks earlier, snow blanketed Georgia and shut down its cities for days. Then rains came. In one area Brookelynn and Jacob pass, workers have piled up young trees that blew down in September during the heavy winds of Hurricane Helene, now brown and desiccated. The Moons’ farm lost about twenty thousand trees, but that is a small fraction of their inventory. Brookelynn and Jacob know of North Carolina tree farms that were devastated by the storm and may not recover.

At each stop on this outing, the couple measures trees with calipers and a long pole and photographs them, Brookelynn’s iPhone constantly abuzz with messages from customers. As they bump along the wet gravel, their black dog Lil Girl races happily alongside. Beyond the oaks and Japanese maples, in the yard around the farm’s office and the cottage next door where they currently live, their one-year-old son Asa laughs and pushes his toy truck under the encouraging smile of his babysitter Angelica. In the afternoon, Jacob will dig stumps and take inventory; Brookelynn will meet with a customer who is planning a large project. The farm is a wholesale grower, selling directly to landscapers and developers. With a large variety of species, many well adapted to the increasingly extreme weather patterns of the Southeast, Moon’s Tree Farm is thriving.

Helping run her family’s tree farm was not Brookelynn’s original dream. Like so many young people from rural areas, she left home to pursue other ambitions. Her family gave their full support. But now, at twenty-nine years old, working alongside her husband, her parents, an aunt and uncle, as well as workers she’s known since childhood, with her grandmother living in her own house on the farm—there is nowhere she would rather be. A former college athlete, she has traded her softball uniform and coaching staff polos for jeans and work boots. Her long blond ponytail flows from the back of a cap with the farm’s logo. The tree farm is the realization of a vision conceived by the previous two generations; now she represents a new generation planning for its future. 

Dwayne Moon, Brookelynn’s father, did not plan to follow his father and uncle, “the Moon Brothers,” into farming, a family tradition since at least the nineteenth century, he says. An athletic man himself, with a black belt in karate, Dwayne is tanned from a lifetime working outdoors. As a teen in the 1980s, Dwayne helped on the family’s land and on another farm his father managed. Raising row crops and cattle was tough, and they couldn’t always break even. After graduation, he planned to go to college, but at that time he saw that his father, Lynn, was short-handed and overwhelmed. “I saw a need, and decided I’d stay a few years,” Dwayne says.

As it turned out, his life’s mission was already right in front of him. The nearby farm that Lynn managed grew trees commercially, and at a young age Dwayne had become fascinated with the art of propagation. By fifteen or sixteen he was growing his own trees on a patch of land. After high school, Dwayne officially went into business with Lynn in 1991, using land on the family farm to grow trees. A year later, Lynn’s brother Norman joined them. When Dwayne was dating his wife-to-be Tricia, the young couple would collect acorns by the side of the road together. Later, she became the farm’s accountant. Atlanta’s tree ordinance, adopted in 1985 to proactively preserve the urban canopy, meant a demand for their offerings, and the business prospered.

Ambitious to develop new cultivars he could patent, Dwayne experimented tirelessly. Each tree shows variation from others of its species, just as people do, he explains. Some individual trees may be taller or shorter than average, more or less tolerant of heat or drought, or unusual in shape or coloration. When someone deems a difference advantageous or attractive, asexual propagation (such as by cutting) allows for new plants genetically identical to the parent to be grown. Hybrids may be created by grafting together the rootstock of one plant and a shoot from another, with the hope of a new plant displaying both specimens’ desirable traits as their tissue grows together. Sometimes a single branch on a tree might reflect a genetic mutation, showing different qualities from the rest of the tree. You can take a cutting from that branch and propagate new trees with those characteristics.

With a keen eye for recognizing promising variations and his talent for propagation, Dwayne has been unusually successful at introducing new cultivars—today he is credited as the inventor on nearly twenty patented plants, with more than a dozen others in the works. As an example, the “Green Giant” cedar has been a popular evergreen for many years, but not all landscape architects love its skinny top, bell bottom, or olive hue. One day Dwayne spotted a mutated branch on a Green Giant. The cutting he took grew into a beautiful tree, with half the Giant’s width and a deep green shade; he christened it Everyst. When developing a new cultivar, the farm grows three to five hundred of it over five years to assess its health and appearance and to study its hardiness before bringing it to market. Today, the Everyst western cedar is among their top-selling trees. Many of their trees are native to the Southeast, but Dwayne also looks for more unusual specimens that could thrive in this climate. “We’re always looking for something a little different,” he says.

The family’s ability to grow beautiful trees that can withstand both heat and cold weather has won them customers across the United States and even into Canada. For landscape architects, trees can be both functional and artistic, bold or subtle brush strokes creating texture and drama. Moon’s Tree Farm supplied trees to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando; the resort wanted cedars, oaks, bald cypresses, and other trees that could support a fantasy of an enchanted European forest but handle the Central Florida heat. They’ve also provided trees to Disney’s Animal Kingdom park, shading its menagerie and visitors in globally themed vistas.

