Berkeley Second Graders say: "Trees R Important"

On the Ohlone Greenway in Berkeley — between the bike traffic and the dog walkers (me) and the people moving fast with headphones in — there’s a stretch of the path that’s been planted on either side with young saplings and hand-painted signs erected on or near them. In a lovely meta moment, those signs are covered in drawings of trees — with wobbly brown trunks, red apples, and scraggled-on root systems. The handwriting is everywhere, literally and figuratively: words upside down, words in bubble letters, words that demand better from the world of adults.

Please Don't Litter. DO NOT Litter! We love this tree. Second Graders Planted This Tree.

The trees have names, of course. Not like “Quercus wislizeni,” but Sunny, NJjamba, and Johnny Jo Bob the 13th.

This past spring, the two second-grade classes at Oxford Elementary, located about a block from the Greenway as it intersects University Avenue, spent two months studying open space: what it provides for plants, for animals, for pollinators, for people. Science teacher Elisa Litsky had them map their schoolyard, cataloging where things grew and where they didn't. "Students surveyed open space in our school," she told me via email, and came away wanting to do more with the open space in their community.

Litsky connected with Berkeley Parks and Recreation, and the classes took a field trip to plant trees along the Greenway. Each group of kids got one and chose its name.

Those of us who live in urban areas can likely anticipate what happened next. Food wrappers, papers, mattresses, all the detritus of modern life started to accumulate around their trunks.

Second-grade teacher Jaime Vines shared via email: "Some of my students who walk on that path often noticed a lot of trash, so they wanted to do something about that — and they decided to try to sway people to protect the tree space by making signs saying they were second graders, they named the trees and planted them, and the trees are important to the habitat along the path."

They took another field trip out to hang the signs on the fence, though sadly, a few windy days blasted some of the signs away. There are still two left.

The signs themselves are not polished. They are extremely made-by-second-graders: letters jostling each other, some words running upside down, the drawings sincere and slightly chaotic. But as I walk down that piece of greenway, I love seeing the reminder that someone loves this place and wants me to love it too.

Litsky mentions, almost as an aside, that her own son is in the other second-grade class. "As I pass the trees with my own son," she wrote, "he says hi and sometimes checks on his tree."

The Ohlone Greenway runs along an old rail corridor through Albany and Berkeley. It's flat, well-used, and the kind of in-between space that could be something but often isn't anything. It's a zone you move through without really seeing it.

But the kids saw it. Vines helped them read it as what it actually is: "a home to animals and shade for all and beauty." That could be said of a lot of places we tend not to cherish very much.

Berkeley public school students are going on summer break this week. While they're off between school years, the trees will keep growing. Hopefully, the adults walking the Greenway will do their part to help them out.