Eddie Bauer leads Memorial Groves effort. (News From the World of Trees).

The first partnership to plant trees under AMERICAN FORESTS' broad-based Memorial Trees campaign was launched January 31, when officials in New York and Washington, DC, announced plans to plant trees for September 11 victims in a program sponsored by retailer Eddie Bauer.

The trees--one for each person killed in New York City; Arlington County, Virginia; and Somerset County, Pennsylvania-will be planted this year as part of Eddie Bauer's Memorial Tree Groves campaign. Individuals are invited to make tax-deductible contributions of $1 or more at any of 500-plus Eddie Bauer stores, online at www.eddiebauer.com, or through its catalogue services. The speciality retailer has pledged to raise $500,000 during the campaign.

The groves as a whole will be a living testament to the police, firefighters, emergency workers, and citizens who risked their Jives to aid their fellow citizens. In announcing the program in Washington, AMERICAN FORESTS' executive director, Deborah Gangloff, praised the groves as representing bravery, life, and "the hope that we will leave our children and their grandchildren a more peaceful world."

In a moving tribute to her husband, Lt. Col. Dennis Johnson, who died at the Pentagon, Joyce Johnson spoke of their shared love of jogging in the woods and the significance the memorial would have to her personally. "God bless you all for caring so much," she said. DC Mayor Anthony Williams and former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, a member Of AMERICAN FORESTS' Board, presented Johnson with a Gilbert Stuart Dogwood from AMERICAN FORESTS' Historic Tree Nursery.

In New York, inclement weather cancelled plans for a NYPD motorcycle motorcade to bring four large evergreens down Hudson River Park's bike path to Hudson River Park Pier 26. The trees were present, though, at the press conference held just five blocks from where the World Trade Center stood. James Ortenzio and Robert Balachandran, chairman of the board and president, respectively, of local partner Hudson River Park Trust joined Joel Holtrop, deputy chief of state and private forestry for the U.S. Forest Service; Stacy Cohen, general manager of a New York City Eddie Bauer store, and AMERICAN FORESTS senior vice president Rick Crouse for the event.

Present at the Washington unveiling were: Mayor Anthony Williams; Jim Connaughton, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality; Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and the environment; Arlington County Board Chair Chris Zimmerman; Glickman; Gangloff, Sheila Hogan, executive director of the Casey Trees Endowment Fund; and Darin George, manager of a Washington, DC, Eddie Bauer store.

Memorial groves totaling 2,893 trees will be planted in New York to memorialize the World Trade Center victims. In Arlington County, Virginia, 184 trees will be planted to remember Pentagon victims. Another 40-tree grove will he planted in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in memory of those who died in the plane crash there.

An additional memorial grove will he planted in Washington, DC, because of its proximity to the Pentagon and as a testiment to the national scope of the September 11 tragedy.