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By TYLER RALEY | Staff Writer

CHELSEA – As the wind blew through the trees surrounding the Chelsea Community Center, residents of Chelsea gathered to attend the city’s annual Arbor Day Celebration on Saturday, Feb. 22 at 10 a.m. 

As designated by the Arbor Day Foundation, Chelsea is deemed as “Tree City USA.” The annual celebration allowed attendees to take home bare root seedlings for free, as well as enter giveaways for door prizes and a variety of larger potted trees.

“We’re doing it just to raise awareness of trees and how important they are to our environment and to our community, just building a community that values its trees and values landscape,” said Paula Davis, tree commissioner for the city of Chelsea.

As of recently, the Arbor Day Celebration has been concurrently run with the Kiwanis Club of Chelsea’s Pancake Day at the Chelsea Community Center. Davis spoke highly of how the celebration has grown each year because of that, spreading knowledge of trees to those who are able to stop by.

“Our goal is outreach with the citizens of Chelsea so that they can come together for a community event that will coalesce our city and just create a sense of community,” Davis said. “Every year we have more and more people come out and see this event. We run it concurrently with the Kiwanis for that very reason in that people can come out for pancakes and then they can come out and get their trees and their Arbor Day stuff. It’s become something where we’re starting to see people year after year. It’s truly creating a sense of community in the city of Chelsea.”

At this year’s celebration, the Tree Commission gave away a pear tree, an apple tree, a serviceberry tree, a weeping cherry tree, a teddy bear magnolia, a crepe myrtle tree, a fruiting crabapple tree and a jane magnolia tree.

With the amount of people that attend the festival each year, Davis always makes a point to continue spreading the message of how valuable trees are to the environment, hoping that citizens will realize the meaning behind all of the efforts the Tree Commission puts in.

“Trees do so many different things. There’s aesthetic qualities to them, they just add beauty, but beyond that, there are real monetary values to trees,” Davis said. “That’s what we’re trying to foster is that trees are not just a nuisance. Trees are not just something that fall when the weather is bad, but there is a real value to trees in that Chelsea values their place in our landscape.”