I love people who love trees. We’re a special breed aren’t we? What a joy to get a couple dozen tree people together to do what we love. Planting a tree is always such a satisfying experience. I’m sure you know the feelings - deliberation about placement, digging a perfect hole, filling it with goodies for the tree, setting the tree into a home you expect it to thrive in long after you are off planet, then you step back and look at what you have done. You have planted a tree. Then you look at it from the other side and get the same satisfaction all over again. Then you step across the street to look at it. It’s there. It’s home. You can’t wait until you next walk the dog or drive by. You can’t wait till fall to see the colors change. You can’t wait till spring to see the flowers and new leaves. And on it goes for the rest of your life. There is nothing like it. I’m so happy for you to have planted a tree.

Now, take these feelings and amplify them one-hundred times. We got to jam over a hundred trees into three city lots in neat rows- all types of exquisite forms and colors mingling there as a family, just like the volunteers who came out to do the work. I am filled with gratitude and joy for all the friends, neighbors, and tree kin who spent the weekend out there materializing dreams, stepping through ourselves and time into the future. It’s like that. You know, this is what tree planting is - tree life and tree time are ways for us to connect to a past and a future that are way beyond our little nows and concepts of self.

It’s perfect how Paul kept saying when people were stressing over details of placement, “come on, we’re not building a cathedral.” That’s coming from the guy who spent about 70 hours on the tractor just prepping the ground before a tree ever showed up. It helped me realize how much we were building a cathedral. His point, I think, was that while we are doing something so grand and spiritual for most of us, actually there is no wrong way to do it. I like this kind of cathedral. The trees will take care of themselves if we just get them into the ground.

Trees, in fact , will take care of themselves if we just let them. When we stop mowing for a season here they come. It’s really all we need to do; they throw their seeds far and wide and suddenly there’s a forest. Trees always do way better when they plant themselves. I don’t believe that they like to be dug up necessarily, or travel at 70 miles per hour on the freeway. However, in the name of diversity and aesthetics we bring the trees together in this formation. Some people are not ready for the beautiful chaos of a million trees planting themselves. The tree nursery and the arboretum are a gateway into the love of a forest. And for people who have or have ever had any problem with trees we have to step gently and paint beautiful landscapes with the trees so that they can see them. These trees are the paint box for Poletown. They will move out into the streets and arbs over the next few years and be the brush strokes of a future that is ours and those yet to come. Don’t ever be the againstest, be the forest.

The trees have landed. Our Earth Day event went swimmingly well. What I mean is that those of us who came were literally swimming as we planted. There was a spring deluge exactly during the hours of our event. So, we really want to thank all those who came out. We met tree lovers from Novi, Madison Heights, Northville, and around our beloved Detroit. It was really cool that people came from far away to support a project that seems so local.

The mud was fierce and slippery and everywhere. Since the trees we planted were so large we had to use the bobcat to lower them into the holes. We had actually already used the bobcat to fork out large holes because the clay was so hard and dense. This allowed us to fill the huge hole with compost and topsoil so that the tree can grow in something more than straight clay.

It was a blast to go out to the nursery and select the trees. What we ended up with was a beautiful mix of trees that were just about 200% over budget. But isn’t it all about the trees? We chose to plant these in trios instead of single specimens. We want their forms and the feel to be amplified as visitors walk among them. We are working toward our goal of creating actual stands of like trees. When we can afford to we will plant them in dozens to give the feel of really being in a grove of, say, Ginkgos, or Birches. We planted three each of Princeton Sentry Ginkgo, Redpoint Red Maple, Paper Birch, Cedar, and Yew. We also planted some understory trees that will add spring excitement. We planted two Kousa Dogwood and two Forest Pansy Redbuds. Oh, and last but not least, on the hill we planted a single Weeping Beech. Did I mention that we imported one-hundred cubic yards of soil to create a hill that sweeps through the middle of the Arb? As a compliment to the living trees we planted 15 boulders. These act as graceful seats and reminders of geologic time. This really brings the earth element into the Arb and deepens the reflection on life in these three time zones: fleeting human time, prolonged tree time, and incomprehensible rock time. The boulders were unearthed from farm fields in the middle of the state. They are making their first local appearance in thousands of years. They were scoured from north of the Great Lakes by glaciers and deposited down here and have likely not seen the light of day since the glaciers receded over 10,000 years ago. May they stand in the sun for the next couple hundred years as the trees grow up in the Arb.

It took three more days to get them all in, but we did it with a core group meeting in the evenings. On Mothers Day Paul and I did the final ground prep and seeded Dutch White Clover. Since then we have made a great friend in the US Fish and Wildlife Service. They are partnering with us to plant 46 varieties of native plants that will benefit the local bees and birds. We seeded about 75% of the Arb with the seed mix they donated.