A treerific volunteer: the wife of Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter takes on the job of stumping the country to encourage tree planting.

A TREERIFIC VOLUNTEER

The wife of Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter takes on the job of stumping the country to encourage tree planting.

Poised on a podium facing a crowd of photographers and officials from the forest industry and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Jeanne Yeutter donned the green cap of a Forest Service volunteer and saluted.

The gesture brought down the house.

The salute was her brainchild - not the creation of coaches from the USDA's public relations department. This genius for crowd pleasing augers well for the success of Jeanne Yeutter, wife of Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter, as honorary head of the Forest Service's new "TREEmendous America" campaign.

Last October 12, under the glass dome that covers the patio at the USDA's executive administration building, Jeanne Yeutter was inducted into the ranks of volunteers for the USDA's Forest Service. Her job: to serve as an official speaker at treeplanting ceremonies, encouraging reforestation efforts across the United States.

"Clayton and I both grew up in Nebraska," she confided during the induction ceremony," and in Nebraska planting trees is the logical thing to do." Over the years, the Yeutters have commemorated special family occasions such as anniversaries, birthdays, and weddings by planting trees in various places.

Presented with a cap sporting a Forest Service volunteer's patch, a windbreaker, name tag, and belt buckle, Yeutter signed up as the agency's 70,001st volunteer. "That's my official number," she noted with a laugh during a subsequent interview with AMERICAN FORESTS.

The interview took place after her return from her first public appearance - a speech at AFA's awards luncheon during the Fourth Urban Forestry Conference, making her debut a show of support for AFA's Global ReLeaf [R] initiative. "We have to start thinking about global warming now," she remarked upon her return from the St. Louis Conference. "We can't wait until it's a huge problem."

In addition to officiating at treeplanting ceremonies, she plans to attend selected forestry conferences and meetings around the country to increase her knowledge and effectiveness as a tree booster. She notes, "I met some really dedicated people in St. Louis, and they taught me a lot about trees."

Crowned by silvery gray hair, a youthful version of the natural look popularized by the First Lady, Jeanne Yeutter is heading up a campaign that Secretary Yeutter describes as the "beginning shot" in the Bush administration's reforestation campaign.

Actually, President Bush fired the first salvo a month before the inauguration of the Forest Service's TREEmendous America campaign. During a September trip to South Dakota, the President planted several trees and urged all citizens to help reforest America - starting in their own backyards.

Grassroots efforts are likewise the focus of the TREEmendous America campaign. Planting trees in urban America is the special target of the Forest Service's initiative, and Jeanne Yeutter considers schoolchildren her most important audience.

"We wanted a slogan that children can identify with," says this civic-minded mother of four. (Her resume contains a long list of charity and community activities.) But she hopes the TREEmendous America slogan will catch on with the general population as well with children. "And we wanted it to be patriotic and to express my interest in trees."

Jeanne Yeutter was born in Illinois and grew up in Nebraska. "When I was a child, we celebrated Arbor Day every year in school by planting seedlings," she says. A high school English and home economics teacher, Jeanne Vierk Yeutter remembers that after her marriage she frequently commented on the windbreak that her husband's father planted on the family farm to prevent snow from drifting as it swept across the wide open expanses of Nebraska.

"We would pass the windbreak," she recalls, "and say, 'Wasn't that good foresight on his part?'"

She adds, "They were large trees by the time I came into the family."

Although Secretary Yeutter notes that his staff cautioned him that he is to remain "second banana" to his wife in the TREEmendous America campaign, he is clearly as committed as she is to reforestation.

One of his earliest recollections is a memory of trying to save the trees around his family's homestead during the dry years of the '30s. "I can remember watering them by hand with buckets," he says. "At the time, we didn't have much in the way of water supplies, even for family consumption."

He recalls that sometime in the 1940s, "My dad planted the very large windbreak that extends for about a quarter of a mile from our house down to the drive."

A few years ago, the Yeutters added more windbreaks, and more recently they have lived in various homes that they have landscaped with trees. At one, they put in a dozen oaks along the street. "Clayton planted each one of those by hand," recalls Jeanne Yeutter.

"But the first tree that we planted as a commemoration was for one of our anniversaries," she says. "Then we planted a tree for the birth of each of our four children. And for the children's birthdays." At their present home in McLean, Virginia, they selected a Yoshino cherry tree, famed for its white (to pink) blossoms, to honor their daughter's wedding. Says Jeanne Yeutter, "Trees make a wonderful living legacy."

