Englewood celebrates Arbor Day this year with a tree give-a-way 8 a.m. until noon April 18 at Centennial Park and a tree-planting demonstration April 20 at Charles Hay Elementary School.

The city has held Arbor Day celebrations for almost three decades and, for the last 23 years, Englewood has annually received the Tree City USA designation awarded by the National Arbor Day Foundation.

John Kohring, city horticulturist, said 65 trees in five-gallon buckets plus 100 seedlings will be given away on a first-come, first served basis. Each resident can claim only one five-gallon tree.

The seedlings are predominantly blue spruce and the five different species of five-gallon trees.

The April 20 event is a demonstration to show the students at Charles Hay Elementary School how trees are planted.

Both Arbor Day events are sponsored in part by the Keep Englewood Beautiful Commission. Traditionally, there are commission members who volunteer to help with the Arbor Day activities.

Kohring said usually all the trees are given away. However, if some are not claimed, the city takes them to the nursery to allow them to mature.

The city maintains a small tree nursery where small trees are tended so they will grow until they are large enough to be planted in the parks or on the golf course to replace trees badly damaged or killed by storms or high winds.

Englewood also received a grant from the Colorado Tree Coalition available to the city every other year. This year, the city used the money to purchase trees to be planted in areas used by the pubic. This year, the grant was sufficient to purchase eight trees. Each tree is about 2 inches in diameter and the plan is to plant the trees in Belleview Park or Pirates Cove.

Arbor Day began in 1872 when J. Sterling Morton urged the State Board of Agriculture to set aside special day set aside to plant trees with prizes to the counties and the individuals who planted the most trees. The program was set and, on April 10, 1872, Nebraska residents responded by planting almost a million trees.

In 1874 the governor of Nebraska officially established Arbor Day for the state. By the 1880s, other states had taken up the idea and planting trees on Arbor Day was becoming an annual event in schools around the country.

The Arbor Day Foundation was created in 1972, the centennial of the first Arbor Day celebration. The foundation was established to promote Arbor Day and planting trees. The foundation created the Tree City USA program about 30 years ago as another means of encouraging tree planting. Today, 3,216 communities have earned Tree City USA designation.