MillionTreesNYC's Quarter Millionth Tree

It was a Southern Magnolia, and it has a new home in St. Albans, a working-class neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It's the 250,000th tree -- more or less -- and the latest one to be part of the MillionTreesNYC campaign, according to an article by Ian Ritz of Epoch Times. Not every tree gets to be planted personally by actress Bette Midler and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, but this one was.

Midler is the driving force behind MillionTreesNYC, through her nonprofit, New York Restoration Project, or NYRP, which funds a number of innovative tree-related programs in this city, which is not generally known for its timber.

Since 2007, Midler’s NYRP "has managed to surpass its projected timeline by completing a quarter of its agenda in only one-fifth of the time allotted," Ritz writes.

The St. Albans Southern Magnolia is now rooted in the yard of Sharon and Thomas Stoney.

"In every area of government, we not only set ambitious goals — we work to meet them ahead of the schedule," Mayor Bloomberg said at the planting ceremony. "We still have a long way to go with the million-tree mark, but the amount of progress we’ve made says a lot about how New Yorkers have embraced this project,” said Mayor Bloomberg.

“I’m over whelmed that we are planting our 250,000th tree," Midler said. "It just proves once again that New Yorkers are the strongest, toughest, and most caring people in the world.”

NYRP is one busy group. Along with trees, they have programs to train urban kids in gardening, sustainability projects with grade school and they even have plans to open "urban farm at our Bathgate Garden – at 16,000 square feet, one of our largest community gardens – located in the Bronx," according to the group's Web site. "NYRP has begun to transform this under-utilized space into the most innovative working urban farm in New York City – capitalizing on various health and community benefits provided by current urban farming techniques."

The "Divine Miss M" and her colleagues are indeed pretty divine.

Photo courtesy of New York City Department of Parks