Gulfport plans to plant a silver buttonwood

Have you ever seen a tree like the one on the picture. Probably. It's called a silver buttonwood. It's one of two varieties of mangroves that grow in brackish water throughout Florida. The City of Gulfport Recreation Department is planting one at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, January 15 on Gulfport Beach, west of the volleyball courts. They'll also have free sweet gum and red maple seedlings you can take home and plant in your own yard.

Why all the fuss? It's to mark Arbor Day, which is a traditional observance designed to call attention trees and their importance to us. It's a very old holiday, and is celebrated on several different dates around the world. The first recorded Arbor Day was in Spain in 1594, and they had a tree festival along with it. The first American Labor Day was almost 300 years later in Nebraska. It was the brainchild of a newspaperman named J. Sterling Morton, who later was named Secretary of Agriculture under Grover Cleveland.

Morton loved trees. Long before he went to Washington, he urged fellow Nebraskans to observe a tree-planting holiday where individuals and counties could win prizes for the largest number of properly planted trees.  The first American Arbor Day was on April 10, 1872. More than one million trees were believed to have been planted on that day. In 1855, Nebraska made the observance an official holiday and moved it to March 22, Morton's birthday.

Whatever day it's celebrated, we think Arbor Day is a good idea, and we think it's great that Gulfport is planting a mangrove tree. Mangroves filter pollutants, absorb excess nutrients from runoff, prevent shoreline erosion, trap sediments, and help increase the clarity and quality of our waters. Besides, they're home to all manner of fish and other sea critters.