Dan Whitehead, a former sales manager at the Moons’ farm who now has his own horticultural consulting business, still regularly recommends their trees to clients. “The landscape architect community has gravitated to using native trees, and the Moon family has filled that need quite well,” he says. “A lot of the new trees they’ve introduced, most farms would never find.”

For Dwayne, growing trees is an expression of his faith. Thank you for taking the time to learn more about our new introductions, Moon’s Tree Farm’s print catalog concludes. God has blessed us with eyes to see His creativity in nature and the desire to develop these selections. “The plant kind of calls me, and I see these things,” Dwayne says.

_As Moon’s Tree Farm expanded, they rented separate plots of land around the Loganville area, south of Atlanta, near the original farm. When Brookelynn, who is Dwayne and Tricia’s only child, came along, the family lived on a small plot with a field of trees behind it. Although as a little girl Brookelynn accompanied Dwayne around the farm and helped out during summer vacations, he wanted her to have the chance to discover what else she might love. He and Tricia encouraged her to try everything and put her in all kinds of activities—ballet, piano lessons, basketball, karate, and even baton twirling.

Sports turned out to be her passion, especially softball—the family’s home filled up with her trophies and medals. Dwayne cleared a space among the trees behind the house for a softball diamond for Brookelynn. He had been too busy helping with his family’s farm to play organized sports when he was young, but he and Brookelynn spent hours together practicing at home, sometimes while trees were being dug up around them. On weekends the family traveled to games and tournaments. “Softball was our life,” Brookelynn says.

This dedication paid off, and Brookelynn earned a spot on the elite Atlanta Vipers fastpitch softball team, the winners of multiple national championships and a training ground for many college scholarship athletes. Dwayne turned his inventor’s imagination to athletic training. Using items around the farm, he developed a hitting aid to help Brookelynn achieve better “popping power” when batting, since as a petite girl she’d never yet hit the ball over the fence. “You have to make what you have work for you,” he says he learned growing up. “That’s the farming mentality.” The hitting aid worked, and at her college tryout, she knocked the camera off the top bleacher, Dwayne remembers proudly.

Brookelynn won a scholarship to play for Harding University, an NCAA Division II school in Arkansas, a Christian college that aligned with the family’s faith. There, she majored in exercise science and continued to distinguish herself on the softball field over 163 games. After graduating in 2017, she was hired as an assistant coach at Webber International University in central Florida, a dream job that would allow her to continue being involved with softball, a sport with limited paying opportunities for women post-college.

While Brookelynn was growing up, Dwayne, Norman, and Lynn had acquired the large property eighty miles to the east, in Washington, Georgia, where the farm is located today, fulfilling their long-held ambition for a unified piece of land. They then began the arduous process of grading it and starting to relocate operations. On weekdays, Dwayne would live in a camper on the new farm, then return on the weekend to be with Tricia and Brookelynn.

Sadly, while Brookelynn was away, hard times befell the tree farm. In 2015, Dwayne’s uncle Norman died unexpectedly, and Lynn was having age-related challenges, though he wanted to continue working. The farm mechanic had a heart attack. When Lynn fell on the farm one day and bloodied his head, Dwayne insisted his father retire. After a lifetime working with the Moon Brothers, Dwayne struggled to find another business partner.

Even living in another state, Brookelynn was able to see how stressed her father became over the next few years, running everything on his own, grieving his uncle, and worrying about her grandfather, whom she was also close with. She loved her coaching job in Florida, but a new thought came to her: What if she returned home to help her dad? She had not inherited his green thumb, nor had she previously considered becoming a tree farmer herself, but like Dwayne had as a young man, she saw a need. After prayer and consideration, she returned to Georgia in 2019, at twenty-three years old. “The Lord just laid on my heart that I needed to come back home,” she says.

_Trees are often described as the lungs of the world, since they absorb carbon dioxide and breathe out pure oxygen. They have also been crucial to the Southern economy for centuries. Before European settlement, longleaf pine forests covered the vast area from Virginia to Texas. Trees were then cleared for farmland and settlements, largely by enslaved laborers, and timber became one of the South’s primary industries, along with turpentine and other substances extracted or derived from pine trees. In the mid-1800s, North Carolina and Georgia led the world in supplying the tree-derived materials used in shipbuilding. But by the dawn of the twentieth century, much of the South’s forestland had vanished—while trees are a renewable resource, landowners seemed not to have thought much about renewing them, in their frenzy to extract maximum value. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was born, in response to growing awareness of the nation’s decimated forests and the economic threat of a “timber famine.” In 1911, the federal government created several new national forests on lands left barren by logging and continued managing existing preserves.

