Pediatric Neurologist’s Family Hosts Tree Planting Event

By Dirk Hoffman

The fifth annual Farooq Family Tree Planting Event was held April 20 at the Clarence Nature Preserve on Thompson Road in Clarence, where family, friends and members of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences community gathered to plant 500 tree seedlings.

“I have always loved trees. I’ve always had a vision that I would plant trees and repopulate areas with fallen trees in the region,” Farooq said.

In 2019, his wife, Zeb, started a book club for their daughter, Sabrina, and her friends.

“It was originally going to be five or six kids, but it grew to about 25,” Farooq said. “It was just a book club, trying to teach kids to be good to each other — to human beings and to nature.”

The book club spurred the idea to have each child perform a community project — and Sabrina chose tree planting.

About 30 seedlings were ordered through the Erie County Soil and Conservation District and the plantings were scheduled for Earth Day weekend in April 2020, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“We wound up planting all 30 of those trees because we had made arrangements with the town of Amherst to plant them in Bassett Park,” Farooq said. “Everybody else had really been looking forward to it and were really disappointed, so we decided we were going to grow the program the next year.”

The second year saw 150 trees planted in Saratoga Park in Amherst and the third year saw 320 trees planted at Billy Wilson Park in Amherst.

“Last year, we did it in a different section of the Clarence Nature Preserve and planted 500 trees, so that was our 1,000^th tree at the end of that event,” Farooq said.

Some of the volunteers are the families from the initial book club, which Farooq noted is great fun — because “we get to see the trees growing and we get to see the kids growing.”

“We have also involved the PTA from Sabrina’s elementary school, so some of the kids from there come,” he said. “I always invite the residents and medical students. And some of my colleagues from the Department of Neurology also come to help.”

Many different species of tree seedlings were planted Saturday — including white spruce, white pine swamp white oak, river birch, sycamore, black walnut, black cherry, red maple, red oak and tulip poplar trees.

“We also have one section where we are planting trees that are good for birds, bees and butterflies — so the flowering type of shrubs or ones that produce fruit, like raspberry or elderberry bushes. There are also dogwoods and serviceberry trees,” Farooq said. “There is quite a bit of variety — so based on which ones will thrive in which conditions — we are clustering them in different sections.”

Erie County Soil & Conservation holds a bulk sale of seedlings each year and Farooq said he studies each type of tree on its list in detail before ordering.

“I like to pick the ones that give off nuts, seeds and berries — things that the wildlife can thrive off of. It is kind of multipurpose thing that we like to do.”

Farooq meets with various town officials to coordinate the plantings.

He noted for the first few years of plantings, the tree survival rate was not the best — around 50 percent — due to various conditions.

“But if you look at the area we planted last year, it’s about 90 percent,” Farooq said. “I think the soil is good, but the other thing is the town of Clarence has a vision similar to ours — replanting the tree population.”

Town officials made efforts such as putting tubes around the seedlings in the fall to protect them from the deer, he noted.

“For the pines, there is research that suggests if you just cover the top, they survive better,” Farooq said. “So, they took index cards and stapled them to the tops, so the deer could not eat them. And the bottom is more bitter, so they don’t eat it. They survived really nicely with that simple technique.”

“We plan to continue this project in years to come and welcome everyone from the Jacobs School community at Earth Day/Arbor Day weekend 2025.”