ARBOR DAYS - Why Trees Matter

April 2011
A R B O R D AY S
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Tree Campus
2
Why US Forest Service
Research Matters
2
treesmatter.osu.edu
2
Tree Greene-ing in
Southwest Ohio
3
Crabapples in Outer
Space
3
Trees fir Growing
Minds
4
Arbor Day is Everyday at
OSU, though in 2011 two
dates celebrated include April 23 and April 29. Saturday, April 23, 2011 - Arbor
Day at Secrest Arboretum of
Ohio State University’s Ohio
Agricultural Research and
Development Center in
Wooster from 10:00-12:00.
April 23 is one of many
chances to see the reopened Arboretum following
the 130 mph tornado of September 16, 2010 in which
1500 large trees were
lost. Doylestown Ohio
Brownie troop and their tree
skits, a tour of Crablandia
as it heads into its pre-peak
for crabapple bloom, and an
Arbor Day Walk of the New
Dawn Rising at Secrest on
April 23 provide just one of
the many times this spring,
summer and fall to appreciate the renewal of the Arboretum (Plant Discovery Day
sales and events are on
May 7).
On Friday, April 29 the
Chadwick Arboretum of
the Ohio State University
and the Trees Matter Columbus Campus Committee will present a new
Tree Walk on OSU’s Oval,
plant a yellow buckeye for
the Arbor Day planting,
and feature a talk by Ricardo Dumont of Sasaki
Associates on the OSU
Mission and Place: Foundations for Campus Renewal
and Innovation with regard
to trees. The program starts
at 10:00 and extends into a
guided walk of 33 campus
trees on the Oval. A Tree
For Thee and a Tree For
Gee!
From J. Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day. In 1893:
Tree Benefits:
“To avert treelessness, to improve the climatic conditions, for the sanitation and embellishment of home environments,
for the love of the beautiful and useful combined in the music and majesty of a tree, as fancy and truth unite in an epic
poem, Arbor Day was created. It was grown with the vigor and benificence of a grand truth or a great tree. It faces the
future. It is the only anniversary in which humanity looks futureward instead of pastward, in which there is a consensus
of thought for those who are to come after us, instead of reflections concerning those who have gone before us. It is a
practical anniversary. It is a beautiful anniversary. To the common schools of the country I confide its perpetuation and usefulness with the same abiding faith that I would commit the acorn to the earth, the tree to the soil,
or transmit the light on the shore to far off ships on the waves beyond, knowing certainly that loveliness, comfort, and
great contentment shall come to humanity everywhere because of its thoughtful and practical observance by all the
civilized peoples of the earth.”
• Energy Savings
• Storm Water Remediation
• Air Quality
• Carbon Sequestration
• Property Value
• Wildlife Habitat
• Aesthetics
W O O D L A N D S T E WA R D S & T R E E I D
It is hard to manage your forested
landscape—whether it be urban or
rural—without being able to identify the trees! To help with this
endeavor, the Ohio Woodland
Stewards Program offers day long
tree identification classes for those
individuals interested in learning
how to id trees.
Join us for these hands on classes
that are scheduled to take place in
various locations around the state,
including June 17—Adams County
and July 15—Waterman Farm, Columbus. For more up to date information and online registration go to
http://woodlandstewards.osu.edu
P age 2
V o l u m e 1 , I s s ue 1
TREE CAMPUS
“Other holidays repose
on the past. Arbor Day
proposes the future.”
J. Sterling Morton
Many municipalities in Ohio, in fact
more here than any state, have
achieved Tree City USA status, a
program nurtured by the National
Arbor Day Foundation (NADF) and
the Ohio Department of Natural
Resources, Division of Forestry.
The Arbor Day folks decided several years ago to add a new program – Tree Campus USA. The
NADF, aided by Toyota, wanted to
engage college students, with their
natural world through trees, focusing on service-learning projects
and Arbor Day celebrations. They
wanted to engage campus
grounds and facilities units, and
biology-oriented departments in
developing better tree management and planting plans, to develop ecological audits of their
campus tree inventories, their
community forests. They wanted
to engage campus faculty, staff,
students, Extension outreach
educators,
alumni, prospective students of all
ages, and Ohio’s
multibillion dollar
green industry as partners.
