Arnoldia Archive

[{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"<i>Arnoldia</i> Reimagined","article_sequence":1,"start_page":2,"end_page":5,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25736","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25e856a.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Damery, Jonathan","article_content":"This issue of Arnoldia is devoted primarily to the world of nineteenthcentury horticulture and botany, the milieu that shaped the Arnold Arboretum upon its founding in 1872. Yet, in some sense, the issue also represents the culmination of a twentieth-century vision for the magazine itself. Next year, as part of the Arnold Arboretum's sesquicentennial celebration, Arnoldia will relaunch with a structure and approach that is dynamic and distinctly modern. The magazine will still appear in print every quarter and serve as a definitive source for novel and interdisciplinary research on trees, shrubs, and landscapes. Yet, an updated format will allow for new points of access\u2014new kinds of content. In the context of modern publishing, the production of a magazine like Gardener's Monthly, which began in Philadelphia in 1859, seems almost inconceivable. Its editor, Thomas Meehan, would have exchanged feedback with authors on handwritten manuscripts. That much can be expected. More miraculous was the printing. The final manuscript would have been typeset by hand, each page composed of thousands of individual lead characters. Once a page was complete, a proofreader would review a test copy, marking errors as an assistant read the original manuscript aloud. According to a detailed account of the process for producing Harper's Magazine, outlined in 1865, the initial proofs were often rife with errors. After all, the compositor prepared everything backward, in the inverse of the printed page. After corrections and additional proofing, the process would continue to the individuals responsible for operating the presses, folding machines, and so on\u2014an elaborate, labor-intensive coordination of both mechanical and human power.1 The Arnold Arboretum's first foray into magazine publishing was a monthly titled Garden and Forest. It debuted in 1888, weeks after Gardener's Monthly ended. Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arboretum, oversaw the magazine for its ten-year run, but the editorial offices were in New York, a few blocks from the printer: Harpers and Brothers. (Harper's Magazine was produced in the same building.) Arnoldia was born as The Bulletin of Popular Information in 1911, and for the next fifty-nine years, the periodical was typeset by hand, using the same basic method employed for Gardener's Monthly. The final person to perform the tedium of creating Arnoldia word by word, line by line was Howard Allgaier, the printer for the Harvard University Botanical Museum. Allgaier began producing the publication in 1933, at the behest of Oakes Ames, the supervisor of the Arnold Arboretum. Ames, a bibliophile, was known to say that \"a botanist's research should be a jewel worthy of a proper setting.\"2 Ames also widened the purview of the Bulletin. For its first two decades, the periodical had focused almost entirely on plants growing at the Arnold Arboretum, but in 1931, the format shifted to standalone, topical articles. Ames wrote several of these, including one on the botanical drawings of John Singer Sargent. Arnoldia Reimagined Jonathan Damery Facing page: In the early 1930s, when Arnoldia was still known as The Bulletin of Popular Information, an interdisciplinary spirit emerged that continues to inspire the magazine today. Blanche Ames provided its first contemporary illustrations. ARCHIVES OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM His wife, Blanche Ames, began supplying botanical artwork of her own. The following year, their son coauthored an article about searching for beach plums (Prunus maritima) from an airplane. Authors would follow their wide-ranging lead. The name of the publication changed to Arnoldia in 1941, but otherwise, the structure and general approach remained the same. In 1970, Arnoldia relaunched under the production of a new printer, the Harvard University Printing Office. At least through the end of the decade, Arnoldia was produced on \"hot type\" machines, which meant that the words were input on a keyboard and cast from lead on the spot.3 This mechanical process had emerged almost a century before, but perhaps owing to the relatively simple one-article format of Arnoldia, it had remained feasible for Allgaier to continue setting the type by hand. The change in printers coincided with a dramatic reimagining of Arnoldia\u2014a project overseen by Stephanne Sutton, who took over the publication upon the retirement of Donald Wyman, the editor for twenty-nine years.4 The 1970 redesign was more than a visual makeover; it also brought new storytelling approaches. The 1960s is often considered an era of innovation in magazine publishing. Large general-interest magazines experienced circulation declines, attributed to the rise of television. (For instance, Life, which once claimed to reach the hands of one in four American adults, ceased publication in 1972.) At the same time, special-interest magazines began to proliferate.5 The redesign of In 1970, Arnoldia was reimagined as a special-interest magazine with multiple features per issue. The current logotype of Arnoldia debuted at the end of 1982. ARCHIVES OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM Arnoldia 5 Arnoldia firmly repositioned the magazine within this new publishing context. While Arnoldia had long hosted a diverse mix of subjects, authored mainly by horticultural professionals, it would thereafter contain multiple articles per issue and showcase a glossy image on the cover. Over the next five decades, Arnoldia went through several visual updates. Among those milestones: the current logotype and dimensions debuted in 1982, and the first color photographs appeared on the interior pages in 2001. Behind the scenes, the modes of production changed dramatically, but our graphic designer, Andrew Winther, skillfully maintained the visual continuity. He began working on the magazine in 1986, while in the art department at the Office of the University Publisher. At that point, the office used offset lithography, and the printing plates were created from photographic negatives of the text and images. By the early 1990s, Winther began designing the layouts on a computer, and ultimately, every aspect of prepress production has gone digital as well. Despite these changes, the basic architecture introduced in 1970 has endured, with each issue composed primarily of several long-form features. In 2022, when the redesigned Arnoldia launches, the feature articles that have long defined Arnoldia will remain central to each issue. But in the opening pages, we will provide a new, distinctive space for shorter narratives that capture behind-thescenes experiences of working with plants in the twenty-first century. We're also adding space for letters, to foster a public dialogue with you, our readers. In the back, we're creating a department composed of essays and opinions. We'll also incorporate contemporary artwork throughout the magazine, building on the legacy established by Blanche Ames ninety years ago. With the first issue of Garden and Forest, published on February 29, 1888, Sargent and the other creators described their commitment to sharing \"noteworthy discoveries\" in the realm of science and horticultural practice. They promised that the magazine would \"place scientific information clearly and simply before the public, and make available for the instruction of all persons interested in garden plants the conclusions reached by the most trustworthy investigators.\" Articles would cover landscape gardening, forest conservation, entomology, and more. The authors would deal both in history and news. Here, looking into 2022, we're doubling down on these longstanding commitments. Expect the first issue to arrive in March 2022. Notes 1 Guernsey, A. H. 1865, December. Making the magazine. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 32(187): 1-31. 2 Allgaier, H. J. 1984. The printing shop. Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, 30(1): 48-50. 3 Ashton, P. S. 1980. The director's report: The Arnold Arboretum during the fiscal year ended June 30, 1980. Arnoldia, 40(6): 238-293. 4 Howard, R. A. 1970. The director's report: The Arnold Arboretum during the fiscal year ended June 30, 1970. Arnoldia, 30(6), 201-250. 5 Abrahamson, D. and Polsgrove, C. 2009. The right niche: Consumer magazines and advertisers. In D. P. Nord, J. S. Rubin, & M. Schudson (Eds.), A history of the book in America: Volume 5: The enduring book, print culture in postwar America (pp. 107-118). University of North Carolina Press. Jonathan Damery is the editor of Arnoldia."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"The Trees of the Silent Dell","article_sequence":2,"start_page":6,"end_page":7,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25737","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25e896d.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Barnett, David","article_content":"A cemetery, by nature, is a place where the past is always present. On September 1, 2021, I retired from Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the day I started employment there. I had arrived in 1993 as the director of horticulture, having a background in public garden management and degrees in horticulture and ecology. At first, I only noticed the natural landscape and the spectacular collection of trees. Mount Auburn, after all, occupies a unique space in the history of American landscape design: It served as inspiration for other pastoral cemeteries in the mid-nineteenth century and, subsequently, for urban green spaces like Central Park and the Emerald Necklace. I didn't initially focus on the monuments and the other \"cemetery\" aspects of Mount Auburn. About two years after my arrival, I gave a tour of Mount Auburn to Richard Harris, my major professor from graduate school at the University of California, Davis, who had authored a textbook on arboriculture. We stopped in Consecration Dell, a natural amphitheater in the center of the cemetery, where paths on the shaded slopes overlook a small pond. I explained that we had just initiated a project to restore this area to the woodland habitat that existed when the cemetery was founded in 1831. In fact, Mount Auburn's first president, Joseph Story, delivered his consecration address in this very location, noting the importance of natural beauty when mourning loved ones. \"What spot,\" he asked, \"can be more appropriate than this, for such a purpose.