Arbor Day recognizes the importance of trees in America

Inspiration for the observance of Arbor Day in April comes from the ancient Greek proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Congratulations go out to the citizens of Pine Knoll Shores, N.C., as the community celebrates its 22nd consecutive year in 2023 as a “Tree City U.S.A.” The designation is awarded annually by the Arbor Day Foundation. 

In 1907, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt penned an Arbor Day letter to America’s school children in which he emphasized the necessity of careful use and the perpetuation of the country’s natural resources. 

“Arbor Day is now observed in every state in our union – and mainly in the schools,” Roosevelt said. “You give part of a day to special exercises, and perhaps to actual tree planting, in recognition of the importance of trees to us as a nation, and of what they yield in adornment, comfort and useful products to the communities in which you live.” 

“When you help to preserve our forests or plant new ones you are acting the part of good citizens.” 

Roosevelt commented that a nation “without children would face a hopeless future”…and a country without trees would be in the same boat. 

Jean Macheca of the Pine Knoll Shores History Committee noted that “conservation” must have run in the Roosevelt family genes. A member of the extended family, Alice Green Hoffman, who bought all the land in present-day Pine Knoll Shores in 1917, was an eccentric tree hugger.

Hoffman adopted this island as her home and ensured that “it would remain generally untouched by development during her lifetime and beyond,” Macheca wrote. 

“Gabrielle Brard, Alice’s companion of 22 years, remembered that Alice was convinced that without the protection of the maritime forest, the dunes would be destroyed and her ‘island paradise’ would be lost. According to Miss Brard, ‘Not only did Miss Hoffman cherish the trees, but she left standing orders that no animal, not even a snake, be killed on her land.’”

 

“One early PKS resident, Phyllis Gentry, remembers visiting Alice’s home, Shore House, as a child and having to navigate a winding driveway that bypassed many stately old trees. She was told that Alice couldn’t bear to cut them down and had built Shore House around them.” 

Hoffman’s “reluctance to sell off any part of her acreage made it possible for the land to pass unspoiled to her conservation-minded Roosevelt heirs,” Macheca said. Hoffman died in 1953 at age 91. 

The Roosevelts were “the ideal caretakers of a carefully planned, ecologically aware community. When most developers in the 1960s were clearing immense swaths of forest to erect cookie-cutter houses and stripping barrier islands for development, the members of the Roosevelt Trust were consulting with attorneys to draw up the environmentally sensitive and tree friendly covenants for Pine Knoll Shores.”

 

Macheca said that the earliest restrictions stipulated that Pine Knoll Shores property owners “leave all vegetation, trees, brooks, creeks, hillsides, springs, water courses and ravines in as near their natural state as is compatible with good building and land use practices….” 

“In the ensuing 50 years (since the town was incorporated in 1973), PKS guidelines regarding general treatment and protection of the land and vegetation, especially mature trees, have remained constant,” and are deeply ingrained in the community code, Macheca said.

 

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, once said: “Forests are the lungs of our land.” 

Everyone’s invited to come and breathe in some of that pure Pine Knoll Shores air.