Elmhurst College will celebrate Arbor Day, as well as its designation as a Tree Campus USA, with tree-planting events on Friday, April 26, and Saturday, April 27.

For the third year in a row, the Arbor Day Foundation has recognized Elmhurst College as a Tree Campus USA for its dedication to nurturing and maintaining trees on its 48-acre arboretum campus. On Arbor Day, April 26, at 11:30 a.m. a Frontier Elm tree will be planted on the south side of Niebuhr Hall.

Elmhurst College assistant professor of biology Merrilee Guenther and Dave Froede, a certified arborist at Bartlett Tree Experts, will speak during the event. Various trees around the campus mall will be hung with tree tags that describe the benefits that specific tree provides every year. The tags have been provided for free by the Morton Arboretum. 

On Saturday, April 27, a Cub Scout troop from Hawthorne School in Elmhurst will join members of the College’s grounds staff in a tree planting ceremony. The group will meet at 10:00 a.m. at the Grounds Building, on Walter Street. The Scouts will help the grounds staff replace two trees and do some planting in the nursery. Both the Friday and Saturday events are free and open to the public. For more information, call (630) 617-6145 or email [email protected].

Elmhurst has a tradition of preserving and protecting trees and shrubs on its 48-acre campus. When it was established in 1966, the Elmhurst College Arboretum had 65 varieties of trees and shrubs; today it contains more than 800. Arbor Day is the brainchild of Julius Sterling Morton who, as a member of Nebraska’s state board of agriculture, proposed that a special day be set aside for planting trees and increasing awareness of the importance of trees.