\" I described how the restoration would require a phased approach to remove all exotic plants, especially invasive species such as Norway maple (Acer platanoides), and replace them entirely with native species of trees, shrubs, and woodland groundcovers. I felt proud to describe to my mentor how the restoration plan would allow me to put into practice ecological management concepts that I had studied in graduate school. We happened to be standing next to a spectacular Japanese stewartia (Stewartia pseudocamellia) planted in 1939. I noted that we would not remove the stewartia just because it was an introduced species, but that, when the stewartia eventually died, we would replace it with a native. I also pointed out that the stewartia had a memorial plaque on it with the name and birth and death dates of a woman who had recently passed away. As we talked, a woman who had been walking nearby came up to introduce herself. She was the daughter of the woman memorialized on the tree plaque. She told me that the family had chosen to purchase the plaque because Consecration Dell was one of her mother's favorite spots. The woman said she visited frequently to think about her mother and thanked me for making Mount Auburn\u2014and Consecration Dell itself\u2014such a beautiful, uplifting, and inspirational place. From that day forward, my relationship with the landscape changed. Talking to the woman beneath the stewartia, I came to understand the significance of Mount Auburn as a cemetery and the importance of serving our \"clients\" with compassion and sensitivity. The entire staff understands this\u2014it is embedded in our culture. My colleagues have all had interactions with visiting family members similar to the one I experienced that day. These encounters motivate us to continue achieving the high standards of maintenance of the grounds\u2014from the trees and gardens to the monuments and other built structures\u2014in order to ensure that Mount Auburn Cemetery remains the beautiful and inspirational place that Joseph Story and the rest of our founders envisioned in 1831. The successful restoration of the native woodland in Consecration Dell over the twenty-five years since that memorable conversation has been one of the highlights of my career. In place The Trees of the Silent Dell David Barnett Consecration Dell represents a nearly two-hundred-year-old vision for the naturalistic landscape at Mount Auburn Cemetery. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR; MAP FROM HARVARD MAP COLLECTION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY of the Norway maples and other invasive species that we removed, hundreds of native trees and shrubs and thousands of ferns and woodland groundcovers now provide a valuable habitat for the birds, salamanders, and other wildlife residents of Mount Auburn. And yes, the magnificent stewartia remains as well. I like to think that the landscape looks just like \"the hill and the valley, the still, silent dell, and the deep forest\" that Joseph Story described so long ago. David Barnett was appointed president and CEO of Mount Auburn Cemetery in 2008. He retired from that position in 2021 confident that the course has been charted for a bright and successful future as an active cemetery, a historically significant cultural landscape, and a model of environmental stewardship."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"The Nauvoo Rose on Temple Square","article_sequence":3,"start_page":8,"end_page":9,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25738","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160a325.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Henrichsen, Esther Truitt","article_content":"\"She brought it from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake City in a teapot,\" my boss, Peter Lassig, told me. It was the spring of 1980, and we were standing in a quiet corner of Temple Square, in the heart of Salt Lake City. Before us, a small, unglamorous rose was beginning to produce its small, deep-red flowers. Peter had asked me to transplant it to a historic home garden, two blocks away. The rose was growing within a collection of special plants protected by the warmth and shade of a fifteen-foot wall made of adobe and sandstone that surrounds the square. Peter explained that the rose came from a woman named Elizabeth Hubble. \"She walked the thirteen hundred miles from Nauvoo,\" he said, \"but her rose rode in the wagon and was most likely the only luxury she allowed herself.\" Elizabeth was one of seventy thousand Latter-day Saints who made the trek across the plains along the Mormon Trail from 1847 to 1869 before the railroad connected the West to the rest of the continent. Elizabeth was among those who were expelled from their homes in Nauvoo, a city they had built. She would have had little time to dig the plant from her garden, and she made a real commitment to keep it alive for the rest of her journey. She would have watered it from the Platte River in Nebraska, the Sweetwater River in Wyoming, and Emigration Creek as she traveled down into the Salt Lake Valley. As Peter told me about the storied rose that late spring afternoon, we were standing across from the south door of the Assembly Hall, a beautiful, Victorian Gothic building, completed in 1882, that was about to go through an extensive renovation\u2014the reason it was necessary to move the rose. Temple Square is the most visited site in Utah, which is impressive for a state boasting five national parks. Its ten acres are dominated by the large, domed Tabernacle and the Salt Lake Temple, divided by the Center Mall. With a cathedral of fabulous American and European elms (Ulmus americana and U. laevis) overhead, Temple Square has served as one of the great urban spaces in the United States for well over a hundred years. The perimeter wall was built as fortification when Salt Lake City was still wilderness and now provides a peaceful space amid the noise of growing urbanity. The next morning, I took a shovel and a pot to dig the little Nauvoo rose, becoming one more in a line of gardeners who had cared for the plant and its provenance since Elizabeth's family had given it to Temple Square in the 1880s. Peter had been introduced to the rose in 1953, when he was fifteen, by his boss Irvin Nelson. In turn, Irvin had been charged with caring for it by his predecessor, who had gardened at Temple Square since the late 1800s. This location was the second placement for the rose on Temple Square. I was taking it to its first new home in nearly a hundred years. Towering over the rose were three Japanese tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) that were the most tree-like peonies I have ever seen. They had been a gift in the 1930s from Brown Floral, a family-run nursery that is still part of the horticultural fabric of Salt Lake City. Each plant had at least thirty mauve blooms, and they were dug and moved to the garden south of the Temple. Several other plant treasures in this space would also be transplanted. In the spirit of its century of being a repository of gift plants, this garden between the Assembly Hall and the Temple Square wall was where, six years later, I chose to plant the seven-son flower (Heptacodium miconioides). This plant was sent to subscribers of Arnoldia when the story of this newly introduced species was published in the Fall 1986 issue. That Heptacodium grew into a glorious tree that every few years bloomed at the same moment as the monarch butterfly migration from north to south. You could stroll past the tree and be amazed as hundreds of monarchs were startled into the air. It was cut down a few years ago by a gardener who had no knowledge of its history The Nauvoo Rose on Temple Square Esther Truitt Henrichsen HENRICHSEN, E. T. 2021. THE NAUVOO ROSE ON TEMPLE SQUARE. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 8-9 and was cavalier about not wanting to learn from those who had come before. In the process of digging the rose that morning in May 1980, I was horrified when it split in two. But, this became an opportunity. I carried the little plants across the two blocks to the Beehive House, where I was the summer gardener and weed-puller. I planted them on either side of a path that led to a gate in the cobblestone wall. Brigham Young had built the wall in the 1850s around his two side-by-side homes, the Beehive House and the Lion House. The roses flourished there for two decades, until the cobblestone wall suddenly collapsed, killing one of the pair. The other was moved to another part of the Beehive House garden while the wall was being rebuilt and was never moved back. I was concerned for the future of the Nauvoo rose because it was difficult to find anyone in the next generation who was interested, but I eventually took three cuttings and have grown them in my home garden for the past decade. By the time this map of Salt Lake City was published in 1870, the Nauvoo rose had been growing in the community for two decades. The rose can now be found in the gardens of the historic Beehive House, mapped with a number 5. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR; MAP FROM LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION I once keyed out the Nauvoo rose and believe it is a Rosa chinensis 'Minima', a variety (formerly known as Rosa indica minima) introduced into cultivation in the early 1800s. It grows about two feet high and two feet wide, and it blooms from spring to fall. In the intense high-desert sunlight of Utah, it prefers growing in a bit of shade. Compared to other roses, the Nauvoo rose may not seem very glamorous. Elizabeth, however, had the imagination to envision her little plant blooming in her new home in the Great Basin. Her descendants who donated the rose and the line of gardeners who cared for it since have all been connected by the love, care, and determination required to let it grow. Esther Truitt Henrichsen is the garden designer at Thanksgiving Point Institute in Lehi, Utah. Previously, after completing a master's in landscape history, she worked for many years as a landscape designer at Temple Square."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Five Generations of Russell's Garden Center","article_sequence":4,"start_page":10,"end_page":12,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25739","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160a728.