The Parkland Garden Club now in its 70th year, has sponsored some long-term community projects to benefit the Lehigh Valley.

Two ongoing projects occur around Arbor Day and Earth Week.

These environmental consciousness days are celebrated alongside others across the nation.

Thirteen members of the Parkland Garden Club spent Arbor Day at the Lehigh Valley Zoo.

There were four red azaleas planted to honor friends and loved ones by club members with a dedication given for each.

They were planted to enhance the newest exhibit of red pandas.

The members also toured the medicine wheel plantings established by the club in 2008 as well as the Blue Star Memorial Byway rock with plaque flower bed which honors all military personnel and features the club flower, the red rose.

The event was attended by the grounds and event staff as well as the zoo administrator, Amanda Shurr.

Light refreshments then followed.

This Arbor Day celebration at the zoo was the 45th held with the first event initiated in 1980.

With the four shrubs added by members this year, the Parkland Garden Club has now donated 362 trees, shrubs, grasses and flowers to enhance the Lehigh Valley Zoo.

The second project began even earlier.

Back in 1964 garden club members engaged youth in the Parkland schools by visiting first grade students in each building to talk about the vital service trees provide to the environment.

Following an educational presentation, each first grade student receives a conifer seedling to take home to plant.

Garden club members continued this yearly tradition for Arbor Day in April.

The club has received comments and pictures from people around Parkland who still enjoy “their tree” growing on their property 40 plus years later!

With the project in its 63rd year, the club works with the Pennsylvania Game Commission to process and dispense these trees to over 800 students annually.

The club seeks to instill an understanding one person’s actions can help the environment and in this way touch our future by encouraging young gardeners.

Accomplished local poet Barbara Crooker shared a poem she had written while looking at her daughter, Rebecca’s tree.

STAR OF WONDER, STAR OF LIGHT from Radiance (Word Press, 2005)

“It’s Christmas, the year before the accident when the earth still seemed fixed.

My husband and children are hanging lights on the big pine tree, the one that Becky brought home as a seedling in first grade wrapped in a damp paper towel.

I am cooking dinner while they struggle with the wires that somehow knot themselves up in the box.

Shadows gather behind the hills. The tree turns dark green, then black.

The tangled string unravels, and they pass it around, loop over loop, while I watch from the steamy window: husband, son, and daughter in a circle around the tree, their arms full of stars.”