Last -and only - time I got the ADF bundle of trees, 2 of them were callery pear seedlings. Those are probably the only ones of that bunch of tinies that survived.
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I think a dogwood or redbud survived for me…but it’s been years, probably high school days. I think maybe I ordered a maple or something for $3 or so around 40 years ago, maybe less.
The main problem thousands of people don’t have the patience or understanding to take tiny bare root trees and nurse them into a big tree.
I get not having the patience for some trees to get production or be a large tree. Some pears take upwards of 10-20 years, pecans take upwards of 15 or more years, a maple will take 40 years to tap, Paw Paw will take 6-8 years. The human lifespan is 60-100 years. 18-30 of the human years are used up going to school depending on level of education. Then lets say you save up for a house before getting trees. You are now between 23-35. Assuming you are the middle ground you just spent 2/3 of your life by the time you got the trees producing at full rate. My goal is to start the trees and then transport them when I get a house but not everyone has that option.
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To be honest school never taught me what Arbor Day was. School taught me about Earth day though. I would not compare it to Memorial Day because that is actually a federal government holiday to my understanding. I would compare Arbor Day to Earthday. Teachers are luckily getting back to teaching kids about plants. My mother is a teacher and her school has a community garden the kids are supposed to work on. It is not what it used the be because the person that was supposed to be in charge recked the garden to be vindictive (that is another story). That being said they made leaders that may slightly know plants but are not the best. A good example was my mother was put in charge of the garden one year. She knows about the different plants and what a perennial vs annual is. You know the basic stuff. If the plants do not come back and go with a vengeance she kills them though. Her garden at home consists of mums, choropsis, lambs ears and sedum. Needless to say that year the community garden had a good crop but the tomatoes had bugs coming out of them and had that issue you get with uneven watering or not enough calcium for example. That is what I saw. Another year irrigation stopped during summer and all crops were killed. Basically the kids are learning a lot of what not to do.
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