LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - A distant cousin of "Trees" poet Joyce Kilmer has planted the 20 millionth tree for the Global Releaf Program of American Forests, a national conservationist group.
The poet's shirttail relative, actor Val Kilmer, who has branched out into poetry himself, planted a sawtooth oak Wednesday at Ashley Pond, a Los Alamos park. Global Releaf earlier had donated 5,000 trees to residents of the city ravaged by fire in 2000.
Kilmer, whose Web site lists the relationship with poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer, read "Trees" at the event here Wednesday.
"I think that I shall never see a poem so lovely as a tree," it begins, concluding: "Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree."
Kilmer, who published a volume of poetry in 1987 called "My Edens After Burns," encouraged people not to buy "plastic" presents but to buy trees instead.
The conservation group was established in 1920, two years after Alfred Joyce Kilmer was killed duing World War I in France.
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