Arbor Day Trivia
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60 free Arbor Day trivia questions with answers. Arbor Day trivia for classrooms, garden clubs, scout troops and anyone planting a tree on the last Friday in April. The questions start with the story every kid learns: J. Sterling Morton, the treeless Nebraska prairie, and the estimated one million trees planted on April 10, 1872. From there they cover why states celebrate on different dates (Hawaii in November, Florida in January, Alaska in May), Richard Nixon’s 1972 proclamation, the Arbor Day Foundation and its Tree City USA program, Arbor Lodge, and Birdsey Northrop carrying the idea to Japan. Because Arbor Day is really about trees, the quiz also visits the world’s tree-planting days (China’s March 12, India’s Van Mahotsav, Israel’s Tu BiShvat, Australia’s National Tree Day), Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement, Johnny Appleseed, Joyce Kilmer’s poem and The Lorax, plus record trees like Methuselah, Hyperion, General Sherman and Pando, tree rings, acorns, state trees and the basics of photosynthesis. Easy questions suit an 8-year-old; the hard ones will test a forester. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia, state statutes, the Congressional Research Service fact sheet or the Arbor Day Foundation, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which US state was the first American Arbor Day held?
Nebraska
Nebraska. Settlers on its nearly treeless plains needed trees for windbreaks, fuel, lumber and shade, so the state set aside a day for planting them.
Q 02Roughly how many trees were planted in one day on the first American Arbor Day?
One million
One million, by the usual estimate. Prizes went to the counties and individuals who properly planted the most trees that day, which helped drive the total.
Q 03Which comic strip's kids mark Arbor Day in a 1976 TV special by planting a garden on their baseball field?
Peanuts
Peanuts. In It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, the new trees catch so many fly balls that Charlie Brown's team finally takes the lead, only for rain to wash the game out.
Q 04On which day is National Arbor Day observed in the United States?
Last Friday in April
Last Friday in April is also the most common state date, but each state is free to choose, and many pick a day that suits their own planting weather.
Q 05Which president proclaimed National Arbor Day on its 100th anniversary?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon. Congress asked him to proclaim the centennial Arbor Day, yet the day has never been made a federal holiday.
Q 06Before proposing Arbor Day, J. Sterling Morton championed tree planting to fellow settlers in which job?
Newspaper editor
Newspaper editor. Expelled from the University of Michigan shortly before graduating in 1854, he went west that fall and was soon editing a frontier paper.
Q 07Arbor Day founder J. Sterling Morton joined Grover Cleveland's cabinet in 1893 as Secretary of what?
Agriculture
Agriculture. Cleveland named him in 1893 after Morton had run for governor four times and lost every race.
Q 08In 1885 Arbor Day's home state fixed it on April 22, J. Sterling Morton's birthday, now better known as what?
Earth Day
Earth Day. Its organizers chose April 22 for a different reason: it fell between spring break and final exams, when college students were free to join in.
Q 09Arbor Day takes its name from the word for "tree" in which language?
Latin
Latin. Arbor is its word for tree, but a garden arbor is probably unrelated: that word began as Middle English "herber", a herb garden, and only later drifted toward the tree spelling.
Q 10Joy Morton, son of Arbor Day's founder, built a household-name company selling what?
Salt
Salt. Joy Morton took over a Chicago salt agency and gave it the family name, then in 1922 turned his Illinois estate into the Morton Arboretum.
Q 11What is the Morton family estate, now a state historical park, called?
Arbor Lodge
Arbor Lodge began in 1855 as a four-room frame house and grew to 52 rooms before the Morton family gave it to the state in 1923.
Q 12"Moon Trees", grown from seeds flown around the Moon on Apollo 14, were mostly planted to mark which occasion?
The US bicentennial
The US bicentennial. Astronaut Stuart Roosa, once a Forest Service smokejumper, carried the seeds; their bags burst open back on Earth, yet nearly all of them sprouted.
Q 13What is the name of the Arbor Day Foundation program that recognizes communities for good urban forestry?
Tree City USA
Q 21The Tree of Ténéré, the only tree for 250 miles until a truck knocked it down in 1973, stood in which desert?