One stands out above all the others. "The tree that is most vivid in my mind is a Colorado blue spruce that we planted for our 25th wedding anniversary," she says. "We went to a nursery and bought a perfect specimen. That means one that when you walk all the way around it, it's perfect on all sides. We used to decorate it for Christmas, but now it's way too big. It's absolutely gorgeous - the pivotal point in the landscaping of our yard."

What comes across to audiences is Jeanne Yeutter's sincere love for trees. In fact, what comes across - during speeches and in person - is just plain salt-of-the-earth sincerity. Observing that she will do well in her campaign, one listener remarked, "She is so real."

Jeanne Yeutter is the kind of nice person who apologizes for being three minutes late to an appointment - and you can tell that she means it.

It's the same when she talks about the benefits of trees. "In cities they provide shade. In the countryside, wind protection. All of us have watched birds build nests in trees or have thrown snowballs at tree trunks. Or watched their leaves fall. Or sat under them on a hot summer day. Trees provide homes for wildlife and raw materials for our homes and paper. And trees will be the answer for combating pollution."

Secretary Yeutter exudes the same genuine enthusiasm. Joining the interview, he greets his wife with an apparently unselfconscious kiss. Then he rhapsodizes about the aesthetic benefits of trees.

"Many of us who have traveled a lot and visited cities around the world know what an enormous difference trees make to one's impression of a city," he says. "The trees of Paris are magnificent. Some people might appreciate Paris for other reasons, and there are ample reasons to enjoy the city unrelated to its beauty, but to me what makes Paris incredibly beautiful are its trees."

He adds that the same applies to London, except there it is the parks that are so appealing. The Yeutters visited the city shortly after a windstorm destroyed many specimens in Hyde Park that were several feet in diameter.

"I'm a great fan of trees just for the beauty they afford to this world," he adds. "In New York City, look what a difference even a few trees make. There aren't many, except in Central Park and the little parks scattered throughout Manhattan." He pauses and then adds with a laugh, "When you look out of the window of a highrise in New York and you can see a tree, it makes your day."

The aesthetic value of trees may be what first attracted the Yeutters, but now they believe that planting trees is a matter of human survival.

"It's very difficult to know at this point in time just how much of a potential threat global warming is or will become over the next several decades," says Secretary Yeutter. "But it appears to me that this is an issue of such paramount importance to people who inhabit the earth that preventive medicine is in order.

"The potential adverse impact of global warming is of such great magnitude that we ought not to take unnecessary chances. If we can implement programs that would in any way impact positively on that threat, we ought to do it. It seems to be an increasing motivation for a major effort at reforestation throughout the world.

"We know trees will make an enormous contribution and perhaps a greater contribution than anything else that might be done. There are other things we can do in terms of preventing the underlying problem - pollution - but until or unless nations are prepared to make some of the hard policy decisions that are necessary to reduce pollution levels, we have little choice but to find ways to combat pollution, and trees fulfill that extremely important role."

Asked about tree planting and the USDA's Conservation Reserve program, the Secretary agrees that the question of the removal of marginal lands from agricultural production has a tree-planting dimension. "At this point most of the Conservation Reserve contracts have been devoted to the production of grasses, and a relatively small percentage - 5 to 10 percent if I recall correctly - has gone into more permanent conversion in the form of trees."

Secretary Yeutter adds, "That raises the question of whether we should extend those Conservation Reserve contracts and provide a stimulus for additional tree planting or renegotiate some of them for that purpose or just simply extend the amount of acreage that is being pulled out of production."

Finally, the Secretary notes, "Global warming would be one of the primary motivations for augmenting this program or perhaps designing some additional programs. Some of that might come through in the President's overall reforestation effort, as well as in the context of farm legislation."

But the Secretary cautions, as he has in the past, that cost is a major consideration.

At the conclusion of the hour-long interview, Jeanne Yeutter reminds her husband that she is counting on him for a ride home. She explains that sometimes they get their signals crossed. There's no doubt about it. Jeanne Yeutter is real.

During the induction ceremony in October, Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson remarked as he presented her with the volunteer's cap and other paraphernalia (and an identical outfit for Secretary Yeutter because many of the agency's volunteers are husband-and-wife teams), "Our success in planting trees for the future," said Robertson, "depends on getting the American people involved."

If anyone can do that, Jeanne Yeutter can. She believes that planting trees is more than a matter of aesthetics; it's now a matter of human survival. "We used to think in terms of tree planting as being a nice thing to do," she says. "Now we think of it as a necessity."

PHOTO : Jeanne Yeutter knows how to please audiences.

PHOTO : Jeanne Yeutter with the cherry tree the Yeutters planted at their home near Washington in honor of their daughter's wedding.

PHOTO : Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter (left) joined his wife as she signed a volunteer's agreement provided by Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson.