Arbor Day and tree walk

On Friday there was a brief ceremony at the gazebo on the court house lawn in which Mayor Herb Arihood read a proclamation about Arbor Day.
There was a banner that proclaims Rensselaer as one of the tree cities in Indiana. (I was drafted into holding one side of the banner for a while, so I might be in a picture in the Rensselaer Republican tomorrow or whenever they feature the event. If the Republican uses that shot, you will see why I got the close-up picture of the mayor above.)

Below the mayor presents the proclamation to Connie Kingman.
After the brief ceremony, there was a tree walk led by James Potthoff, who identified the trees around the court house and made comments on them. He talked a bit about the threat of the emerald ash borer, which is being transported throughout the country in firewood. Jasper County is currently not infested, but White County has it, probably because of camping around Lake Shafer. If you see large, purple, kite-like structures in trees this summer, they probably will be emerald-ash-borer traps, which are checking to see if the insects are around. (By itself, the borer only moves about a quarter of a mile per year. But when people move it in firewood, it can move hundreds of miles a year.)

We have a lot of ash trees because they were planted to replace the elm trees that were wiped out by Dutch elm disease. It is probably not a good time to be planting a lot of new ash trees.
I had to leave early so did not hear all he had to say. He did say that the trees that work best in an urban setting might not be the best for rural settings, and the people should plant a mix of different kind of trees. One thing that surprised me was that he did not think tulip trees were a good urban tree because they get too big.