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Russell-Skehan, Elizabeth","article_content":"I felt the presence of the large video camera and mic over my right shoulder as I opened the photo album of Russell's Garden Center from the 1980s. \"There's the four of us,\" I said with a smile to my husband, Tim, who sat next to me. I was referring to a photograph of us with my mom and dad, wearing our teal Russell's shirts and sitting in front of our new sign on Route 20. The highway connects Wayland with Boston, about sixteen miles to the east. Our daughter Genevieve, the movie director, encouraged me to continue. \"Pretend there's no camera or mic here, and just tell me about the five generations of Russell's.\" I began my story, explaining how the business was established in 1876. \"My great-grandfather Samuel Lewis Russell was a butcher,\" I said, \"and his original store was called Russell's Provisions.\" He lived at the farm where Russell's is today, but his store was located about half a mile away, at the intersection of Route 20 and Pelham Island Road, in Wayland Center. It stood near a grocery store called the Collins Market, along with the library, post office, and several churches. Everything was within walking distance. \"There were no cars in 1876, for convenience,\" I said. Tim held up a picture of the Russell's Provisions storefront for the camera to capture. We were filming a documentary about our family business, aiming to tell the story of how our 144-year-operation\u2014one of the oldest garden centers in the country\u2014tackled the challenges of the pandemic by changing our business dramatically. For us, the family history was a central motivation for maintaining the garden center through the initial closures in March 2020, when we experienced more than a million dollars in losses. We worried that we might have to close the business altogether. Genevieve asked, \"Was your grandfather a butcher too?\" \"Not at all\" I replied. I explained how my grandfather, Lewis Samuel Russell, was a farmer. Like his father, he grew vegetables and cut flowers on the family farm, and he also raised chickens and sold the eggs. In 1920, he opened Russell's Market in the space where we now sell garden tools\u2014right next to his house. At that point, cars were becoming more common, which meant that my grandfather could close the original location in town. It wasn't just my grandfather running the market, I explained. \"My Grammy, Ruth Russell, would add up customers' purchases on a little pad of paper and collect cash and make change out of her apron pocket.\" Genevieve asked me to pause for a moment and instructed the cameraman to zoom in on my face. She then asked, \"What was it like growing up on a farm?\" I described how I would visit my grandparents almost every day. I would play in the fields with my sisters and cousins, while my grandfather and great uncle worked nearby planting, weeding, and picking crops. At that point, my parents were involved with the business, so we would often stop to see them in the office, before heading to Grammy's yellow house, which still stands along Route 20. She'd give us fresh bread and sweets that she'd cooked on the old black coal stove. In the evenings, when my grandparents babysat for us, we'd watch Lawrence Welk and Carol Burnett on the television as they counted the cash from the day at their kitchen table. Family and business were inseparable. \"They'd hide the cash in an oatmeal box in the cupboard,\" I said. \"Once it was full, my grandma would put it in her bra and ride the bus to deposit it in the bank.\" Tim flipped the page of an album from 1965 to reveal a picture of my dad, Lewis Samuel Russell Jr., watering rows of flowers growing in our greenhouses. The cameraman zoomed in with his lens. My dad joined the business after he returned from the Korean War. By then, a significant part of the business revolved around wholesaling Five Generations of Russell's Garden Center Elizabeth Russell-Skehan Facing page: Russell's Garden Center has been a family-owned fixture in Wayland, Massachusetts, for five generations. PHOTOS COURTESY THE AUTHOR; USGS MAP FROM HARVARD UNIVERSITY, HARVARD MAP COLLECTION RUSSELL-SKEHAN, E. 2021. FIVE GENERATIONS OF RUSSELL'S GARDEN CENTER. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 10-12 cut flowers to florists in the Boston area. My mom, Charlotte, worked as a bookkeeper and also managed the flower deliveries. Twice a week, she would load my sisters and me into the van and deliver flowers. We loved helping her carry the bunches of fresh flowers into the stores. After the energy crisis of the 1970s, we stopped growing cut flowers and closed our greenhouses every winter to conserve heat and save money. With specialization, airplanes and trucks could bring cut flowers from the southern regions of the United States and overseas, so Russell's stopped selling wholesale. My uncle had built several greenhouses, and my dad recommissioned them for growing annuals and vegetables. This transition was the start of the garden center as we know it today\u2014 and was yet another instance of the business evolving in response to changes in the market and technology. \"Because we were located on Route 20, we had plenty of customers driving by to stop in,\" I told the camera. \"We added houseplants, cactus, poinsettias, and potted mums and began selling more Christmas trees, wreaths, and fresh floral arrangements.\" At that point, my dad hired his best friend, Hugh McKenzie, who started the Garden Shop. Hugh added tools, fertilizers, and insecticides, along with garden statuary and supplies for birds. My mom worked long hours, too, and expanded the offerings to include vases, pots, silk flowers, candles, Christmas ornaments, and d\u00e9cor. At noon, Genevieve suggested we take a break. During the interview, her plan for structuring the film had shifted, and she wanted to run the idea past me. \"Mom,\" she said, \"I've decided to start with the history of Russell's before we go into the story of everything you all did to overcome the pandemic.\" I agreed that this was a great idea. We had already decided that the last thirty minutes of our movie would be about the remarkable response from our community once we were able to reopen the business in the spring of 2020, after more than a month of closure. We found that the community embraced gardening with newfound enthusiasm\u2014and in the end, Russell's not only survived 2020 but thrived. With the camera rolling again, Genevieve asked when Tim and I joined the company. Tim told the story of us joining in 1986. \"I'm a recovering mechanical engineer,\" he joked, \"and Elizabeth's expertise is in marketing and advertising. I quickly learned that this was a lot more fun than sitting in an office all day.\" I explained how, at this point, I'm delighted that our son, Dan Skehan, has joined us full time. He is the fifth generation to work at Russell's. With a background in accounting, human resources, and financial management, he was instrumental in helping us figure out how to stay in business through 2020. He secured payroll protection loans and helped us furlough and then rehire and train our employees. Moreover, he kept abreast with ever-changing guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and the State of Massachusetts. \"He remained calm and added a wealth of knowledge,\" I explained. \"I'm not sure we'd still be in business if we didn't know that Dan would be here to continue the legacy of Russell's Garden Center.\" Elizabeth Russell-Skehan is the president and vice president of marketing at Russell's Garden Center. They are now editing a full-length feature documentary film called Growing Through Covid- 19. To watch a trailer or to donate to the film, visit www.growingthroughcovid19.com. 12 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION (Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) 1. Title: Arnoldia. 2. Publication number: 0004-2633. 3. Filing date: September 22, 2021. 4. Frequency: Quarterly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 4. 6. Annual subscription price: $20.00 domestic; $25.00 foreign. 7-8. Address of offices of publication, publisher, and editor: The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, 125 Arborway, Boston, Suffolk County, MA 02130-3500. 9. Full names of publisher, editor, and managing editor: The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, publisher; Jonathan Damery, editor. 10. Owner: The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. 11. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total: None. 12. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months. 13. Publication name: Arnoldia. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: June 29, 2019. 15. Extent and nature of circulation. a. Average number copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 1,720. Actual number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,750. b. Paid and\/or requested circulation: (1) Paid outside-county subscriptions: Average: 28. Actual nearest to filing date: 25. (2) Paid in-county subscriptions. Average: 1,181. Actual nearest to filing date: 1,193. (3) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, and counter sales: None. (4) Other classes mailed through the USPS: None. c. Total paid and\/or requested circulation. Average: 1,209. Actual nearest to filing date: 1,218. d. (1)(2) (3) Free distribution by mail. Average: 191. Actual nearest to filing date: 196. (4) Free distribution outside the mail: Average: 250. Actual nearest to filing date: 250. e. Total free distribution: Average: 441. Actual nearest to filing date: 446. f. Total distribution: Average: 1,650. Actual nearest to filing date: 1,664. g. Copies not distributed. Average: 70. Actual nearest to filing date: 86. h. Total. Average: 1,720. Actual nearest to filing date: 1,750. i. Percent paid and\/or requested circulation. Average: 73%. Actual nearest to filing date: 73%. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. Jonathan Damery, Editor."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"The Resilient Trees of Flower City","article_sequence":5,"start_page":13,"end_page":15,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25740","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160a76c.