State funds will help spruce up Nebraska City’s Arbor Day Farm; weekend holiday activities planned

LINCOLN — A $1.5 million state grant to the Arbor Day Foundation is intended to help improve the Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City.

In honor of Arbor Day, observed in Nebraska and across the nation on the last Friday of April, the Nebraska Department of Economic Development outlined how the public funds are to be used.

Awarded last fall as part of the state’s shovel-ready capital project program, the funds are to help expand parking at the farm so the historic property has room for more visitors.

Additionally, the funds are to assist in renovating the farm’s Window on the World’s Trees exhibit, which showcases the foundation’s global reforestation and conservation work.

Inspire to plant

Founded in 1972, the Lincoln-based Arbor Day Foundation is the largest nonprofit membership organization dedicated to planting trees. With its partners, it has helped plant more than 500 million trees worldwide and also spearheads various initiatives to improve air and water quality and to provide habitat for wildlife. 

“Our team in Lincoln, Nebraska City, the State of Tennessee, and remote across the United States come to work daily to elevate our mission — to inspire people to plant, nurture and celebrate trees,” said Taylor Barnes, a recruiter at the Arbor Day Foundation. 

To celebrate the Arbor Day holiday, the foundation organizes events like the free and open-to-the-public Arbor Day LNK Festival on Sunday, April 28, at Antelope Park in Lincoln. The festival, from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., features live music, food trucks and interactive educational activities. The foundation also will give away 150 trees on a first-come, first-served basis.

Among weekend activities at the Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City:

On Saturday, April 27, orchard experts are to plant 100 Smitten apple trees in a history-making planting session set to start at 11 a.m. (The orchard will become one of only five noncommercial growers worldwide to care for Smitten apple trees, according to a news release.) Attendees are offered gift bags including a free Smitten apple.

A Wildlife Encounters presentation featuring a wallaby, a bull snake, a glass lizard and an armadillo in the Tree Adventure Theater begins Saturday at 12:30 p.m. 

Tours of the largest public lilac collection in Nebraska, featuring 215 specimens, are to be held Saturday  afternoon .

Capitol concolor fir

Also in celebration of Arbor Day, state representatives on Friday joined kids from Trinity Daycare in a tree-planting excursion at the State Capitol grounds.

Those helping included Lt. Gov. Joe Kelly and representatives of the Nebraska Forest Service, Statewide Arboretum, Arbor Day Foundation, Lincoln Parks and Recreation, Nebraska Natural Resources Districts and Lincoln-based Executive Travel. The group planted a concolor fir on the southeast lawn of the Capitol.

“Arbor Day is an exciting time of year, because planting trees is a commitment to the future,” said Tom Green, director of the state  association representing NRDs. “Each sapling is the start of added protection, habitat and beauty for generations to come.”

The choice of the concolor fir aligns with the original landscape plans developed by Ernst Herminghaus, the state’s first professionally trained landscape architect, who designed the Capitol landscape plan, according to a news release from the NRD association. It said the Capitol Commission over the past 27 years has replanted the same species in designated locations and in accordance with a landscape blueprint established nearly 90 years ago.

State NRDs, since their inception in 1972, have planted conservation trees and shrubs for windbreaks, erosion control, wildlife habitat and other conservation purposes. According to the association that represents them, the state’s 23 NRDs have planted more than 100 million trees.