My family tree?
A crabapple, which blossomed with bright purplish flowers and blanketed the backyard with tiny, wormy fruit.
The tree stood at my childhood home when we moved into the house in 1971 and remained standing until 1982, the year I graduated high school.
A blight of some kind forced my parents to take down the tree, but for more than a decade the crabapple provided work and recreation and sparked my imagination.
Saturday mornings I joined my siblings in the backyard to pick up spoiled fruit — we competed to see who could chuck a crabapple in the garbage came from the greatest distance and occasionally flung crabapples at one another — a warm weather substitution of a snowball fight.
We climbed the trunk and hung from branches until one brother fell and broke an arm.
At my youngest, I played at being Johnny Appleseed and planted the crabapples to grow more trees around the neighborhood.
I learned about Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, the nomadic orchardist of the 1800s, from a Walt Disney cartoon series that also told the tall tales of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan and, more recently, John Henry.
The children’s tale is that Johnny Appleseed randomly spread seeds everywhere he traveled but the reality is he established nurseries from Pennsylvania to Illinois.
I hadn’t thought of Johnny Appleseed in years but he came to mind when I contemplated how I wanted to celebrate National Arbor Day, which is Friday, April 30.
The Arbor Day Foundation encourages us to attend a planting celebration or plant a tree on the holiday observed the last Friday in April.
Arbor Day’s origins is on the Great Plains — in Nebraska — where in April 1872 a man named J. Sterling Morton called for setting aside a day for planting and calling attention to trees.
Nebraskans are said to have planted a million trees on the first Arbor Day.
Later, in Lisle, Illinois, Morton’s daughter Joy founded the Morton Arboretum, a destination for many students in the Chicago suburbs, including myself decades ago.
Children learn about oaks and acorns, how to plant seedlings and make tree jokes —What’s a tree’s worst month? Sep-timber.
Kids also learn about the value of trees using a tree benefit calculator.
The live oak outside my home, with a trunk measuring about 22 inches in circumference, provides overall benefits of about $231 a year, including:
- Intercepting about 12,281 gallons of stormwater runoff;
- Raising the property value by $163 a year;
- Conserving 141 kilowatt hours of electricity for cooling;
- Absorbing pollutants like ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide through leaves;
- Intercepting particulate matter like dust, ash and smoke;
- Releasing oxygen through photosynthesis
- Reducing atmospheric carbon by 1,240 pounds.
As for my family tree, if the crabapple still stood, the annual estimated value would be about $165.
But I’d put the estimated value much higher.
Happy Arbor Day!