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Arbor Day Honors J. Sterling Morton
To celebrate Arbor Day in style, the Arbor Day Foundation offers some suggestions:
? Raise the flag, strike up the band. Organize a fun run. Have poster or poetry contests. See if local businesses will donate prizes. Get the PTA to sponsor a children’s pageant or play.
? Get people excited. Show them things they’ve never seen. Tell them things about trees they’ve never heard.
? Fill the air with music. Have an Arbor Day concert of songs about trees, or with tree names in their titles.
? Stir people to action. Ask a civic group to promote a paper drive, then recycle that paper and save a tree. Use proceeds to buy a tree to plant in a special public place. Ask a local radio station to sponsor a tree trivia contest and give away trees to winners. Conduct a tree search. Ask people to find large, unusual or historic trees in your community.
? Dedicate a forest, a tree or a flower bed in a park, and make it an occasion to talk about stewardship. Organize an Arbor Day Fair.
? Get people together. Encourage neighborhood block parties and get neighbors to adopt and care for street trees in front of their homes. Distribute buttons. Give away trees.
? Celebrate in a personal way by planting a tree yourself. It is an act of optimism and kindness, a labor of love and a commitment to stewardship.
