Home & Garden
Newport Rotarians Spruce-Up Seeds for the Future
The Rotary Club of Newport-Balboa continues a decades-old Arbor Day tradition of titivating, or sprucing-up, seedlings for every third-grader in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District.
Over the past 44 years members of the Rotary Club of Newport-Balboa have prepared seedlings for local third-graders. This past weekend they kept the Arbor Day tradition alive.
The rotarians gathered Saturday and spent hours trimming the roots and cleaning the dirt from 2,632 Carrotwood tree seedlings. Beginning today, the seedlings will be delivered to third-graders across the 21 public and 15 private elementary schools within the Newport-Mesa Unified School District.
“Every year we order the seedlings and they’re all dirty, so we clean them and dress them up,” Bill Hossfeld, the rotary's Arbor Day Chair, said as he smoothed a rotary club label onto a cleaned seedling. “Then each of us goes to one of the schools in the area and hands the trees out to the students, teachers and front office faculty.”
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Since the start of the tradition, the Rotary Club of Newport-Balboa has donated close to 120,000 trees to elementary school students as a way of celebrating the importance of Arbor Day and of honoring the environment.
“What I look forward to every year is interacting with the students, explaining to them what Arbor Day is all about, and seeing how they come to appreciate what they have,” Dick Dickson, who has participated in the event all 44 years, said.
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Each year rotarians teach a new group of students how trees provide oxygen, beauty and shade, help fight the effects of pollution and serve as a vital component of animal habitats.
And sometimes they stumble across a tree they titivated many years ago.
“Some of these people have been around for a number of years, and they’ll come up to us and say, 'you should see the tree we planted 25 years ago, it’s now 35, 40 feet tall!'" Dickson said. “That’s always one of the fun parts, to see the results.”
The titivating event started in 1969 when the late Rotary President General Thomas F. Riley and Cecil Schira, then-president of Hines Nursery, joined forces to promote Arbor Day among school children in the Newport Beach area.