Tree farms come in different varieties. The first ones were born when, faced with loss of livelihood, private owners of timberland accepted the necessity of the conservation, management, and reforestation for which conservationists had been advocating. Rather than perpetually migrating to new virgin forestland, leaving ghost towns and ruined economies when they depleted a section, as they did in the nineteenth century, land owners would have to grow their own trees. This revolution was formalized with the “American Tree Farms System,” introduced in 1941, in which growers could be certified for adopting sustainable forestry practices (perhaps in a bid to evade governmental regulation of the industry). The tree farm movement proved wildly successful, revitalizing the timber industry and covering more of the U.S. with privately owned forests. Today, the “forest products” industry (paper, lumber, and anything else produced from wood) generates $288 billion annually and accounts for four percent of the U.S. manufacturing gross domestic product (GDP), according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Southeast leads the nation in timber production, with Georgia first in the region. Across the state line, North Carolina’s tree farms supply almost four million Christmas trees a year, second only to Oregon. A majority of Georgia’s land is once again covered in forest.

In contrast with tree farms serving the forest products sector, the Moons’ farm is a nursery, growing trees not to be chopped down, but to be transplanted, living, into landscapes, purifying the air and providing shade and beauty. With many cultivars hardy in challenging urban conditions, the farm’s trees are prized by architects and developers, especially as towns and cities recognize trees’ importance to citizens’ health and to mitigating the effects of climate change. More than 150 Georgia communities have earned the Tree City USA designation, which necessitates maintaining a tree board or department and a tree ordinance, among other requirements for ensuring a stable and healthy tree population. Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens has made protecting the city’s tree canopy part of his platform, calling it the “most powerful nature-based tool for climate resilience,” and partnering with several environmental organizations to advance this goal, promising to double the downtown tree canopy with eight thousand trees over five years.

These measures are necessary because in 2023 the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Vulnerability Index named Georgia as the fifth-most-vulnerable state to climate change. In the most affected locales, the combination of heat and air pollution poses particular risk to residents’ health. Georgia is experiencing more days of extreme heat per year and more days with higher overnight temperatures than in previous years. Climate scientists predict more and longer-lasting dry periods, punctuated by heavy rainfall and flooding.

Heather Kirk-Ballard, a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia who studies sustainable urban landscapes, says that trees help cool the air, mitigating the “heat islands” created by the extensive concrete  in cities and reducing the need for air-conditioning, which uses a lot of energy and emits greenhouse gases. Trees can also protect people and landscapes during extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and the tornadoes that have become more frequent in the Southeast. Kirk-Ballard explains that in addition to serving as windbreaks, “trees can very much help with flooding. They can slow down the velocity of water. They also help to take up that water, to absorb it, and to clean the water, so you recharge that water. Trees offer so many different services.” (She notes that it’s important to plant them a safe distance from buildings.) In 2023, the USDA’s Climate Change Resource Center reported that urban trees in the continental U.S. store over 708 million tons of carbon (approximately 12.6% of annual carbon dioxide emissions in the United States) and capture an additional 28.2 million tons of carbon each year. Trees also help prevent soil erosion and provide habitats for wildlife and food for insects and birds. “It is so very important to keep a tree inventory up as high as you can in urban areas,” Kirk-Ballard says.

“I think people take trees for granted sometimes,” says Dwayne Moon.

_Learning the business at Moon’s Tree Farm was not initially easy for Brookelynn. Sometimes she would cry from frustration after phone calls with customers—despite growing up on the farm, she felt unprepared for their intricate questions, like she’d learned nothing from her dad. And at an age when many young women have busy dating lives, she wondered whether she’d be able to find a partner who would support the all-consuming lifestyle of a family farm. But being with her family was rewarding, and the work got easier as her knowledge grew. One Saturday while she was at the gym, a tall, dark-haired guy struck up a conversation with her, then asked her out to dinner. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to dinner with you! I just met you!’” she recalls, laughing. She told him she would meet him at the gym again the next day after church. She and Jacob, a young police officer who grew up in a nearby town, ended up talking for hours. Within six months, they were engaged.

Jacob, a pastor’s son, “didn’t know any more about trees than anyone else” before he met Brookelynn, but he had been wanting to get out of law enforcement. Knowing how important tree farming was to his fiancée, he agreed to try it. In the fall of 2020, he moved onto the farm, into Brookelynn’s grandparents’ basement. Luckily, the family loved him, and he fell in love with the work’s variety and the outdoor life it offers. A year after they met, he and Brookelynn married and moved into the little house next to the office where Dwayne and Tricia had been living, while Dwayne and Tricia relocated an hour away near a lake in the Oconee National Forest. After residing steps away from the office for the past few years, Brookelynn and Jacob have been building a home secluded from the farm by a grove of trees.