Many universities are now certified
with the Tree Campus USA program, and as Buckeyes, tree lovers to our core, how can we not
join the fun and function of bettering our tree campus, to grow our
tree culture at OSU as we apply for
Tree Campus USA status? Look
for enhanced tree trails (such as
the new OSU Oval Tree Trail unveiled at Arbor Day on April 29).
Look for research and outreach on
how our leafy friends pay us back.
Future activities include an Arboblitz activity during the week of
October 3 next Fall and many
educational opportunities with
Chadwick Arboretum here on the
Main Campus. The OSU Tree
Campus Wooster program will also
partner with Secrest Arboretum of
OSU’s Ohio Agricultural Research
and Development Center, City of
Wooster and the College of Wooster in Northeast Ohio for activities.
WHY U.S. FOREST SERVICE
R E S E A RC H M AT T E R S
The United States Forest Service
Northern Research Station north of
Delaware Ohio has long provided
needed research on Ohio’s forests
from studies on Dutch elm disease to
the ecology of woodland ecosystems,
from invasive species such as the
emerald ash borer and ash rejuvenation studies to the effects of climate
change on forest structure. Join us on
Tuesday, November 29 on the OSU
Columbus Campus for a full day program on the research done by scientists at this lab.
Also, don't forget: October 19, 2011,
The Sixth Annual Why Trees Matter
Forum in Wooster Ohio, with keynoters
Dr. Greg McPherson of the US Forest
Service in Davis, CA and Dr. Maureen
Austin of OSU Extension.
H T T P : / / T R E E S M AT T E R . O S U . E D U
It is ever a work-in-progress,
but the Why Trees Matter website (treesmatter.osu.edu) is up
and running, thanks to the
efforts of Dr. Sakthi Subburayalu in the OSU School of
Environment and Natural Resources (SENR). Check out the
brochure for the upcoming April
29 OSU Campus Oval Tree
Walk. Check out the detailed
i-Tree ecological audits of over
a dozen Ohio municipalities by
going to the SENR link and
clicking on "Tree Evaluations".
Learn how to contact Why
Trees Matter team members.
More to come!
W hy T r e e s M a tte r
P age 3
Tree Greene-ing in Southwest Ohio
Greene County Master Gardeners are partnering with the
Miami Valley Juvenile Rehabilitation Center to grow street
trees. The Master Gardeners
will provide seedlings from
their gardens and woods. At
the juvenile facility, the teenage residents will plant them
in containers, be taught how
to maintain the trees and
monitor for tree diseases and
pests. After training, the teenagers will be responsible for
the trees' care. When the
trees reach sufficient size,
they will be offered, at no
cost, to local governments.
This project is particularly
important as the Emerald Ash
Borer threatens to destroy
the county's 15 million plus
ash trees, presenting both
environmental and economic challenges. Master
Gardeners in Greene
County have already conducted i-Tree ecological
audit inventories of 21,381
publicly maintained trees to
help communities identify
the number of threatened
ash trees that, if untreated,
may be lost. Inventories for
Xenia, Bellbrook, Bowersville, Cedarville, Beavercreek and Jamestown are
complete, with Fairborn and
Spring Valley scheduled.
“He who plants a tree,
plants a hope”
C R A B A P P L E S I N O U T E R S PAC E
Ohio is known for its crabapples,
with about $15 million in wholesale
revenues annually for Buckeye
nurseries, but this April 29 – on
Arbor Day! - crabapples will fly
right out of this world! Here is the
story: NASA sponsors a Student
Spaceflight Experiment Program
with thousands of schools nationwide entering. A Broward County
FL middle school won one of only
16 entries for experiments to be
housed on a small farm in space
on the last flight of the Space
Shuttle Endeavour (with Gabby
Gifford’s husband Mark Kelly as
the captain).
On the very last day for all the
protocols to be met, NASA scientist Dr. Jeff Goldstein called OSU
Extension’s Why Trees Matter
(known for its crabapple expertise
and leadership of the International
Ornamental Crabapple Society). He explained: ―OSU, we
have a problem.‖ The school’s
entry was about to be invalidated.
