Fashioning beauty amid chaos: A Baltimore native uses a mosaic of different projects to improve his hometown's urban environment. (Earthkeepers).

Mosaic isn't just the way Bryant Smith expresses himself artistically, it's a metaphor for the way he approaches urban forestry. Just as he brings together disparate pieces--blue tiles, broken pottery, bits of mirror--to form one big picture, so too he brings together different projects--community outreach, vacant lot restoration, a prison garden--to do one thing: improve the urban environment in Baltimore.

A social-science technician with the U.S. Forest Service, Smith knows a lot about that environment. He grew up in the Broadway Homes Housing Complex in downtown Baltimore. A progeny of the projects, Smith--who's better known as "Spoon"--says, "I rolled with the fellas, I participated in illegal activities."

As for trees, the closest association he had was with an oak outside his front door: his grandmother used it for switches. Needless to say, he was not predisposed toward trees.

Most people he knew saw them as a nuisance--their leaves were messy and they were said to attract rats. But in the early 1990s, Smith made a life-changing move. He took a job at a community outreach center, which "was like the lifeboat coming in." That "helped me see that there's a different way of life, that the way we're living is not normal and it's not right."

His next epiphany came when he saw a girl at the center throw trash in the gutter. "That lack of knowing about the environment and that constant abuse sparked the thirst to know more, so that I could then educate my people." He did lots of educating as a street-tree coordinator for a local nonprofit, the Parks and People Foundation. He learned "the true benefit of a tree"--and how to identify one. And he taught his mother that the tree in their backyard wasn't poison ivy but Ailanthus altissima--"tree of heaven" to many, "ghetto palm" to Smith.

Now, wearing spoon rings and a spoon bracelet, describing the work he did there for six years--planting trees and restoring vacant lots--it's hard to reconcile the 25-year-old man he is with the boy in the 'hood he was. "I wanted to learn how to protect my urban environment as a whole." he says. Trees were "a tool" for himself and others. "Once I got you interested in the tree, then I could interest you in other things--the stream cleanup, the alley cleanup."

He helped communities plant maples on East Lafayette, redbuds on Port, and pears on Chester. And he helped them clean up the vacant lots in their neighborhoods. There's Reservoir Hill Community Garden, a 20-plot space where tomatoes and sunflowers flourish, and the block on Duncan Street that was converted into a garden in 1988. Before then, the city had demolished a block of houses and the area had become overgrown. "People were dying back here, getting raped, and the community said this is enough." That was before Smith's time, but he's worked in similar spots--he never knew what he'd find beneath the weeds and waste. "My fear was that I was going to find a dead body."

Now the gardens here are full of corn and hollyhocks. Grapes cascade over the fence so the hungry can help themselves. This is a low-income neighborhood with drugs and high crime. "You're in the 'hood." Then, marveling, he adds, "You get these little pockets of beauty in the middle of the chaos."

Now, Smith is working on a long-term ecological study, supported by the National Science Foundation, to find out if those pockets are making a difference in Baltimore. He aims to make a difference on the ground and in his field. Recruiting people who live here-minorities--is the best way to really make a difference in the urban environment.

That's another part of his picture. He's puffing it together, piece-by-piece, tile-by-tile.