Saturday, April 27 – Tower Road, Gainesville
On a blustery, overcast Spring morning we celebrated Earth Day (April 22) and National Arbor Day (April 26) by planting twenty-five trees along the bike path adjacent to Tower Road, between SW 13th Road and SW 8th Avenue in southwest Gainesville: longleaf pines (Pinus palustris), southern magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora), and winged elms (Ulmus alata).
Saturday, March 23 – Wilson Robinson Park, Archer
We returned to the site of the January 19 Arbor Day celebration to plant eight additional trees in the Park and the adjoining neighborhood: Magland holly (Ilex x ‘Magland’ Oakland™), Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), and Walter’s viburnum (Viburnum obovatum).
Saturday, February 24 – Archer Church of the Nazarene, Archer
We planted twenty-six trees – white oaks (Quercus sect. Quercus), chestnut oaks (Quercus montana), longleaf pines (Pinus palustris), and southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) – at the Archer Church of the Nazarene, 13327 SW State Road 45, and along the nearby Archer Braid Trail.
Friday, January 19 – Wilson Robinson Park, Archer
We celebrated Florida’s Arbor Day at the Park (13975 SW 74th Street, Archer, FL) with an Arbor Day proclamation from community officials, a poetry reading, and a Q & A session on best tree planting and care practices led by Alachua County arborists and horticulturists. Fifty juvenile fruit trees – brown turkey figs (Ficus carica), everbearing mulberries (Morus nigra), Jiro persimmons (Diospyros kaki ‘Jiro’), and pomegranates (Punica granatum) – were given away by volunteers from the Alachua County Master Gardener program. We planted a dozen trees in the park: southern magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora), winged elms (Ulmus alata), southern live oaks (Quercus virginiana), and American lindens (Tilia americana).
Photographs by A. Ewert-Harpold, T. Harpold, C. Houder, D. Jordan, H.H. Rays, S. Xie, and D. Zhu. / CC BY