1st of 100 new trees in honor of lumber tycoon Fred Erb planted in Royal Oak
The late Fred Erb, of Bloomfield Hills, made a fortune in lumber yards and real estate.
To celebrate Fred Erb’s 100th birthday in February, his children decided to plant 100 trees in Royal Oak, where the first Erb Lumber store was located.
On Thursday morning, Fred Erb’s son, John Erb, chair of the Birmingham-based Erb Family Foundation, hefted dirt in his dad’s memory to plant the first tree — an oak, of course.
“It’s fitting that this city is named for a tree,” Erb told a crowd that gathered for the event, and he praised Royal Oak for dedication to its canopy of trees.
Ushering in Arbor Day
John Erb planted one day before Arbor Day on Friday, when the nation marks the beauty and importance of trees. Adding more trees to Oakland County, and to the planet, can’t make climate change go away, as tree huggers sometimes claim. But there’s no question: More trees can help. And anyone with a patch of ground can make like John Erb.
It’s not just about shade and property value and the beauty of nature, he said. The legacy of his father is much about controlling and purifying stormwater. Trees are crucial for taming this era of more intense rainstorms, the recent bane of basements in southeast Michigan and of floods this month in the Upper Peninsula.
Referring as well to his mother, Barbara Erb, John Erb said that both of his parents “felt a great sense of urgency about Great Lakes water quality, reducing runoff and advancing sustainable businesses. ... They were very focused on the future world in which their kids and grandkids would grow up.”
$300 million legacy
Fred and Barbara Erb left about $300 million to their foundation when both passed away in 2013, according to previous Free Press reports. Since then, the foundation’s grants have gone to a who’s who of clean-water groups as well as to key university researchers in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Lansing. The foundation also punches above its weight with air-quality and lead-reduction grants in Wayne County. And it echoes the Erbs’ love of the arts with, for example, recent grants to Detroit Opera and to Signal Return, a budding arts program on Detroit’s east side.
In health care, the illness that afflicted Fred Erb’s final years got an international boost this year when $3.3 million was granted to the Alzheimer’s Association, which annually for five years “will identify the two top-ranked dementia scientists from around the world to each receive a $300,000 research fellowship,” the foundation’s website says. Besides honoring his father’s birthday in February, Thursday’s back-to-earth event celebrated another 100 things, John Erb said.
“This is all taking place at a time when the foundation our parents established reached more than $100 million in grants,” he said.
Like the money that his father made, grants from the Erb Family Foundation generally go to groups and universities in the Midwest, mainly in Michigan, some in Ontario — more than $10 million in 2023 alone, most of it for clean-water and related causes. Its many big checks going in many directions, all beginning in 1917 in a barn-like building on South Main at Lincoln in Royal Oak, where Erb Lumber sold to do-it-yourselfers over a retail counter and at wholesale to home builders with flatbed trucks.
That was at the south end of Royal Oak, 3 miles from the placid Royal Oak Arboretum off 13 Mile Road, where John Erb planted the first of the grant’s 100 trees. The nature preserve has become a refuge for trees and tree lovers. On Thursday, it was renamed the Fred A. Erb Arboretum.
So, how will 100 new trees get tucked into those 4.25 acres? With smiles and calluses, said Bob Muller, president of the all-volunteer Royal Oak Nature Society, on-hand for Thursday’s planting.
From broken concrete to lush landscaping
Muller’s history with the arboretum is a challenge for anyone with vacant land or a backyard.
“When we started here a dozen years ago, this was a waste area behind the community center, filled with invasive plants. People dumped old concrete here,” he said. Since then, Muller, a retired Chrysler electrical engineer, along with other volunteers including numerous Boy Scouts, ripped out invasive plants and turned back time. Summer after summer, they replanted with native Michigan species. Many of the natives Muller brought from his 40-acre getaway near East Jordan in northern Michigan. It will take two years to plant the Erbs’ 100 trees, he said.
“We want to add an irrigation system, so we don’t lose any to drought,” he said. What kind of trees? “We’re looking at about 70 trees that are considered native to Michigan, and we want at least one of each kind. Right now, we have one of all 11 oak trees native to Michigan,” including the pin oak planted Thursday.
Why native? Why not plant whatever’s on sale at the local nursery? Because non-native species are hostile to other life, Muller said.
“A lot of the trees growing in all the yards around here are non-native. Heck, tulips and daffodils came from Europe.
“But if you plant non-native, there won’t be any beneficial insects or birds on there,” he said.
Native plants are best
In contrast, a Michigan native oak tree is host to hundreds of different caterpillar and other insect species, providing lunch for toads, birds and an endless chain of other wildlife, Muller said.
“Native plants are what was here when the settlers got here,” he said.
Until now, the Nature Society was improving the arboretum on a shoestring budget, volunteer and master gardener Vanessa Schultz said.
"Now, getting more trees in here will be phenomenal. And we'll have demonstration areas to show people what they can do with native plants," Schultz said.
In addition to buying 100 trees, an Erb grant of $250,000 over two years will pay for native shrubs and wildflowers, observation benches, trail signage and maintenance equipment.
“With that grant, nature is just going to explode here,” Muller said with a laugh.
The money will be spent through a nonprofit oversight agency, the Royal Oak Civic Foundation. The arboretum already offers nature trails, a mushroom patch, fields of wildflowers that feed butterflies and a feature that Fred Erb, with his intense interest in water quality and reducing runoff, would love — a rain garden that soaks up storms like a living sponge.
As environmental realists point out, if humankind wants to duel climate change to a draw, it will take more than new trees. Still, on a planet where an estimated 15 billion trees are cut down each year, planting new ones 100 at a clip can do nothing but good.
As John Erb put it, “I’m optimistic that if everyone gets concerned and takes action, we can solve the problem.”
Contact Bill Laytner: blaitner@freepress.com
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Royal Oak tree planting to honor lumber tycoon Fred Erb begins
