By admin 
No one said anything when Dennis Baba began turning the stump of a South Land Park tree into a roughly 4-foot-tall squirrel.
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A company had taken down a silver maple tree in the front yard of a South Land Park Drive home near 43rd Avenue in January. Homeowners Laura and Dave Bell commissioned Baba, who began making chainsaw art carvings in 2024, to transform the stump in late April.
When the project became clear to people passing by, they started stopping to watch. Some people even made multiple trips.
“This is the first time in my life I ever felt like a celebrity,” Baba said. “Kids were taking photos. I ran out of business cards.”
Sacramento is nicknamed the “City of Trees,” boasting somewhere around a million trees. Within the city’s broad canopy, though, the Bells aren’t the only people to have had an old or dying tree turned into public art. And Baba’s not the only person to capture public imagination by doing it.
A goddess for Jan Tamayo
In the front yard of Jan Tamayo’s Tahoe Park home, the remains of a Chinese hackberry tree have been carved into a roughly nine-foot tall goddess.
Tamayo said the statue is named Praebet.
“She feels powerful to me,” Tamayo said. “Independent. Strong.”
Art trees weren’t exactly a trend in Sacramento when artist Crystal Lockwood and her now-husband Thomas Hamilton spent two weeks living out of a 22-foot Chevy Lazy Daze RV outside Tamayo’s home in the mid-late 2010s to create Praebet for $5,000.
But, as it went with Baba, people took interest as they saw Lockwood and Hamilton creating a carving in the front yard of a home near a busy street.
Some of it might have been the spectacle of the creation process, which involved up to 15 feet of scaffolding that Lockwood and Hamilton could climb like stairs. They used Dremel tools and chainsaws that they sometimes wielded simultaneously depending on where each of them was in the scaffolding.
“There was a lot of attention to it,” Hamilton said. “Everybody driving by would be like, ‘Wow, that’s great. What is that? It’s a goddess. Oh my God, thank you.’”
For months after, Tamayo brought Lockwood’s business card to people she saw checking out Praebet. Lockwood’s phone number is at the base of the statue.
Since doing the job for Tamayo, she and Hamilton have created dragons at an East Sacramento home and carved a waitress out of an old tree at Jim Denny’s diner in downtown Sacramento. The waitress carving tree later had to be cut down because it was hollow, Lockwood said.
Though she and Hamilton now live in Washington state, she still gets calls about the statue she created for Tamayo. Lockwood estimates she gets up to three calls per month related to the statue.
Among the people to view the statue was a member of the Bell family. The family was deciding what to do with the silver maple tree. Laura Bell said that during the pandemic, while her children attended college from home while she and her husband each worked remotely, the tree became a source of comfort.
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“In the hollow branches, there was a family of squirrels,” she said. “Squirrels have two or three litters every year. And so we got to watch lots of baby squirrels being raised in that tree.”
Still, branches from the street were extending over South Land Park Drive and were coming down. A tree company deemed the tree unsafe and removed most of it, leaving a roughly seven-foot-tall stump. That primed it for its next life, which can carry benefits for both the public and local wildlife.
Jessica Sanders, the executive director of Sacramento Tree Foundation, said stumps could be used as habitats for snags, owls or other wildlife. “It’s a great way to honor a tree’s legacy, if it has to come out because it’s reached the end of its life or for safety,” Sanders said.
Laura Bell said that while her daughter found out about Tamayo’s tree, she discovered Baba online. Baba, a Granite Bay resident who has a day job and does carving in his spare time, asked just $1,500 for the job. “Most chainsaw artists charge a lot more,” Laura Bell said.
The family contemplated having the tree carved into a tomato, in honor of the city’s nickname of “Sacra-tomato.” They settled on a squirrel that has been nicknamed Butchy, the name of a character from bedtime stories told to Dave Bell when he was a child by his father.
What tree carvings mean to people
Dave Bell said that people stopped to talk with Baba all day each day of the job. He was supposed to finish at noon on the second day of the two-day job because of how many people wanted to talk with him.
“It’s just very exciting to me to see kind of people’s reaction,” Dave Bell said. “They just snap their head and that big smile comes on their face. Lots of families driving by and you can hear the kids talking about the squirrels.”
The finished results can have different meanings for people.
Former Sacramento City Councilmember Ray Tretheway, who served as Sacramento Tree Foundation’s executive director for about 30 years, also said that it was important to do no harm to trees. But he said that it could be “a wonderful second life” for a tree to be turned into art.
“Some people might look at it and say, ‘You know what, that tree out there was their best friend for decades and it continues on,’” Tretheway said. “It’s a pretty strong message.”
Tamayo and Lockwood met when Lockwood was carving a bunny out of a tree at a home near Fairfield for an elderly widower whose wife was nicknamed Bunny.
Lockwood, who focused more on fine art for much of her career, initially refused the job for the widower. After he explained that the tree she would be carving was his late wife’s favorite, Lockwood tearfully agreed to do it.
“He could sit in his favorite chair and look out at the bunny every day and then think of his wife,” Lockwood said.
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