“--- a poem lovely as a tree,” that’s how Joyce Kilmer finished the last sentence in his poem “Trees.” Recently, that poem was brought to mind as I read an Arbor Day Foundation request for a contribution. It was for funds to help in the planting of new seedlings. And if you think only of those trees lost to forest fires, the building of new homes and to the manufacture of paper products, the request seems to have been a reasonable one.

Like so many of us, I wandered about the neighborhood as an elementary student, collecting and identifying the autumn leaves on the tall area trees that grew there and was amazed at what I learned. Not only were those leaves different and beautiful, depending upon which tree they came from, but my classmates and I also learned that those oversized plants helped to purify the very air we breathed.

We learned that some of the area’s trees, the conifers, remained green all year long, while others, the deciduous, lost their leaves each autumn and grew new ones each spring. We learned more about food bearing trees too. While we knew about most of the ones that bore fruit, those that produced nuts were a surprise as well as the maples that provided syrup, perhaps the earliest of the sweeteners that we take for granted today.

Two of the most basic gifts we receive from trees are shade for coolness and the beauty for the landscaping of our homes. And while the raking of these leaves in the fall is sometimes considered a necessary evil, when a tree goes missing, due to ice or wind storms, they are usually quickly replaced. The hole in the sky they left is a far greater evil.

In my yard, and I suspect the yards of many, every tree growing there has a story, a story that someone in the family gave us as a gift, transplanted from their yard to ours, or was dug from a woods for our yard. Only one by our front curb was from the city and mistakenly planted over our water line. Those roots, unlike the many that help to control erosion, I fear are destined to find their way into my water supply.

In some places trees are grown as money crops. Not just the Christmas tree industry or in the nurseries that provide for our landscaping, but the more recent plantings that will one day soon result in the replacement of elm, ash, and American chestnut that have systematically been destroyed by insect infestations. And the growing price of wood in the lumber yards suggests to us that tapping our forests for building supplies may not always be enough for our needs. Groups like The Arbor Day Foundation may soon be necessary leaders in the production of trees of all kinds.

And from just the position of enjoyment, who doesn’t find a forest beautiful? When I was a child it was the shape and color of leaves that allowed me to know the little I knew about the species of trees around me. Later I found the shapes of trees in the winter made the species even easier to identify.

In the British Isles trees have been harvested to a point in many places, that few houses are now made of wood today. In the rain forests of South America, climates have been altered, and in much of Africa, so many trees have been harvested just for cooking fires that there are desserts where jungles used to be. Even in America trees are being cut in many places, more rapidly than they are being replanted.

Thanks Arbor Day Foundation for the reminder. And yes, I will send a contribution.