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Quinn, Mark","article_content":"On March 4, 1991, I awoke to a knocking on my door. A coworker from the Monroe County Parks Department in Rochester, New York, planned to pick me up early to go to a trade show in Syracuse. When I glanced at the clock, however, I realized the power was out. The clockface was blank. I dressed quickly in the dark, and when I stepped out the front door, I found that the day's agenda was completely different than planned. My coworker had indeed arrived to pick me up, but looking down the street, I saw that ice covered everything. My twenty-five-foot-tall white birch (Betula papyrifera) was bent over, with the tip touching the ground. (This tree later sprang back, showing the amazing resilience of trees to crises.) We headed for Highland Park, the historic arboretum on the south side of Rochester, where we both worked as horticulturists. After multiple turnarounds due to trees blocking the road, we finally arrived at the Highland Park production greenhouses. The scene that met us was shocking. A huge limb from a one-hundred-year-old European beech (Fagus sylvatica) had fallen on our turn-of-the-century glass greenhouse. Like most of the largest trees in the park, this beech dated to the early 1890s and was planted by horticulturist John Dunbar according to plans drafted by Frederick Law Olmsted. We immediately set to work removing the limb and closing the hole in the damaged greenhouse, stapling poly film to the cypress bars in an attempt to save the delicate orchids inside. As we worked to keep the plants from freezing, we could hear the occasional snap of limbs breaking elsewhere in the park, but we still had not fully comprehended the scale of devastation around us. Rochester has a special affinity for trees. In the early 1800s, it was dubbed the Flour City, as waterpower of the Genesee River was used to grind enormous amounts of flour that was then shipped via the Erie Canal. By the second half of the century, however, Rochester became the Flower City, home to many of the country's largest and most prosperous nurseries. Two nurserymen played an especially pivotal role: George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry, owners of the successful Mount Hope Nursery, which they established around 1840. In 1888, Ellwanger and Barry donated land from their nursery grounds to the city to be used as a public park. Later named Highland Park, this land occupied a highpoint overlooking the city and the southern tier hills. Olmsted was enlisted to design a system of parks for Rochester, including North Park (now Seneca Park) and South Park (now Genesee Valley Park). Considering the interest that local nursery owners had invested in tree cultivation, Olmsted designed Highland Park as an arboretum. Many of the specimens to be planted were donated by Ellwanger and Barry. Park Superintendent Calvin Laney began acquiring additional plants for the park, but it soon became clear that more horticultural help was required. Dunbar was hired in 1891 to oversee the plant collections in the park. He quickly forged relationships with other prominent horticulturists, including Charles Sprague Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum. The similarities between Highland and the Arnold are not just superficial. Both arboreta were designed by Olmsted and were envisioned as features within larger park systems. Both have the distinct feel of an Olmsted design, with curving paths following the contours of the landscape. Dunbar and the horticulturists who followed him maintained an active relationship with Sargent and others at the Arnold. For many decades, The Resilient Trees of Flower City Mark Quinn QUINN, M. 2021. THE RESILIENT TREES OF FLOWER CITY. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 13-15 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION Highland Park 15 the institutions exchanged plant material, supporting research at both sites. As time passed, the products of these efforts matured into beautiful collections. In Rochester, the public has come to expect these large, well-maintained trees throughout our arboretum and park system. Still, as a community of tree lovers, we often take for granted the tremendous asset left by our predecessors\u2014until crisis strikes. The ice storm of 1991 was one of these events. Having saved the orchids, staff turned their attention to assessing the damage to the arboretum. It seemed that almost everything in the collection was either damaged or destroyed. At first, opening roads and paths so people could get around was the priority. This effort to restore access took days. As the work progressed, we started to look at individual specimens and, to our dismay, found many of our most celebrated trees were no more. One public favorite, a katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum), looked like the last few feet of every branch was broken and hanging. The tree had been received in 1919 from the nursery of Leon Chenault, in Orleans, France. Once the forestry team addressed safety issues elsewhere in the landscape, they turned to the katsura, spending days expertly trimming off every broken limb. Today, three decades later, no evidence of the trauma remains. The katsura has returned bigger and better than ever. The saddest loss for me was a Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica), which had been received from Veitch Nursery, in England, in 1892. The specimen\u2014perhaps my favorite tree in the park\u2014was fascinating, forming an impenetrable maze of eight- to sixteen-inch trunks with gray-green mottled bark. It had been completely uprooted and was lying on the ground. I remember cutting up the branches and wondering if another specimen as impressive as this one existed anywhere. Yet, sometimes having too much to do can play in our favor: with thousands of trees down and in need of work, our team deferred grinding stumps until later. That spring, dozens of new shoots sprouted from the overturned Parrotia stump. Over time, our team thinned the shoots, allowing space for some to grow. Now thirty years have passed, and the plant is once again a tangle of trunks\u2014 again one of my favorites. While so many trees were damaged and lost, others weathered the storm with remarkable ease. Walking through the park, you come to an impressive pair of zelkovas (Zelkova serrata), found in the valley behind the historic Lamberton Conservatory. One of the trees was received in 1899 from Thomas Meehan & Sons, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and the other arrived in 1919 from the Arnold Arboretum. These trees stood strong against the ice. Likewise, at the corner of Highland Avenue and Goodman Street, a dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) did the same. The tree was grown from seed distributed by the Arnold Arboretum in 1948, when this newly identified species was first introduced to North America. The dawn redwood flexed under the weight of the ice but bounced back with little damage. Despite the losses to the ice storm, Highland Park recovered. Every morning, I drive through the pinetum, which includes hundreds of varieties of mature evergreens\u2014an uncommon and, I think, underappreciated asset for a city park. The pinetum is particularly impressive in the winter with snow on the trees, giving the impression of being in an evergreen forest far north of Rochester. As I pull into my parking spot, I glance to a nearby hill where I see two magnificent fernleaf beech trees (Fagus sylvatica 'Asplenifolia') standing amongst a grouping of beech trees of other varieties. These two were donated from Ellwanger and Barry's Mount Hope Nursery in 1892. Looking to the left, I can see an American chestnut (Castanea dentata), about thirty feet tall and starting to succumb to blight, a remnant of a former crisis. Each of the trees stands as a living history\u2014a testament not only to their own resilience but to the commitment of the generations of horticulturists who have built and stewarded the plant collections in Flower City. Mark Quinn is the superintendent of horticulture for Monroe County Parks, in Rochester, New York. He oversees the cultivation and care of the botanical collection at Highland Park and all the parks throughout the County Parks System. Facing page: The author stands with one of the celebrated trees at Highland Park\u2014a katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) received in 1919. PHOTO COURTESY THE AUTHOR"},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"The Prince Family: Pioneers of American Horticulture","article_sequence":6,"start_page":16,"end_page":23,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25741","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160ab6f.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Casscles, J. Stephen","article_content":"It was a beautiful day on August 1, 1782, when Prince William Henry, the third son of King George III, was received at the home and gardens of William Prince Sr. in Flushing Landing, New York. The American Revolutionary War had effectively ended the year before when the British surrendered at the Battle of Yorktown. Yet, the sixteen-year-old visitor, who would, in 1830, rise to the throne as King William IV, had come to present a stand of colors to the King's American Dragoons, encamped three miles to the east of the Princes. The British soldiers were invited for a barbecue of a whole roasted ox at the Prince home, not the kind of warm reception that an American patriot would have given to a future British monarch and his troops. Prince was a nursery owner, almost forty years older than William, and the visit suggests the prominence of both Prince and the nursery. During the visit, Prince and William discussed their shared interest in growing and breeding plums, a specialty of the nursery. Plums were a critical fruit crop because they could be dried and stored for long periods and used as a nutritious food by the British Navy. Prince had introduced new plum varieties to Long Island, observing the acclimatization of the green gage plum (a common form of Prunus domestica). He even developed new varieties of plums, including 'Yellow Gage', which he would officially introduce the year after William's visit. In 1789, another group of illustrious visitors stopped at Prince's nursery: the newly elected president of the United States, George Washington, and his entourage of vice president John Adams, New York governor George Clinton, and the president of the Continental Congress, John Jay. Washington was less impressed with the nursery than William had been. He noted a large number of young fruit trees but described the shrubs as \"trifling\" and the flowers as \"not numerous.