Hundreds of volunteers celebrated Arbor Day on Saturday morning by planting over 75 trees along Walnut Street, between 40th and 43rd streets.
As part of the Walnut Street Greenway effort -- whose goal is to beautify the neighborhood -- students from Penn, Drexel University, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College were able to extend the Walnut Street Greenway by three city blocks.
"Trees are good," Penn landscape architect Bob Lundgren said. "They bring the birds in. You don't have to park your car in the sun, you can do it in the shade. It makes a big difference."
Volunteers, given a set of tools and gloves, were assigned to an area, called the tree pit, where their trees were to be planted. Around each tree pit was a group of five volunteers. A tree specialist worked with each group of volunteers and a block supervisor oversaw each lot of 10 trees.
"It's a lot harder work than I anticipated," Drexel junior Sam Zitin said.
Several different types of trees were selected, including honey locust, Chinese elm, shingle oak, hackberry, Japanese maple and jolivette cherry.
Unforeseen difficulties added excitement to the tree-planting extravaganza. One of these was an unexpected stump in the middle of one of the tree pits. The removal of the stump required an ax and a chainsaw.
"This is turning into an excavation," Zitin said, after 80 minutes of trying to remove the stump with no visible progress.
The event received multimedia coverage, but not all of the volunteers were impressed.
College freshman John Kneeland asked, upon spotting a Channel Six Action News vehicle, "What's wrong with people? People are out killing people somewhere and we're here planting trees."
Other volunteers had a more positive attitude. "If I wasn't planting trees, I'd just be sleeping on a Saturday morning doing nothing," College junior Patrick Wade said. "This is satisfying work."
The College Democrats, the Muslim Students Association, the Sigma Kappa sorority and the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity were among those organizations from the University that participated.
In order to plant the trees, University City Green -- a nonprofit organization and the event's sponsor -- had to secure the permission of each store on Walnut Street in front of which it wanted to plant a tree.
"You get a lot of community buy-in because you've got to talk to everybody," volunteer Michelle Robinson said. "We've been working on this for months."
Indeed, the community played a large part in the event's success. Tables and tools were supplied by the University City District, shovels were donated by the Water Department of Philadelphia and UC Green and brooms were supplied by Spruce Hill Community Association and UCD.
"The problem is that there is so much involvement from the community that a lot of time is spent waiting around for the leaders," College junior Keith Randall said.
