Over a span of four days, gratitude for trees spread like a canopy over Abington Friends School as members of the Class of 1964 returned to the School to see a Tree Tour that their gifts had created and the Class of 2016 joined first graders in planting a pair of cherry trees during the annual Arbor Day celebration.
Alum Sally Goldschmeding Branch of Dallas, who rallied former classmates to donate $11,622 to the Tree Tour, was among those who came to see what their gift had wrought — a nature trail of about 30 trees that is a piece of something much bigger, an arboretum that will open on campus this fall.
About a dozen alums gathered in the John Barnes Room on Friday, bringing with them the surprising news that one of the AFS campus trees was grown from the acorn of a 460-year-old National Champion tree; a fragile newspaper clipping displaying a photo from Arbor Day 1964 and a host of memories of school days in the Triangle building.
“We used to do that!” Janet Atkinson shouted out when a photo of a student studying in a flowering cherry tree popped up on the screen as Chief Technology Officer John Rison explained a new website that will allow visitors to walk through the tree park and find on their cellphones information about the oaks, beeches, maples and other specimens on the trail.
“With your gift, we were able to professionally tag 300 trees,” Lower School Science Teacher Rosanne Mistretta told the group during a brief introduction in the Meeting House.
Marketing Director Gabrielle Giddings explained the grant-writing that enabled the project to grow much larger than first imagined and Lower School Art Teacher Amanda Milz told of a trip to the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown than inspired the glazed clay markers that students created for the Tree Tour.
The alums seemed pleased with the project so far and offered suggestions about going forward. They also showed they were hardly a pot of shrinking violets. They asked that something be done about ivy that had been spotted growing up their class tree, and wondered about their former schoolhouse. “Why is our ninth grade classroom a garage?” one alum asked.
But it was Beth Ebert Benveniste, of the Class of 1966, who brought the news that surprised the group. In 1994, she said, she had donated a sapling that was an offshoot of the Wye Oak tree in Maryland, a magnificent specimen that was the largest white oak in the nation until it was felled during a severe storm in June 2002.
A photo Beth carried indicated her sapling had been planted outside the Lower School entrance and the AFS database quickly showed its location. On Saturday, Beth visited the tree, thriving in full canopy as it stands to the right of the path leading to the Lower School door. (She later sent AFS a copy of a letter from 1994 indicating there were two Wye Oak saplings planted on campus.)
Then it was outside for a brief tour and a chance to hear from five of the Middle School students, led by Social Studies Teacher Mark Smith, who have spent hours gathering information, taking photos and writing poems about the trees.
“The tree tour gives us a chance to share publicly how much we love our campus,” said Sophie Peterson, a seventh grader. As she and the others — seventh graders Charly Avril and Anna Sperger and fifth graders Trinity Graham and Lily Goldstein — talked with the alums, the connection between the current and former students was instant and electric.
For Lynda Plott ’64 of Fairfax County, Virginia, the visit to AFS was the first time she had been back since leaving the School at the end of seventh grade. She said over her 30-year career as a kindergarten teacher, she had planted a few educational acorns of her own, adopting in her classes favorite parts of her AFS experience — a tree planting, a buddy system and even a moment of silence.
“It was such a delight to give to the children what was given to me,” she said.
The alums were supposed to cap off their day by attending Arbor Day festivities on Friday afternoon, but Mother Nature had other ideas. A spell of rainy and cold weather forced the postponement of the ceremony until Monday afternoon. And even then, in a bow to the weather, the ceremony was recast as a combination indoor-outdoor celebration for the first time.
Inside the Hallowell Gym, parents packed the bleachers and students sat on the floor by grades as fourth-grade students performed a traditional dance embracing spring, and other students read poems and sang and played music. Senior Class Clerk Loghan Thain handed off a ceremonial shovel to Junior Class Clerk Desmond Daniels.
Then the ceremony moved outside for the traditional tree planting. To the strains of “Ashokan Farewell,” seniors took turns picking up a ceremonial shovel and turning over spadesful of earth on the root ball of a yoshino cherry tree. Next to them, first graders fulfilled the same task with their own tree, keeping alive a tradition, care for the trees of our earth, that dates back more than a century at Abington Friends.