\" Flushing had been under British military occupation for the past seven years, and little plant material could be shipped during those long years of hostility. Nonetheless, by the 1790s, the Prince Nursery was likely the largest propagator of grafted fruit trees in the United States. It would grow to become even more: a center of horticultural learning. The Prince family's horticultural enterprise originated with William Prince's father, Robert, who was born in the 1690s. (His birth year has been variously presented as 1692 and 1699.) By 1723, Robert had begun collecting, growing, and propagating trees for his fruit farm. The plants included varieties of apples, pears, plums, nectarines, peaches, cherries, and small fruits. Throughout Robert's life, the nursery slowly evolved into a vibrant commercial operation, occupying eight acres directly south of what is now Northern Boulevard. This first Prince homestead was a beautiful structure with rounded shingles, set in a bank of flowering shrubs on the western edge of his property, next to the Flushing Creek. Flushing\u2014in northern Queens County\u2014was an ideal location for a nursery that would grow to become national in scope. It sits on the Long Island Sound, where winters are milder than most other parts of the state and where summers are cooler and less humid than colonial centers to the south. Flushing boasted high-quality topsoil, rich and fertile, with few stones. An underlying subsoil provided good water drainage while retaining sufficient moisture to allow plants to grow quickly. Flushing's location relative to the Port of New York meant that plants could readily be shipped to other parts of the country and Europe. Moreover, Flushing benefited from the cultural and financial rise of New York City. These factors would, in the nineteenth century, induce many other prominent nurseries to establish operations in Flushing. Robert and his wife, Mary Burgess, had six children. Their oldest son, William, took over the nursery by 1745, the year before Robert's death. Under William's leadership, the nursery ultimately expanded to twenty-four acres. The diversity of plants increased, as did the total sales. At the time, the standard American practice for propagating fruit trees, especially peaches (Prunus persica), was to grow seedlings and not to graft a tree to a suitable rootstock. Because of this seed-grown method, the quality of orchard trees was unknown until they came to maturity. Prince realized the commercial value of predictability and often budded or grafted his fruit trees to keep the variety true. The nursery expanded quickly between 1750 and the beginning of the American Revolutionary War in 1776. William published his firstknown notice of advertisement on September 21, 1767, which stated, \"For sale at William Prince's nursery, Flushing, a great variety of fruit trees, such as apple, plum, peach, nectarine, cherry, apricot and pear. They may be put up so as to be sent to Europe. Capt. Jeremiah Mitchell and Daniel Clements go to New York in passage boats Tuesdays and Fridays.\" The nursery's first-known catalogue appeared in 1771, a single-page broadsheet. The list contained over 230 plant selections, which was sizable for a nursery in colonial America. In addition to fruit crops, the offerings included evergreen trees, timber trees, and shrubs. Among the ornamental selections, tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) and lilacs (three varieties, presumably Syringa vulgaris) were among the most expensive. An advertisement published in the New York Mercury, dated March 14, 1774, stated that William Prince was selling more than one hundred Carolina magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) that were over four feet tall, raised from seed. He also advertised ninefoot- tall catalpas (Catalpa speciosa). The Revolutionary War halted the shipment of Prince's plants to most parts of the American colonies, except for areas under British control, such as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, and parts of the South. These wartime closures hurt the business. Reports variously state that somewhere between three thousand to thirty thousand grafted cherry trees were either purchased or confiscated by the British, to be used as hoops for making barrels. Yet, the Princes were likely British Loyalists and benefited from military protection. In fact, William's daughter Sarah married a British Army Major, Charles McNeill, who resigned from his military service after the war. And the British General Lord Howe ordered army units to guard the nursery, posting soldiers at the entrances. When George Washington visited the Princes with his entourage in 1789, his assessment of the poor quality and low diversity of the ornamental plants may suggest that nursery was still recovering from the war. Yet, by the summer of 1791, secretary of state Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Democratic-Republican James Madison of Virginia visited the nursery and reported more favorably. The men were touring New York and New England to study botanical curiosities, wildlife, and historic battlefields. They maintained that the tour was for health reasons and scientific exploration. Yet, those versed in politics noted that the trip was conducted through the country's Federalists strongholds of New York and New England instead of areas dominated by Jefferson's political base of Democratic-Republican support. Jefferson desired to improve domestic agriculture and arranged the nursery stop to discuss his ideas with William. Among the topics, they talked about Jefferson's vision for promoting the cultivation of sugar maples (Acer saccharum) for syrup production. Jefferson also took the opportunity to order plants for himself: sugar maples, highbush cranberries (Viburnum trilobum), balsam poplars (Populus balsamifera), and Beurre Gris pears (a variety of Pyrus communis). Later, he expanded his order to include stone fruits and nut trees, along with an array of ornamental trees, shrubs, and roses. As the United States grew towards the close of the century, so did the Prince Nursery. By 1793, William Prince, at the age of sixty-eight, turned over operations to his sons Benjamin and William Jr. Benjamin maintained the original family nursery for many years, calling it the Old American Nursery, but it was William Jr. who became the primary mover of the family business in the third generation. In 1793, he purchased twenty-four acres directly northeast of the original nursery. There, on the banks of \u222b Flushing Creek, he established his Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery. He designed it as a showplace to educate the public on botanical matters, including native plants, new varieties bred in the United States, and plants imported from Europe and farther afield. William Jr. and his son William Robert Prince took up the cause of identifying and describing plant material so that it could be offered to the public\u2014and they were highly invested in acquiring newly introduced species. In 1804, for instance, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked upon the Missouri River to explore the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase. The expedition had been commissioned at Jefferson's request, and when the explorers returned east, they came bearing seeds and other botanical collections. The Princes were among the first nursery operators to grow and distribute plants from the expedition, and the Oregon grape holly (Mahonia aquifolium) became one of their most successful new products. The Princes were also among the first American nurseries to offer ornamental species from East Asia, like the golden rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata), lacebark elm (Ulmus parvifolia), and Chinese wisteria (Wisteria sinensis). By the mid-1830s, William Jr. had ten nursery outbuildings, of which several were greenhouses that contained tropical and subtropical plants from Africa and Asia. Visitors could pay an admission fee to experience the warmth and humidity of the greenhouse\u2014a rewarding respite to escape the dark, cold New York winter. The nursery catalogue listed ten tropical hibiscuses (Hibiscus) and two gardenias (Gardenia) that bloomed in their greenhouses. Prince grew tropical fruits and flowers specifically for winter viewing. For variety, they also exhibited insectivorous plants such as sundew (Drosera), pitcher plant (Sarracenia), and Venus flytrap (Dionaea). Moreover, in 1833, The New-York Annual Register reported that the gardens and nursery covered up to forty In 1793, William Prince Jr. purchased twenty-four acres alongside the original nursery, naming the new property the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery. In the decades to come, a cohort of nurseries would open in Flushing, including Parsons Nursery and Bloodgood Nursery, both mapped nearby in 1841. SMITH, 1841\/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION ies cultivated in America, other than apples. (While the father and son intended to treat apple cultivation with a third volume, the work was never published.) Like A Short Treatise on Horticulture, this book was widely read in America and became influential among aspiring horticulturalists. Moreover, the Princes paid particular attention to the nomenclature of the fruits covered in all of the publications, untangling confusion occurring in the field. This interest in the accurate classification of horticultural plants began with the work of William Sr., and it was among the family's most significant contributions to American horticulture. As a testament to William Jr.'s interest in classification, he displayed in his home a bust of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who formalized the modern system of botanical nomenclature. William Jr. received the statue in a presentation by New York governor DeWitt Clinton at a meeting of European and American scientists to honor Linnaeus's birthday in 1823. A simultaneous celebration in Virginia was officiated by Thomas Jefferson, an honorary member of the Linnaean Society of Paris. By the time William Jr. died in 1842, Flushing had become a vibrant center for American horticulture. Bloodgood Nursery had been established there in 1798 and would become known as a specialist in maples. (A common Japanese maple even bears the name of the nursery: Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood'.) G. R. Garretson Nursery, a seed company specializing in flowers and vegetables, was established in 1836 and would grow to cover one hundred acres, supplying wholesale seeds to nurseries across the United States and offering retail via mail order. But the most famous of these newer operations was Parsons Nursery, established in 1838; the Parsons family would later play a central role in introducing plants from East Asia, especially Japan. Meanwhile, William Robert had been assuming increasing responsibility for the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries. In the 1820s, he expanded the nursery, purchasing three large parcels so that his land holdings may have totaled up to 113 acres. These properties were located adjacent to a house he bought for himself