At trade shows, Brookelynn and Jacob are often among the youngest tree farmers. The number of family farms of any kind in the United States declined dramatically over the twentieth century, and has continued to wane. In many cases, the next generation wants to pursue other careers, or the farm’s finances are not healthy enough to keep it going. Sometimes the land is more valuable than the business. Agriculture census data released by the USDA in 2024 showed that the average farmer is fifty-eight years old. “I would have been looking to wind down in ten or fifteen years,” Dwayne says, if Brookelynn hadn’t joined the farm. High costs for land and machinery also make it very challenging for younger people to start their own farms, rather than continuing an existing one. Still, in recent years, the Moons and Anschutzes have noticed a few more sons or daughters or cousins taking on responsibility in other families’ tree farms.

Continuing the farm also matters to the many employees outside the family. During its busiest seasons, the farm employs more than twenty-five people. A few workers have been with the tree farm since the early 1990s. Efren Jimenez, a foreman with lively eyes, wearing a camouflage balaclava against the cold on the January day we meet, has worked for the tree farm for more than twenty years. He had been living in Chicago, but his brother-in-law worked at the original Moon’s Tree Farm, and when Jimenez visited he thought that Georgia would be a better place to raise children, so he applied to work there too. Today, his own daughter is out of college and recently married. “This is my first job in Georgia, and I hope it’s my last one,” he says before heading out to water the trees one last time, later cutting off the pump in anticipation of the coming freeze.

Now working with customers is second nature to Brookelynn, and she is able to look for ways to innovate, especially with their website and ordering systems. She has developed a good eye for quickly picking out trees customers will love. Though she and Dwayne occasionally “butt heads,” as he puts it, he is able to focus more on his horticultural experiments, his favorite part of the job. Baby Asa loves being on the farm and seeing the big trucks rattle down the gravel roads. Brookelynn and Jacob hope that one day the business will be an option for him too, though Brookelynn says that she wants to follow her parents’ example and let him decide for himself. Asa gets excited when he hears music, and Brookelynn looks forward to teaching him piano when he’s old enough and also to seeing what he grows up to love. “The beauty of it is that Dad never pushed me to do it,” she reflects about joining the farm.

Not everyone has the opportunity to join a family business, but today some Americans are rethinking the lifestyle of job-hopping and frequent relocation in search of success that many college graduates pursue, wondering, like Brookelynn, what it might look like to forge a life in their homeplaces instead. In her new book Here: A Spirituality of Staying in a Culture of Leaving, Lydia Sohn argues that long-term commitment to a place or a relationship or an endeavor offers a rich connectedness that can be harder to find when we’re constantly on the move. “I think that in this modern-day culture of many opportunities and upward mobility and the digital workforce, it’s really common for people to leave their jobs or locations or communities in pursuit of what they think will be better for them and make them happier,” Sohn says. But if we decide to stay, she argues, we may gain the chance to know the individuals, land, and community around us more intimately, to feel responsible for their well-being and be supported by them in turn. “What the spirituality of stability teaches is that whatever you’re wanting and looking for can be discovered right where you are. And right where we are has limitless possibilities for happiness and growth.”

The tallest trees sold by Moon’s Tree Farm are about twenty-four feet high and are around seven years old. During the spring they can be seen gliding by horizontally on flatbed trucks or rising above the earth as crews dig them up with heavy machinery. Trees that Jacob remembers planting in 2020 are now towering. “It seems like you blink and it’s been a year,” he says. In 2023, Lynn Moon passed away, the last of the eldest generation that worked the tree farm, a man who believed in his son’s dream and helped make it reality. Acutely aware of the limited time we all have with our families, Brookelynn says that her grandfather’s death makes her want to spend as much time with her parents as she can. Though she gave up one dream, she has no regrets. “Softball I just loved so much I never would have wanted to stop,” she says. But the challenging season that brought her home was followed by happiness she hadn’t imagined.

The false spring will end, followed by frozen days and nights. But soon after that, true spring will arrive, trees bursting into glorious bloom and perfuming the warming breeze. Seasonal workers will return and greet their friends; last year’s fallen leaves will nourish the new growth that turns everything green. With machines, crews will pot thousands of young plants a day, as many as a hundred thousand in a week. Greenhouse seedlings will be strong enough to plant in the ground, while other trees will depart for Atlanta’s tree canopy or a California homeowner’s backyard. And after inevitable building delays, months of excitement and stress, Brookelynn and Jacob will finish construction on their home, a place to be sheltered in and to grow, to establish strong roots, and to plant the seeds of new dreams that they can’t yet see coming.

This story appears in the Summer 2025 print edition as “Field of Dreams.” Order the Y’all Street Issue here.