A local environmental group helped Erie grow a little greener this weekend.

LEAF held a native tree giveaway at Frontier Park on Sunday, giving people a chance to take home trees while also supporting future giveaways.

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From 10 this morning until 2 in the afternoon for the second day in a row, people stopped by Frontier Park for LEAF’s native tree giveaway.

The group says native trees are important because they support wildlife, improve biodiversity and help strengthen the environment in erie.

“And we gave away close to 500 native trees yesterday, so what you see behind me is just what’s left over. But there’s still lots of great vareity, we have some dogwood shrubs and lots of canopy trees that get 70 to 100 feet tall,” said Hannah Rhodes, the program director at LEAF.

Depending on the tree, some will grow quickly while others will take many years.

“It depends on the tree; we have some, like silky dogwood needs a year or so from the sapling stage that it’s in. But then our tulip proplers, our prescims, they may take 40 years to fully fruit,” Rhodes explained.

This year, the trees were available at no cost, but organizers also introduced a donation option.

The give what you can model lets people choose whether they want to contribute.

“The more people give back for their trees, the more trees we can purchase for our next giveaway. Already, we’ve had so many generous people sustain us so that there is definitely going to be a fall giveaway which is exciting,” Rhodes said.

Now the goal was to give 1,000 trees away. 600 of them were already given away yesterday, leaving only a couple hundred left today. And people are still picking their trees up

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“The best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago; the second-best time is today. So that’s my favorite part about giving away trees and knowing that they’ll be planted. We’ve had so many great people be excited to take and plant their trees and that’s awesome to see,” she went on to say.

LEAF said the broader goal is to plant 275,000 trees and hopefully more throughout the area. They said every tree taken home today is one more step towards building a healthier, more resilient community.

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