Royal Oak Arboretum to unveil new additions April 24

ROYAL OAK — Royal Oak is upping its game in the nature department with some updates to the Fred A. Erb Arboretum, located at the southeast corner of Lexington Boulevard and Marais Avenue, that will be unveiled in a special ceremony April 24.

The unveiling will include improvements funded by a grant from the Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation.

The unveiling will begin at 10:30 a.m., with a tree planting ceremony to take place at 11 a.m. Self-guided walks will take place immediately following the ceremony.

“The Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation continues the legacy of two lifelong Southeast Michigan residents who were deeply committed to their community,” according to erbff.org.

The Erb Foundation donates and awards initiatives that Fred and Barbara cared the most about, such as the environment, arts and culture, jazz education, sustainable business, and Alzheimer’s disease research.

The grant provided the arboretum with $250,000 to plant 100 trees and support other ecosystem improvements at the arboretum in honor of what would have been Fred Erb’s 100th birthday, according to Jill Martin, Royal Oak’s management analyst and grants coordinator.

The other items funded with the grant include irrigation system installation, storage shed building and tools, maintenance for trees, invasive species removal, prairie oak restoration, educational signage, and programming, according to Martin.

“This money from the Erbs has allowed us to do things we wouldn’t have accomplished in our lifetimes,” Bob Muller, from the Royal Oak Nature Society, said.

The Royal Oak Arboretum sits on four and a half acres of land and surrounds the Leo Mahany/Harold Meininger Senior Center. Around 2006, a long range plan was put in place to plant a collection of native plants that were not found in Tenhave Woods, according to an informational document about the arboretum on romi.gov.

“We actually started doing something in 2008, and it started because the nature society maintains the two nature parks and we had a tree ID workshop in the community center, and we noticed a couple of trees that weren’t in either nature park,” Muller said.

Muller explained that because the native trees that were missing could not be planted in the already existing nature parks at the time, because it’s not allowed to plant in a nature park, they would plant the trees behind the senior center where there was a large opening.

The arboretum is home to around 82 Michigan native trees. In Michigan, there are 87 native trees, so the arboretum just has a few more to go before it can be said that it has every native tree species.

The unveiling will also include showcasing the improvements made by two other grants.

An Oakland County Parks and Recreation Commission grant in the amount of $71,250 with a required match from the city of Royal Oak of $23,750 funded 1,300 feet of hard surface trails, three Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant benches, one picnic table, and two additional handicapped parking spaces at the trailhead.

An AARP grant in the amount of $15,000 has been put toward installing three ADA-compliant picnic tables and two accessible benches at the Royal Oak Senior Center.

“The nature society makes around $5,000 a year; that sort of limits how many things we could buy,” Muller said. “I think we have put somewhere in the neighborhood of a little over $20,000 worth of trees that the Erb grant helped us with.”

A major installation to the park is the addition of hard surface trails, making the trail more accessible.

“The new trails are all 6 feet wide, which means if you’re having a nature walk you can have a group of people next to you,” Muller said. “Some of our trails were originally sort of dead ends. We made sure that all of the trails, wherever you are walking, you would never have to turn around and walk back. The trails all loop back to the community center in some way.”

In addition to native trees, the arboretum features native plants and flowers that are also used for learning purposes, according to Muller.

The nature society often puts on guided walks that people can attend to learn about the various flowers, plants and trees located on the grounds of the Arboretum, and now with the improvements, Muller sees many more walks in the future.

“It was literally a waste area behind the community center when we started,” Muller said. “So we’ve created a whole park for the city of Royal Oak that I think is sort of unique. I can think of no other city adjacent to us that has an arboretum, a botanical garden.”

The ceremony celebrating the updated Arboretum is free to the public.