Sahara
Sahara. The lone acacia in Niger was a landmark for caravans, its roots reaching water more than 100 feet down; its remains now sit in the national museum in Niamey.
Q 22China's Arbor Day, March 12, commemorates the death of which leader who championed reforestation?
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen died on March 12, 1925, and within a few years the date became Arbor Day; a later resolution asks able-bodied citizens from age 11 to plant three to five trees a year.
Q 23Which president's wife led a campaign that planted thousands of dogwoods and daffodils across Washington and fought roadside billboards?
Lady Bird Johnson
Tree City USA began in 1976, and by 2025 about half of all Americans lived in a town that met its tree-care standards, one of which is holding an Arbor Day celebration.
Q 14Washington's famous cherry trees were planted in 1912 as a gift from which city?
Tokyo
Tokyo. Its first gift of 2,000 trees arrived so riddled with insects that President Taft ordered them burned, and a healthy replacement shipment followed two years later.
Q 15Which two YouTubers launched the #TeamTrees fundraiser with the Arbor Day Foundation in 2019?
MrBeast and Mark Rober
MrBeast and Mark Rober took up a fan's dare: MrBeast had just passed 20 million subscribers, so he should plant 20 million trees, one for every dollar raised.
Q 16England's Sycamore Gap tree, illegally felled in 2023, stood in a dip beside which ancient landmark?
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall. The National Trust raised 49 new trees from the felled sycamore, one for each foot of its height, and gave them to communities around the UK to plant.
Q 17Which president wrote an Arbor Day message "To the School Children of the United States"?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt. The president who wrote to schoolchildren about the importance of trees also created the US Forest Service and set aside 150 national forests.
Q 18Hawaii holds Arbor Day early in its rainy season, in which month?
November
November. The start of the rains is the best time to plant a tree there, so Hawaii skips the mainland's spring date.
Q 19Florida sets its Arbor Day months ahead of the national one, on the third Friday of which month?
January
January. Florida follows the Southern habit of holding Arbor Day in winter, when planting weather there is best.
Q 20Which state observes Arbor Day on the third Monday in May, one of the latest dates in the country?
Alaska
Alaska. States time Arbor Day to their own planting weather, so the far North goes last, and Maine waits for May as well, using its third full week.
Lady Bird Johnson. The 1965 Highway Beautification Act was nicknamed Lady Bird's Bill, and her husband pressed it on his staff by saying he loved that woman and she wanted that act.
Q 24Which Jewish holiday, known as the New Year of the Trees, is marked in Israel by planting trees?
Tu BiShvat
Tu BiShvat began as a farmers' date: the rabbis fixed it as the shared birthday of every fruit tree, so the years could be counted for laws on when fruit could be eaten or tithed.
Q 25Van Mahotsav, a week-long tree-planting "forest festival" held each July, is celebrated in which country?
India
India. It grew out of the tree-planting weeks that botanist M. S. Randhawa began in 1947, which minister K. M. Munshi turned into a national festival in 1950.
Q 26The chestnut tree Anne Frank described in her diary, toppled by a storm in 2010, stood in which city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam. Fungus had condemned the old chestnut by 2007, but a steel frame bought it three more years, and trees raised from it now grow at schools and memorials abroad.
Q 27Which country's village of Villanueva de la Sierra claims the first modern Arbor Day, organized by its priest in 1805?
Spain
Spain. The village priest launched the planting festival in 1805, and Villanueva has gone on marching out with music and hoes to plant trees every Carnival Tuesday.
Q 28Sikmogil, an April 5 tree-planting day that was once a public holiday, is which country's Arbor Day?
South Korea
South Korea. Sikmogil dates from the 1940s, when cutting for timber and firewood had left most of the country's mountains bare.
Q 29Which Kenyan founded the tree-planting Green Belt Movement and won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize?
Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to win the prize. Her movement paid rural women a small sum for the seedlings they raised, so planting trees also brought in an income.
Q 30Which country's 2012 Arbor Day Act requires every able-bodied citizen aged 12 or over to plant a tree each year?
Philippines
The Philippines. The act revived Arbor Day as a yearly event run by local governments, which each set a date to suit their own planting season.