Lending a green thumb to the dollar trees

For the sake of photosynthesizing organisms everywhere, I don't do much gardening. But I'm a bit of a cheapskate deal-hound and I recently came across something too good to pass up: $1 trees.

See, whenever you make a $10 donation to the National Arbor Day Foundation, they send you 10 trees. Sounds too good to be true? I thought so too, so I decided to try it out.

Sure enough, a few weeks after typing in my credit card number, I received a carefully packaged bundle of 6- to 12-inch twigs ranging from sugar maple and red oak to river birch and white pine. Not exactly the forest I was expecting to take over the mailroom, but still, all you really need to get a mini-thicket going in your backyard. Plus, the firs smelled absolutely delicious.

While you can pick and choose exactly what trees you want, you can also leave it up to the organization to send you a mix of species appropriate for your area. They also make sure to send the bundle during tree-planting season and have lots of handy materials, like tree and planting guides, to help you create the perfect landscape.

For a few moments after receiving my gift for support, I seriously considered a suggestion to become the Natalie Appleseed of Manhattan, just planting my carbon-eating goodies on the carefully manicured medians of Park Avenue. But then I realized I could get arrested for that.

So instead, they've found a home in the garden behind my apartment building, where they're being taken care of by a neighbor with a much greener thumb than me. I figure giving the trees a fighting chance was the least I could do for the environment. I'll keep you updated on how they fare.