Kenosha County Arbor Day celebration is Friday, April 26

BRISTOL — A countywide celebration of Arbor Day will be held this Friday at the Kenosha County Center in Bristol.

In addition to the customary tree-planting ceremony, this year’s festivities will include a celebration of the opening of an automated weather station that the University of Wisconsin-Madison is now operating on the County Center grounds.

The event will begin at 5 p.m. with a tree arts exhibit featuring the works of Kenosha County 4-H members, followed by the weather station inaugural ceremony at 6 p.m.

A tree-planting ceremony led by Extension Kenosha County Horticulture Educator Vijai Pandian and including Kenosha County officials will follow at 6:15 p.m. County officials will also hand out tree saplings for attendees to take home and plant.

“Arbor Day is a time to celebrate the beautiful trees that surround us, and to pass that blessing onto future generations by planting new seeds in the ground,” said Kenosha County Executive Samantha Kerkman. “Kenosha County is proud to be a part of that succession with our annual
Arbor Day celebration.”

Supervisor Guida Brown — the newly appointed chair of the County Board’s Planning, Development and Extension Education Committee — encouraged the community to join in the celebration, and to learn more about Kenosha County’s diverse native tree landscape. “We’re fortunate to have an outstanding, educational arboretum on the County Center grounds,” Brown said. “This event is a showcase for that and for the county’s new relationship with UW-Madison that has brought an informative weather station to the community.”

The station is part of the university’s statewide Wisconet network, which reports real-time data from 21 locations across Wisconsin. Information collected includes air temperature, relative humidity, dewpoint, soil temperature and moisture, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and solar radiation.

This data, updated every 15 minutes, is available to the public on an online dashboard accessible at www.go.wisc.edu/bristolweather.

The Kenosha County Center location is the first Wisconet station in southeastern Wisconsin. “This weather station will be an integral part of monitoring the resilience of the trees in the arboretum,” said Panadian, the local Extension agriculture educator. “And it’s also going to be a very helpful tool for the residents of Kenosha County, in terms of monitoring plant pest and growing conditions.”

The Kenosha County Center is located at the northeast corner of highways 45 and 50 in Bristol. More information about the County Center Prairie & Arboretum — including a self-guided tour of its trees — is available at https://www.kenoshacounty.org/2182/Kenosha-County-Center-Prairie-Arboretum.