Commissioner helps kick off huge spring planting

Calling trees just as important as big sewer pipes, Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman helped Friends of Trees kick off its largest Neighborhood Trees planting of the season Saturday.

Thanks to more than 200 volunteers who participated in the first-day-of-spring planting, 300 large street and yard trees were planted in the neighborhoods of Cully, Madison South, Rose City Park and Roseway—an over 100 percent increase from the number planted last year.

“It’s important to have trees that capture storm water and keep it from getting in our sewer system—to beautify neighborhoods, enhance property values, and to provide cooling in the summer time,” said Saltzman, who oversees the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), a Friends of Trees project partner via the Grey to Green (G2G) Initiative. “Planting over 300 trees is a remarkable accomplishment.”

Included in the volunteers figure were about a dozen employees from the Port of Portland, the sponsor of the community planting.

The Port of Portland has provided financial sponsorship to Friends of Trees for several years, but this year the employees were excited to enhance the partnership by planting in the neighborhoods, said Director of Aviation Steve Schreiber.

“We decided we need to dig in and kind of get our hands dirty,” said Schreiber, who also mentioned he grew up in the neighborhood, and that his father and grandfather actually helped build the church that staged the Northeast Portland planting.

While such a dramatic increase in trees planted requires a lot of preparation for things like trucks and tools, volunteer neighborhood coordinators like Jillian Miller faced the logistical challenge of feeding all those volunteers breakfast and lunch.

“We needed to ramp it up this year,” said Jillian Miller, who volunteered for the second year as a neighborhood coordinator.

All around, Friends of Trees is seriously ‘ramping’ up its numbers. Prior to this record breaking planting, the 20-year-old Northeast Portland nonprofit already planted 13,587 trees and shrubs in the metropolitan area this season alone.

With a few Saturday plantings remaining through April 10, this guarantees the figure will be well over 15,000 for the year, and close to 400,000 trees and shrubs planted in two decades.

“Friends of Trees is a great organization—they’ve proven they can organize—getting people out today,” said Saltzman.

“The city of Portland, particularly the Bureau of Environmental Services, is really pleased to be able to have a partnership with Friends of Trees to meet some ambitious objectives the city wants to see—which is more trees planted in the city because they’re part of our infrastructure.”