photo by: Niamh Coomey

One of two oak trees is planted in Wheeling Park on Monday for Arbor Day, part of an effort to plant 100 trees there over the next year.

WHEELING — City leaders, Wheeling Tree Board members and park staff gathered around a small swamp chestnut oak tree and a pile of dirt with shovels Monday morning — a celebration of Arbor Day and another small step toward replenishing Wheeling Park’s downed trees.

The oak was one of two new trees planted in Wheeling Park on the warm morning. The Wheeling Park Commission, in collaboration with local sponsoring organizations, planted another 15 trees over the weekend as part of the park’s multi-year plan to slowly replace the nearly 200 trees that a double derecho storm knocked down in 2022.

“It’s really important to continually plant trees over a span of years because if you plant all your trees at once then they’re all the same age and then they all die at the same time and so we’re trying to plant a few trees each year,” Wheeling Tree Board Chair Karen Cox said.

Cox said Monday’s planting was part of an effort to ensure a green, tree-filled future for the next several generations in the friendly city.

“We are planting this because we are planning towards the future of Wheeling. We want to have a beautiful green space for our children to grow up into and for our grandchildren to grow up into,” Cox said.

The heavy wind and rain storms three years ago rocked the park, dramatically changing its landscape and even how locals use the park today.

“We lost a lot of big, beautiful trees and with that we lost a lot of our shade,” Cox said.

“Everyone knows when you go to a picnic you want to be in the shade of a tree in the summertime and so it really has changed how the park is used.”

“It was a huge loss and we are just trying to bring it back so that whenever the next big storm comes through we’ll have some smaller trees to come up into that canopy.”

Cox explained that having a variety of types of trees is important to support the diversity and longevity of the natural space. Several years ago the invasive emerald ash borer took out the ash tree population in the park.

“We always encourage people to try to pick a tree that has not already been planted everywhere so that we can increase the diversity of our trees and make our urban forest canopy more resilient,” she said.

This is the second year that Wheeling has had its designation as a “Tree City USA,” meaning they meet several qualifications such as having the official city council-designated tree board to maintain and manage the tree population.

Wheeling City council made this year’s Arbor Day proclamation at their most recent meeting to re-emphasize their support of the tree board’s work to maintain and replenish Wheeling’s urban forest.

Cox said the tree board is excited to have so much support from the city. City Manager Robert Herron was present at Monday’s planting and emphasized how much trees improve the city.

However it will be some time before Wheeling Park sees its canopy return to the fullness it once had. The trees that Wheeling Park lost to the derecho storms were large and very old, Cox said.

The park’s newest oak likely won’t reach its full size for another 50 years.

“The trees in this park were over a hundred years old, they’ve been here a long time,” she said. “Trees are slow. They grow slow and they die slow — unless they get knocked over.”