Arbor Day was blustery enough to make one appreciate the wind-break benefits of mature foliage.

During a tree-planting Wednesday at Sonoji Sakai Intermediate School, the wind whipped around the southwest corner of the building, scourging the small knot of Kelly Beemer’s fifth-grade students into shivers.

The group were gathered behind the school to plant a Prairie Fire crabapple tree with Mayor Darlene Kardonowy. One by one, the students hopped up on a rock to share remarks on the day.

“We are proud to plant this tree at Sakai because we know it will be there for a long time,” Yvonne Eber read.

The tree seemed a slender reed to stand up to the wind, but Ann Lovejoy from sponsoring nursery Bainbridge Gardens had brought reinforcement for the stripling – a nutrient mat of human hair and Mychorrhizae fungii spores to place beneath the roots.

“This is going to be the best-nourished tree on the property,” Lovejoy said.

As an especially wild gust whipped through, student Neil Bjorklund clutched a large poster that threatened to sail away – his winning entry in a statewide Arbor Day contest.

Bjorklund’s painting of a mature tree ringed by animation-like images of an acorn sprouting was inscribed with the contest theme: “Trees are Terrific from Acorn to Oak.”

“My parents said I would win,” Bjorklund said, “but I was never sure, because I hadn’t seen anyone else’s in the class. I did it in one day. I came home and worked on it until seven or eight.”

Bjorklund will celebrate with an ice cream party for his classmates later this month, and all the student posters will be on display at Bainbridge Gardens.

According to the National Arbor Day Poster Contest website, over 65,000 fifth-grade classrooms across America participated in the contest this year.

Beemer, an island native who has returned to Bainbridge to teach, signed her class up to participate in the contest.

“I like to do anything that involves the students with the community,” she said.

Bjorklund’s poster goes on to the national contest, with the winner to be announced April 25.

First place includes a $1,000 savings bond and an all-expenses-paid trip to Nebraska City, Neb.

The destination might seem an odd reward, unless one knows that Arbor Day was founded in Nebraska Territory in 1872 by J. Sterling Morton. Editor of the territory’s first newspaper, Morton used his forum to such effect that more than one million trees were planted for the first celebration. By 1880, the celebration had taken root nationwide.

Morton’s belief that the country’s forests should be treated as a sustainable resource, with liberal replanting – viewed by some of his contemporaries as eccentric – seems prescient today.

“Arbor Day is important to us because it’s a day of reminding that trees and environment is important for life,” Eber told her classmates.

First-year teacher Beemer notes that the tree will always mark, for her, the start of her teaching career on the island where she was born.

“I was thinking that it would be fabulous to plant a tree my first year of teaching, specifically my first year of Sakai,” Beemer said, “because I can watch it grow and share it with my classes year after year.”