What's Your Why? Volunteer Spotlight on Ann Johnson


Wreaths Across America celebrates volunteerism across the country, and our volunteers are committed, patriotic, and innovative. The mission to remember, honor, teach is a mindset, not just a one-day event in December. The wreath retirement stories are just as impressive, from wreaths cleanup to their repurposing and recycling.

Ann Johnson is the co-owner, with her husband Steve, of Lazy J Tree Farm in Washington state. “The farm was started by my husband’s father in 1958 when my husband was just a little fella. It initially started as a raspberry farm, and over time, they bought more acreage and expanded into a you-cut Christmas tree farm. Today, it’s eighty-eight acres. Much larger than his father ever thought it could be.”

Ann got involved with the Michael Trebert Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in December 2020 as the chapter was just getting started with Wreaths Across America. “One of my sisters found we had a patriot in our past, and I took that to the local DAR chapter. They did the research and I filled out the application. Low and behold, we do have a patriot. His name was Gresham Pope, and he was connected through my father’s mother. You just never know until you start to search. We had lots of preachers and lots of military in our family background.”

Ann joined the DAR in December 2020 as they were just getting started with Wreaths Across America. She shares when she attended her fist meeting and they went down through a list of their projects, nothing really struck a chord with Ann until they got to Wreaths Across America. “When I joined, I saw a lot of opportunities to use my skills and talents, but nothing fit really well. When they got to the Wreaths Across America presentation, my former husband was a military veteran, my father was a military veteran, and my son, so, when I saw that it was a natural fit for me. Then, when I heard no one was recycling, it broke my heart.”

Ann quickly realized the Lazy J Tree farm had the capacity to help the mission. “We didn’t know what to do the first year, so we just started to do it,” Ann explains of the process.  We had a big truck and could haul wreaths to and from the participating cemetery. We set up some tables and got pliers of different sizes. We put down a tarp to collect the greenery and used a bin to collect the rings. Chapter Regent Judy Tordini took the wreath tags because she uses them in her speaking opportunities about Wreaths Across America. We took the rings to a metal recycler near us, and the greenery got chopped up in our farm grinders for mulch. Then, we got down to what do we do with the red bows? I strung them together, all going in the same direction, and I made ten-foot garlands out of them. We have some large cement animals on the farm for the kids to enjoy, and I draped these garlands over some of them, and it looked festive. It was fun.”

Ann explained their success in 2020 led to more fallen veterans honored in 2021, so the recycling effort grew too. “This year, we had twice the number of wreaths and felt challenged. We had experience under our belts with the wreaths set up, so the challenge was how do we get more people here to help. Judy recruited the DAR members and their husbands, and I posted it on Next Door, a local social media site, and we emailed our neighborhood group. We wound up with forty-three volunteers, and they had so much fun. Of course most of them, except the DAR, had no idea what Wreaths Across America was. It was a good experience for them and now they’re totally sold and will get more involved. It took only a few hours of work for over forty volunteers to recycle 974 veterans’ wreaths. We had younger people working with seniors and we developed a really good system as they worked in teams to dismantle the wreaths.”

Thank you, Ann, Steve, Judy, and all the folks involved with the mission with Lazy J Tree Farm. You can hear Ann’s interview in our What’s Your Why feature on Wreaths Across America Radio.