On warm days, a single mature tree can provide the cooling effect of 5 room-size air-conditioners. On cold days, a tree can act as a wind-break, reducing heating bills. Tree leaves absorb air-borne dust particles and CO2, a Greenhouse gas. And trees can boost property values by as much as 10%.

- Start by digging a hole 3 times the width of the root ball and exactly as deep as the root ball.

- Cut any twine or wire holding burlap around the root ball. Get rid of as much as you can, and fold the rest down.

- Fold the burlap down so it doesn’t get in the way of spreading roots (90% of most trees’ roots are found in the top 18” of soil, growing laterally).

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I have a weakness for natural history museums. Not just the big ones, with their dreamy dioramas of ancient moments-before-battle tableaux of extinct predators and their equally extinct, though more immediately imperiled, prey. In the dimly lit, echo-y halls ruled by dinosaurs, mammoths, sea-monster-size squid and other giants, I can disappear, invisible and speechless in the shadows of creatures implausible. When? Where? How? Really? No!

I love the smaller, out-the-way museums, too, the sleepy ones, relics themselves, you often find on college campuses. At the University of Nebraska, they have a diorama of a farm, complete with a skeletal cat chasing a skeletal mouse, right near the skeletal livestock and skeletal poultry, and, of course, our friend, the skeletal farmer. It’s Day of the Dead meets Green Acres and it’s completely brilliant.

Michigan State has “The Hall of Diversity,” a celebration of Darwin’s epiphany, filled with the pinned and stuffed of what are now somewhat faded creatures: A butterfly. A squirrel. A mountain lion. An owl. Each stares, glassy-eyed, into the yawning eternity of a dusty, little-visited gallery. And each, I think to myself, is its own “hall of diversity.” Who has taken up residence on that old pelt? What mite-y villages have set up shop amidst the feathers? And who is that staring back at me from the eyelash of a long-dead wolf?
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