in 1827. The home had a wide center hall, \u222b 20 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 acres and contained approximately ten thousand species of trees and plants, with particular attention devoted to grapes and mulberry trees. Visitors had free access to the outdoor gardens every day, except for Sundays. At the same time, the commercial operations of the nursery expanded rapidly, as evidenced by William Jr.'s increasingly thicker plant catalogues. He also began to subdivide the products among smaller specialized catalogues. In addition to his standard Annual Catalogue for Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Plants, which covered his earlier offerings, he began to issue catalogues that focused on items such as bulbous flowers and tubers, greenhouse plants, chrysanthemums, and vegetable and flower seeds. William Jr. attracted additional attention in 1828 when he published one of the first strictly horticultural books to come from the United States: A Short Treatise on Horticulture: Embracing Descriptions of a Great Variety of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Grape Vines, Bulbous Flowers, Green-House Trees and Plants, &c. The book described all the plant offerings at the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery, in some sense serving as an extended advertisement. The treatise also comprehensively covered horticultural topics, such as planting, pruning, and propagation. It even included information about soil preferences and methods for fungal disease control. Over the next three years, William Jr. worked with his son, William Robert, on two additional books, for which his son was the primary author. The first, A Treatise on the Vine, was published in 1830 and was the first significant book written in America on grape cultivation. The Princes had systematically tested scores of European grape varieties (Vitis vinifera), along with improved varieties of native North American grapes (like V. labrusca and V. riparia), and interspecific hybrids. The book described over two hundred European grape varieties and eighty American. This work helped to establish viticulture as a fullfledged branch of American horticulture, and for William Robert, grape breeding and cultivation remained a lifelong interest. The second book, The Pomological Manual, published in 1831, was a two-volume cyclopedia that attempted to catalogue all fruit varietwith two solid Dutch doors on either end and a bust of Linnaeus (likely from his father) on a bracket against the wall. The house's formal gardens contained two ginkgos (Ginkgo biloba), which were among the oldest in the country, and an old cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) that the Princes had imported from France. Under William Robert's leadership, however, the business began to struggle. In the 1830s, he speculated heavily in the domestic silk industry and may have been a key contributor to the skyrocketing prices for mulberry trees (Morus alba), the food source for silkworms. He imported more than one million mulberry trees from France in 1839, and shortly afterward, the price for mulberry trees crashed. When this venture failed, the Princes could not keep up with mortgage payments on the nursery, and by 1841, they lost the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries in foreclosure. These events spawned a bitter controversy with the property's new owner, Gabriel Winter, who was married to one of William Jr.'s cousins. Although William Robert continued to raise and sell plants from an adjacent nursery property, he and Winter competed in horticultural publications over the right to sell plants as the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries. Ultimately, the Princes kept the name, and Winter sold the remaining plant inventory and subdivided the original property for housing development. By 1846, the finances at the new Prince nursery began to stabilize, and William Robert published Prince's Manual of Roses, his third and final significant contribution to horticultural literature. At his new botanic garden, William Robert grew over seven hundred rose varieties, and the book provided detailed descriptions of varieties and featured many roses from China. He also included information about horticultural care and propagation. It was one of the very best works on this subject. Still, it was eclipsed in popularity by Samuel B. Parsons's book published the following year: The Rose: Its History, Poetry, Culture, and Classification. Parsons\u2014the proprietor of Parsons Nursery in Flushing\u2014ultimately revised his book as Parsons on the Rose: A Treatise on the Propagation, Culture, and History of the Rose. The competition between these books suggests the horticultural foment that was occurring in Flushing during this period. William Prince Jr. and his son William Robert Prince (above) authored seminal American horticultural manuals. In A Treatise on the Vine, published in 1830, they promoted new grape varieties, including 'Isabella', which became a favorite of American viticulturists. HEDRICK, 1908 AND 1911\/ARCHIVE OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM 22 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Later, William Robert went on two extended botanical expeditions, to California (in 1849) and Mexico (in 1850). While these trips suggest that the business was doing reasonably well, William Robert began to gradually withdraw from the day-to-day management of the nursery around 1855, at the age of sixty. Instead, he devoted his energy to other botanical interests, including research on botanical medicinal remedies. He also continued to breed and evaluate new varieties of fruits and ornamental plants, especially grapes, strawberries, and roses. His oldest son, William III, meanwhile assumed increasing responsibility for the enterprise. William Robert's career reflected the changes that were going on in the American horticultural community. His father had been a founding member of the New York Horticultural Society in 1818 and joined the Massachusetts Horticultural Society after it was established in 1829, but he was also a member of the Linnaean Society of Paris, the Horticultural Society of London and Paris, and the Academy of Georgofili, based in Florence, Italy. William Robert invested his energy into the increasingly sophisticated American horticultural societies rather than those in Europe. He contributed many articles to the leading American agricultural magazines of the day, such as The Rural New Yorker and Gardener's Monthly. Moreover, he was a member of the American Institute of the City of New York and the American Pomological Society. On March 28, 1869, William Robert died at his home in Flushing, and as it turned out, the esteemed business died with him. William III had enlisted for the United States Army during the Civil War, and he chose to remain in the military. William Robert's second son, LeBaron Bradford, pursued a career in law and politics. Gardener's Monthly printed a two-page obituary for William Robert. It was a sad and respectful tribute to his horticultural brilliance while nonetheless remarking on his combative personality. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society issued a full resolution commemorating his life as a \"pioneer in the field of horticulture,\" a title that seems equally appropriate for the three generations of Princes that came before him. In 1939, efforts were made to move William Robert's house to the site of the New York World's Fair, to demonstrate a historic colonial homestead, but the campaign came to no avail. Later, New York City park commissioner Robert Moses rejected a proposal to move the structure to Flushing Meadow Park. Moses's vision for a \"modern city\" had little space for old wooden buildings. In its last few years of use, the structure served as a rooming house and a club. The shabby, unpainted building was then boarded up and surrounded by billboards and a gas station. The house was torn down in 1942. Of course, by that point, the lush greenhouses that once welcomed winter visitors had long ago disappeared, and the nursery property had been subdivided and sold for development. Yet, the 150-year story of the Prince family lives on today. The family built a foundation for commercial horticulture in the United States. They championed the cultivation of plants from across the country and around the world, and their publications promoted best practices in horticulture. They even helped with establishing a more systematic approach for horticultural nomenclature. Moreover, the success of the Prince nurseries is inextricably linked to the subsequent generation of horticulturists who established businesses in Flushing. This expanding group of nursery owners became leaders in their own right. In this way, a horticultural legacy that began with one family who lived on the edge of Flushing Creek became a national and international story. Acknowledgment I'm grateful for the support of Susan Lacerte, who recently retired as executive director at the Queens Botanical Garden, located near the former Prince Nurseries. Susan's knowledge of horticulture in Flushing, both present and historical, has been an inspiration. References Cornett, P. 2004, January. Encounters with America's premier nursery and botanic garden. Twinleaf: 1-12. Downing, A. J. 1845. The fruits and fruit trees of America: Or the culture, propagation and management in the garden and orchard of fruit trees generally; with descriptions of all the finest varieties of fruit, native and foreign in this country. New York: Wiley and Putnam. \u222b The Prince Family 23 Gager, C. S. 1912, October. The first botanic garden on Long Island. Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1(4): 97-99. Hedrick, U. P. 1911. The plums of New York (Report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station). Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hedrick, U. P. 1908. The grapes of New York (Report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station). Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hedrick, U. P. 1925. The small fruits of New York (Report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station). Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hedrick, U.P. 1933. A history of agriculture in the State of New York. Printed for the New York State Agricultural Society, Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hotchkiss, T. W. 1934. Prince house, Lawrence Street & Northern Boulevard, photographs, written historical and descriptive data. Dist. No. 4, Southern New York State, Historic American Building Survey, HABS No. 4-19. Jacobsen, A. and Williams, J. D. 2009. Prince family nurseries (ca. 1737- post- 1851). Bulletin of the Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation, 21(1): 4-7. Johnson, J. 1887. The village of Flushing, map of desirable building lots, Flushing: A historical sketch. New York: John P. Stock, Printer. Manks, D. S. 1967. How the American nursery trade began. Plants & Gardens, 23(2). McGourty, F. 1967. Long Island's famous nurseries. Plants & Gardens, 23(3). Munsell, W. W. 1882. History of Queens County, New York, with illustrations, portraits, & sketches of prominent families and individuals. New York: Press of George MacNamara. Prince, B. and Mills, S. F. 1823. A treatise and catalogue of fruit and ornamental trees, shrubs, &c., cultivated at the Old American Nursery. New York: Wm. Grattan. Prince, W. 1771. To be sold, by William Prince, at Flushing-Landing, on Long-Island, near New- York, a large collection of fruit trees, as follows. New York: H. Gaine. Prince, W. 1790. To be sold, by William Prince, at Flushing-Landing, on Long-Island, near New- York, a large collection, as follow, of fruit trees and shrubs. New York: H. Gaine. Prince, W. 1825. Annual catalogue of fruit and ornamental trees and plants, bulbous flower roots, green-house plants, &c. &c., cultivated at the Linnaean Botanic Garden, William Prince, proprietor. New York: T. and J. Swords. Prince, W. 1828. A short treatise on horticulture: Embracing descriptions of a great variety of fruit and ornamental trees and shrubs, grape vines, bulbous flowers, green-house trees and plants. New York: T. and J. Swords. Prince, W. R. and Prince, W. 1830. A treatise on the vine; Embracing it history from the earliest ages to the present day, with descriptions of above two hundred foreign, and eighty American varieties, together with a complete dissertation of the established culture, and management of vineyards. New York: T. & J. Swords. Prince, W. R. and Prince, W. 1831. The pomological manual; or a treatise on fruits: containing descriptions of a great number of the most valuable varieties for the orchard and garden. New York: T. & J. Swords. Prince, W. R. 1846. Princes' Manual of roses: Comprising the most complete history of the rose, including every class, and all the most admirable varieties that have appeared in Europe and America, together with ample information on their culture and propagation. New York: Clark & Austen, Saxton & Miles, Wiley & Putnam, and Stanford & Swords. Ross, P. 1902. A history of Long Island: From its earliest settlement to the present time. New York: Lewis Publishing Co. Smith, E. A. and Hayward, G. 1841. The village of Flushing, Queens County, L.I.: nine miles east of the city of New York: lat. 40\u00b0 45' 1\"N, lon. 73\u00b0 09' 58\"W. [Flushing?: s.n., ?] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https:\/\/www.loc. gov\/item\/2008620796 St. George's Episcopal Church, Baptismal Records, 1800- 1840, Flushing, N.Y., 135-32 38th Avenue, Flushing, N.Y., Rev. Wilfredo Benitez, Rector. Trebor, H. (Ed.) 1938, October. Garden center: The four Princes\u2014William of America. So This is Flushing. Flushing, N.Y.: Halleran. U.S. Department of Agriculture. 1976. The Prince family manuscript collection: A register of their papers, in the National Agricultural Library (Library list 101). Beltsville, MD: U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library. Waldron, R. K. 1958. Prince's plants. The Call Number, 20(1). J. Stephen Casscles is an attorney, winemaker, and horticultural writer living in the Hudson Valley. His publications include Grapes of the Hudson Valley and Other Cool Climate Regions of the United States and Canada, published by Flint Mine Press."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Such a Fine Assemblage: The Jesup Collection of North American Woods","article_sequence":7,"start_page":24,"end_page":49,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25742","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160af27.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Mauz, Kathryn","article_content":"It was a beautiful day on August 1, 1782, when Prince William Henry, the third son of King George III, was received at the home and gardens of William Prince Sr. in Flushing Landing, New York. The American Revolutionary War had effectively ended the year before when the British surrendered at the Battle of Yorktown. Yet, the sixteen-year-old visitor, who would, in 1830, rise to the throne as King William IV, had come to present a stand of colors to the King's American Dragoons, encamped three miles to the east of the Princes. The British soldiers were invited for a barbecue of a whole roasted ox at the Prince home, not the kind of warm reception that an American patriot would have given to a future British monarch and his troops. Prince was a nursery owner, almost forty years older than William, and the visit suggests the prominence of both Prince and the nursery. During the visit, Prince and William discussed their shared interest in growing and breeding plums, a specialty of the nursery. Plums were a critical fruit crop because they could be dried and stored for long periods and used as a nutritious food by the British Navy. Prince had introduced new plum varieties to Long Island, observing the acclimatization of the green gage plum (a common form of Prunus domestica). He even developed new varieties of plums, including 'Yellow Gage', which he would officially introduce the year after William's visit. In 1789, another group of illustrious visitors stopped at Prince's nursery: the newly elected president of the United States, George Washington, and his entourage of vice president John Adams, New York governor George Clinton, and the president of the Continental Congress, John Jay. Washington was less impressed with the nursery than William had been. He noted a large number of young fruit trees but described the shrubs as \"trifling\" and the flowers as \"not numerous.\" Flushing had been under British military occupation for the past seven years, and little plant material could be shipped during those long years of hostility. Nonetheless, by the 1790s, the Prince Nursery was likely the largest propagator of grafted fruit trees in the United States. It would grow to become even more: a center of horticultural learning. The Prince family's horticultural enterprise originated with William Prince's father, Robert, who was born in the 1690s. (His birth year has been variously presented as 1692 and 1699.) By 1723, Robert had begun collecting, growing, and propagating trees for his fruit farm. The plants included varieties of apples, pears, plums, nectarines, peaches, cherries, and small fruits. Throughout Robert's life, the nursery slowly evolved into a vibrant commercial operation, occupying eight acres directly south of what is now Northern Boulevard. This first Prince homestead was a beautiful structure with rounded shingles, set in a bank of flowering shrubs on the western edge of his property, next to the Flushing Creek. Flushing\u2014in northern Queens County\u2014was an ideal location for a nursery that would grow to become national in scope. It sits on the Long Island Sound, where winters are milder than most other parts of the state and where summers are cooler and less humid than colonial centers to the south. Flushing boasted high-quality topsoil, rich and fertile, with few stones. An underlying subsoil provided good water drainage while retaining sufficient moisture to allow plants to grow quickly. Flushing's location relative to the Port of New York meant that plants could readily be shipped to other parts of the country and Europe. Moreover, Flushing benefited from the cultural and financial rise of New York City. These factors would, in the nineteenth century, induce many other prominent nurseries to establish operations in Flushing. Robert and his wife, Mary Burgess, had six children. Their oldest son, William, took over the nursery by 1745, the year before Robert's death. Under William's leadership, the nursery ultimately expanded to twenty-four acres. The diversity of plants increased, as did the total sales. At the time, the standard American practice for propagating fruit trees, especially peaches (Prunus persica), was to grow seedlings and not to graft a tree to a suitable rootstock. Because of this seed-grown method, the quality of orchard trees was unknown until they came to maturity. Prince realized the commercial value of predictability and often budded or grafted his fruit trees to keep the variety true. The nursery expanded quickly between 1750 and the beginning of the American Revolutionary War in 1776. William published his firstknown notice of advertisement on September 21, 1767, which stated, \"For sale at William Prince's nursery, Flushing, a great variety of fruit trees, such as apple, plum, peach, nectarine, cherry, apricot and pear. They may be put up so as to be sent to Europe. Capt. Jeremiah Mitchell and Daniel Clements go to New York in passage boats Tuesdays and Fridays.\" The nursery's first-known catalogue appeared in 1771, a single-page broadsheet. The list contained over 230 plant selections, which was sizable for a nursery in colonial America. In addition to fruit crops, the offerings included evergreen trees, timber trees, and shrubs. Among the ornamental selections, tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) and lilacs (three varieties, presumably Syringa vulgaris) were among the most expensive. An advertisement published in the New York Mercury, dated March 14, 1774, stated that William Prince was selling more than one hundred Carolina magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) that were over four feet tall, raised from seed. He also advertised ninefoot- tall catalpas (Catalpa speciosa). The Revolutionary War halted the shipment of Prince's plants to most parts of the American colonies, except for areas under British control, such as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, and parts of the South. These wartime closures hurt the business. Reports variously state that somewhere between three thousand to thirty thousand grafted cherry trees were either purchased or confiscated by the British, to be used as hoops for making barrels. Yet, the Princes were likely British Loyalists and benefited from military protection. In fact, William's daughter Sarah married a British Army Major, Charles McNeill, who resigned from his military service after the war. And the British General Lord Howe ordered army units to guard the nursery, posting soldiers at the entrances. When George Washington visited the Princes with his entourage in 1789, his assessment of the poor quality and low diversity of the ornamental