A local environmental group helped Erie grow a little greener this weekend.<\/p>\n
LEAF held a native tree giveaway at Frontier Park on Sunday, giving people a chance to take home trees while also supporting future giveaways.<\/p>\n
Erie County Public Library collects donations at drive through book drive <\/a><\/p>\n From 10 this morning until 2 in the afternoon for the second day in a row, people stopped by Frontier Park for LEAF\u2019s native tree giveaway.<\/p>\n The group says native trees are important because they support wildlife, improve biodiversity and help strengthen the environment in erie.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we gave away close to 500 native trees yesterday, so what you see behind me is just what\u2019s left over. But there\u2019s still lots of great vareity, we have some dogwood shrubs and lots of canopy trees that get 70 to 100 feet tall,\u201d said Hannah Rhodes, the program director at LEAF.<\/p>\n Depending on the tree, some will grow quickly while others will take many years.<\/p>\n \u201cIt depends on the tree; we have some, like silky dogwood needs a year or so from the sapling stage that it\u2019s in. But then our tulip proplers, our prescims, they may take 40 years to fully fruit,\u201d Rhodes explained.<\/p>\n This year, the trees were available at no cost, but organizers also introduced a donation option.<\/p>\n The give what you can model lets people choose whether they want to contribute.<\/p>\n \u201cThe more people give back for their trees, the more trees we can purchase for our next giveaway. Already, we\u2019ve had so many generous people sustain us so that there is definitely going to be a fall giveaway which is exciting,\u201d Rhodes said.<\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n