By Martine Miller, MPIO – Town of Mount Pleasant Communications Manager
MOUNT PLEASANT, SC (December 3, 2021) – The Town of Mount Pleasant and students at the East Cooper Center for Advanced Studies (ECCAS) today celebrated National Arbor Day by planting a crab apple tree on the grounds of the facility. In South Carolina, Arbor Day is celebrated on the first Friday of December.
More than a dozen students were led in the planting by Eddie Bernard, Mount Pleasant Urban Forester, and Peyton Schultz, ECCAS Horticultural Instructor. This hands-on experience allowed students to further their understanding of digging, tree-planting, and mulching. The planting was followed by a visit to the facility’s greenhouse where more than 35 swamp chestnut oak and laurel oak trees that were being grown by students from bare root seedlings provided earlier in the year by the Town as part of a Take Root Mount Pleasant initiative. These trees are to be distributed in the spring.
Each year, the Town of Mount Pleasant plants nearly 8,000 trees in the community (mostly native live oaks) and spends a minimum of $2 per residents on tree planting projects. These efforts, along with a tree board/department and a tree ordinance, have earned the Town of Mount Pleasant the designation of Tree City USA for 33 consecutive years.
“A thriving urban forest offers many advantages to the community,” said Bernard. “Trees absorb the sound of traffic, they cool our neighborhoods, and reduce energy costs by shading building and protecting them from winter winds. Homes with trees have higher property values, and green space plays a major role in improving mental and physical health.
About Arbor Day Foundation
The Arbor Day Foundation is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to planting trees. Today, the Arbor Day Foundation has more than one million members and has planted more than 350 million trees in neighborhoods, communities, cities, and forests throughout the world. For more information, visit their site at https://www.arborday.org/