Sonoma doubles-down on Arbor Day celebrations

The Sonoma community will be celebrating Arbor Day 2016 this weekend with two events to commemorate the archetypal tree-huggers’ holiday – in the Plaza on Friday, and at Montini Preserve on Saturday morning. Both events will feature a 2-year-old coastal oak sapling from the ancient tree at Jack London’s cottage, still hanging on 100 years after the writer’s death in 1916.

The events include the presentation to this year’s Rotary Conservation Award winner, Joanna Kemper.

On Friday, Sonoma’s official festivities include the eighth annual celebration at the Plaza amphitheater, beginning at 11 a.m. Until this year, the Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau has been organizing the event, but with former director Wendy Peterson’s retirement, the Bureau has moved in a different direction. So for the first time the City itself has more of a direct hand in the ceremony, with Ken Brown of the Community Service & Environment Commission taking on leadership.

Once again the emcee for the event will be Tom Rusert of Sonoma Birding; poems, music and a keynote speech by Assemblymember Bill Dodd will be included, and the presentation of the oak sapling by Jack London State Historic Park’s Tjiksta Van Wyck and California State Parks archaeologist Breck Parkman.

The highlight might be the presentation of the Rotary Club Conservation Award, to Overland Trail docent Joanna Kemper. Since 2009, the Rotary Club has presented its annual Conservation Award at the Arbor Day ceremony, in recognition of a local volunteer who has “made an appreciable difference for their conservation efforts, over many years, in Sonoma Valley,” said Rusert, himself recipient of the honor in 2013.

“When we started the Arbor Day celebration in 2009,” added Rusert, “we changed the paradigm of what the Plaza is to be used for, except farmers markets and large events.” At about the same time he helped develop recognition of the Plaza as a “living arboretum” with almost 30 tree species from around the world. His Self-Guided Tree Tour map, which includes a list of Plaza birds, is a popular handout at both Visitors Bureau centers, in the Plaza and at Cornerstone.

Rusert credits Gary Edwards’ leadership in bringing the Rotary Club along with the award, but notes too that “Rotary International has a long-standing reputation for planting friendship trees all over the world.”

Past honorees include Rusert, Pat Elliot and Mickey Cook, last year’s Maggie Haywood and the first Conservation Award winner, Bob Cannard Sr. – who died just days before the Arbor Day 2009 ceremony.

Kemper, this year’s Conservation Award honoree, is a long-time Marin County environmentalist who has thrown herself into similar roles here in Sonoma.

A Master Gardener since 1999, and former chair of the Tiburon Open Space Committee and board member of the Angel Island Foundation, since moving to Sonoma in 2007 she’s served as docent at Quarry Hill, steward chair at Sonoma’s Overlook Trail and a past board member of the Sonoma Ecology Center.

“I like to spend my time with kids,” said Kemper, in her resilient Pennsylvania accent. She was at Quarry Hill earlier in the week, and on Thursday planned to take a class from the Sonoma Academy up the Overlook Trail for a combined history-natural history hike. “Last week I was told by one of the kids it was the second-best class trip he’d ever been on,” laughed Kemper proudly.

“I think it’s a quintessential Sonoma Valley award,” she went on. “I got a call from Gary Edwards, I asked him what I could do for him, and he said, ‘I think there’s something I can do for you.’” When he told Kemper she had been nominated for the award, she said, “It floored me, I just couldn’t believe it.”

The seedling from Jack London’s live oak tree will be presented to the city at Friday’s ceremony, but it will be planted at the head of the Montini Trail the next day, Saturday, April 30.

The ceremony begins at 10 a.m., and the planting is scheduled for 10:30.

The huge coast live oak, next door to the cottage where the writer spent his final days, is certainly nearing the end of its own 400-years-plus life, but the park’s ominous 2013 prediction of the old oak’s death was revised.

“After additional tests, it was determined that the situation was not as dire as initially thought,” said Anne Abrams, a communications spokesperson for Jack London State Historic Park. “No one at the park wanted to take the tree down.”

Several efforts were undertaken to “clone” the tree by planting its acorns in significant places around the county. About 40 acorns were nurtured to seedling by Quarry Hill botanist Corey Barnes; one of these will go to ground in Montini though a few others have been planted, including one in the very shadow of “Jack’s Oak” at the park and another headed for Piedmont, where London lived in the early 1900s.

It won’t be the first time one of the acorns from Jack’s Oak has been ceremonially planted. The year following London’s death, his widow Charmian planted an oak seedling in his honor on the lawn of Oakland City Hall – a tree known today as the London Oak.

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com