Their idea of comparing apple
seeds germinated on Earth to
those exposed to space was still
fine, it was just that apple seeds
were too big for the experimental chamber. Seeds
needed to be 3 mm or less
in diameter.
NASA’s first question was:
are crabapples truly apples? Yes, just small apples – less than 2 inches in
diameter. Second, were
crabapple seeds small
enough? OSU Extension
crabonauts Cheryl
Fischnich and Vicki Myers intrepidly set out on their mission to our
Crablandia research plots at
OSU’s Secrest Arboretum at the
Ohio Agricultural Research and
Development Center, and, in the
words of Jeff Goldstein:
―Please pass on to everyone that
you guys SAVED this experiment.
It is because of you that this student group is flying an experiment
on the Shuttle. The school received your seeds, FedExed them
to the lab conducting the fluid/
sample compatibility test, the
seeds were placed with their nutrient solution in the mini-lab, and it
was sealed for 14 days to mirror
the experiment on the shuttle. The
seals on the mini-lab were unaffected after 14 days, and the experiment passed the test. And we
just learned that the experiment
has now passed the overall NASA
flight safety review. THANK YOU
THANK YOU!”
All conditions are go, the countdown begins and OSUE’s Why
Trees Matter Signature Program,
Secrest Arboretum and the
OARDC are now partner institutions in the expedition. Check out
the program website at: ( http://
ssep.ncesse.org/communities/
community-directory/) and see
how the very small crabapple has
gone beyond global!
Lucy Larcom “Plant a
Tree”
Why Trees Matter is a Signature Program of Ohio State University Extension
focusing on the economic, environmental, and social benefits of trees. The
OSU team has many partners, including the Ohio Department of Natural
Resources, Division of Forestry, the Ohio Nursery and Landscape Association
and the overall Ohio green industry, community foresters throughout Ohio, the
nation’s largest tree care company, Ohio’s own Davey Tree Expert Company,
and national partners such as Minnesota’s Urban Forestry Institute.
The OSU team includes OSU Extension educators and specialists, tree
researchers in the Departments of Entomology, Horticulture and Crop Science,
and Entomology, the School of Environment & Natural Resources, and the
Agricultural Technical Institute. Two Extension teams are highly involved, the
OSU Extension Nursery Landscape and Turf Team and the OSU Extension
Ohio Woodland Stewards.
Contact the Co-Coordinators of Why Trees Matter: Kathy Smith
(smith.81@osu.edu), and Jim Chatfield (chatfield.1@osu.edu). Visit our website at: treesmatter.osu.edu
TREES FOR GROWING MINDS
“The true meaning of
life is to plant trees,
under whose shade you
do not expect to sit.”
Nelson Henderson
We are all growing in our lifetime learning quest, of course,
but in our youth is the greatest
opportunity to grow awareness
and a true sustainability of our
natural culture, our tree culture,
our challenge to the countering
effects of ―nature deficit disorder‖. Why Trees Matter is working with many such projects,
from the TreEAB (emerald ash
borer-EAB within the context of
Why Trees Matter) projects of
OSU Extension in cooperation
with the US Forest Service, the
Department of Evolutionary,
Ecological and Organismal
Biology Department in the OSU
College of Biological Sciences,
to programs such as the Treemendous Day with over 440
elementary school students at
Harold Schnell Elementary in
West Carrollton, Ohio.
A few words about TreeMendous Day…over 600 chil-
dren, teachers, and parent
volunteers from the school,
OSU volunteers, and Cox Arboretum (Dayton) staff and
volunteers where the Day was
held this summer. Students
had a Trees Across the Curriculum experience involving
literature, art, science, math
activities. The students
adopted trees at Cox, where,
using the i-Tree models, they
will monitor the ecological
benefits of these trees while
they are at the school and…
imagine this: 30 years from
now a parent from one of their
―Bravo‖ groups of 1st-5th graders now, brings her son to enroll at Harold Schnell and
shows how much her adopted
tree back in 2010 has grown
and contributed in ecological
services to the environment of
Montgomery County. Parvis e
glandibus quercus. Mighty oaks
from little acorns grow.