Green health: a tree-filled street can positively influence depression, study finds Ashley Stimpson In 2005, when Celena Owens purchased an investment property in the up-and-coming East Baltimore neighborhood of Oliver, it was supposed to make her life better. But three years later, the housing market crashed, neighborhood renewal stalled, and the home that was going to be a rental became her full-time residence. Owens fell into what she describes as a “major depressive episode” that would last for the better part of a decade. That’s when Owens, an IT developer for the state of Maryland, began to notice a pattern. During her workdays in the leafy suburbs of a nearby county, her mood would lift. “Even though I was still dealing with stuff, I felt a sense of calm, of comfort,” she remembers. On the commute back to the nearly treeless neighborhood she called home, that feeling would evaporate. “The closer I got to my house, the more depressed I would feel,” she says. “It was just this overwhelming sense of heaviness.”