Tree seedling giveaway will be to help observe Arbor Day

NEWARK, NJ — Arbor Day will be observed on Friday, April 29, at 1:30 p.m. at Hawthorne Hawks Healthy Harvest Farm, 446 Hawthorne Ave., between Demarest and Dewey streets, in the city’s South Ward. The entrance to the farm is on Demarest Street.

Local partners, including Greater Newark Conservancy and Newark DIG — Doing Infrastructure Green!— will also participate.

The tree seedling giveaway is part of the New Jersey Tree Recovery Campaign. Seedlings, available on a first-come, first-served basis, also come with instructions on how to store, care for and plant them. The goal of the Tree Recovery Campaign is to distribute more than 500,000 tree seedlings to New Jersey residents through the course of the next five years. It is a joint effort between the city of Newark, New Jersey State Forest Service, New Jersey Soil Conservation Districts, Sustainable Jersey, Arbor Day Foundation, Brothers International, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Wyndham Vacation Resorts and FedEx.

Arbor Day was begun by President and New Jersey native Grover Cleveland’s secretary of Agriculture, J. Sterling Morton, in Nebraska, in 1872, as part of his efforts to encourage forestry and land conservation, with the planting of 1 million trees in that state. It has become a national and international event, celebrated on different dates by nations and states, but with the same theme: planting and preservation of trees and the Earth’s environment.

  Arbor Day