plants may suggest that nursery was still recovering from the war. Yet, by the summer of 1791, secretary of state Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Democratic-Republican James Madison of Virginia visited the nursery and reported more favorably. The men were touring New York and New England to study botanical curiosities, wildlife, and historic battlefields. They maintained that the tour was for health reasons and scientific exploration. Yet, those versed in politics noted that the trip was conducted through the country's Federalists strongholds of New York and New England instead of areas dominated by Jefferson's political base of Democratic-Republican support. Jefferson desired to improve domestic agriculture and arranged the nursery stop to discuss his ideas with William. Among the topics, they talked about Jefferson's vision for promoting the cultivation of sugar maples (Acer saccharum) for syrup production. Jefferson also took the opportunity to order plants for himself: sugar maples, highbush cranberries (Viburnum trilobum), balsam poplars (Populus balsamifera), and Beurre Gris pears (a variety of Pyrus communis). Later, he expanded his order to include stone fruits and nut trees, along with an array of ornamental trees, shrubs, and roses. As the United States grew towards the close of the century, so did the Prince Nursery. By 1793, William Prince, at the age of sixty-eight, turned over operations to his sons Benjamin and William Jr. Benjamin maintained the original family nursery for many years, calling it the Old American Nursery, but it was William Jr. who became the primary mover of the family business in the third generation. In 1793, he purchased twenty-four acres directly northeast of the original nursery. There, on the banks of \u222b Flushing Creek, he established his Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery. He designed it as a showplace to educate the public on botanical matters, including native plants, new varieties bred in the United States, and pOn May 18, 1885, an important exhibition heralded as a \"noble gift to the city\"1 opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Beneath the high ceilings of the exhibition hall, glass cases displayed 350 specimens as the Jesup Collection of North American Woods. Each was a whole log, about four and a half feet tall, still cloaked with bark as in life, with the upper half cut away to reveal the wood inside. Many of the specimens were accompanied by original watercolor illustrations of foliage, fruit, and flowers. A writer announced of the exhibit in Harper's Weekly, \"The average visitor will be impressed and surprised by the beauty of some and by the extreme oddity of others.\u2026 The various coloring of the woods, often rich and sometimes startling, and running into the most delicate shades, and the strength or grace or whimsicality of form, as traced in the divers[e] coursings of the grain, are matters to attract even the casual eye, and to stamp as absurd the hasty judgement which would say that a collection of logs can not be interesting.\"2 Over the coming years, the collection grew to include more than five hundred species. It represented the scientific and philanthropic vision of two noteworthy individuals: Morris Ketchum Jesup, one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History, and Charles Sprague Sargent, the director of the Arnold Arboretum. The collection remained a cornerstone of the museum's exhibits for more than six decades. The fact that an exhibition of this magnitude could almost entirely vanish from the public memory seems almost improbable. Yet, the story of its exile is as intriguing as that of its origins. A Generous Friend On the occasion of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, William H. Brewer, a professor of agricultural science at Yale University, observed, \"America has long been described by geographers and naturalists as the wooded continent, distinguished for the luxuriance and extent of its forests and the number of its arboreal species.\"3 At that time, scientists were beginning to comprehend the vastness of North American forests, but popular appreciation of this forest wealth lagged behind. At the Exhibition, audiences were introduced to displays of American woods and wood products through exhibits mounted by individual states and by the United States Department of Agriculture, which showcased specimens representing four hundred tree species from around the country.4 Such exhibits distilled an abstract general abundance into the remarkable variety of trees that comprised the country's forests. The Exhibition's millions of visitors vastly exceeded the number of people who had ever traveled across the country or explored its forested lands, and early efforts to organize around the idea of forest conservation took root at that gathering. At the time, there was not a museum in the country that possessed a similar, permanent exhibit that could perpetuate the transient awe from the Centennial Exhibition into an enduring educational mission. In 1880, such an exhibit\u2014but one even more monumental\u2014 became Jesup's vision for the American Museum of Natural History. A forest lover himself, Jesup was also keenly interested in the uses of forests and, increasingly, in the roles forests played in the wider landscape of human settlement and industry. Jesup and the museum's director, Such a Fine Assemblage: The Jesup Collection of North American Woods Kathryn Mauz Facing page: The Jesup Collection of North American Woods revealed the wonder and scientific diversity of North American forests by showcasing wood samples from more than five hundred tree species. As one commentator later said, it was \"a perfectly unique collection which cannot anywhere be repeated.\" AMNH RESEARCH LIBRARY DIGITAL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, 31642 MAUZ, K. 2021. SUCH A FINE ASSEMBLAGE: THE JESUP COLLECTION OF NORTH AMERICAN WOODS. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 24-49 26 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Albert S. Bickmore, discussed the possibility of developing this exhibit at the museum for the expressed purpose of showcasing the contributions of American forests to industrial and artistic endeavors. In August 1880, while attending the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, Bickmore approached Harvard botany professor Asa Gray for advice. He described the museum's planned Department of Economic Botany, which was primarily to feature important products from the forests of the country. Gray directed him to interview Sargent, who at the time was in charge of the census of American forests for the Tenth Census of the United States. Bickmore spent an afternoon at Dwight House on Sargent's Holm Lea estate in the suburb of Brookline. Although Sargent was away conducting fieldwork, Bickmore toured the grounds and learned about the work Sargent was pursuing for the forest census. Bickmore soon wrote to Sargent in care of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where Sargent was briefly stopped along the last leg of his grand tour of western forests. As Bickmore explained, a \"generous friend\" of the museum wished to develop an \"instructive and attractive collection\" of the wood products of North American forests, \"placing it in a tangible, visual form before our citizens and our tide of visitors from all parts of the continent.\"5 Of course, that unspecified friend was Jesup, who would become the museum's president from 1881 until his death in 1908. His foresight had led him to Sargent, whose zeal and breadth of knowledge were positively suited to realizing this singular goal, and whose awareness of his own expertise prevented him from letting the opportunity pass to someone else. Jesup also sponsored other collections and many expeditions in varied fields of study during his tenure at the museum, and Sargent simultaneously expanded the Arnold Arboretum's living collection and pursued an astounding schedule of publication. Yet, the wood collection was seen as a crowning achievement during the lifetimes of both men. It was, according to one commentator, \"a perfectly unique collection which cannot anywhere be repeated.\"6 ARCHIVES OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM AMNH RESEARCH LIBRARY DIGITAL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, 2A5200 The Jesup Collection emerged from the collaboration of Morris K. Jesup (right) and Charles Sprague Sargent. Jesup Collection 27 Unprecedented Activity Following his return from the west, Sargent met with Jesup and Bickmore in New York in the first week of November 1880. In response to the proposed project, he sent a seven-page letter describing his \"suggestions\" for the wood collection and its exhibition, which in effect were stipulations to guarantee his participation. Sargent believed that the collection should incorporate every tree species that grew naturally in the United States, even those that were of limited distribution or held little economic value. As a reflection of his recent and ongoing work on the forest census, he argued that only this approach would allow the collection's importance to be realized by both the public and scientists, who, he would later assert, \"will value it in proportion to its completeness.\"7 Further, Sargent insisted that the exhibit be arranged according to the botanical relationships of the species, following the organization of his report for the forest census, and that the labels should incorporate the data from his investigations as to each species' geographic distribution and the properties of its wood. He shared Jesup's interest in including foliage and fruit to illustrate the aspect of the living trees, as well as the products derived from the trees that were important to commerce and the trades.8 In essence, it would be a full-scale adjunct to his census report, one that Jesup hoped would also have popular appeal and that all concerned believed would be an asset to the museum.9 Sargent's primary role in the project was to direct and coordinate the field efforts and, later, to provide interpretation for the resulting specimens. By mid-December 1880, once a general plan for the collection was understood, he was becoming impatient to send collectors into the field.10 The first to be recruited were alumni of the forest census who were familiar with both the terrain and tree species they were to locate, as well as the rigors and routine of moving logs from the forests to the railroads for shipping. Some were in the field as early as January, and specimens began arriving at the museum in early March 1881. Charles Mohr, a physician and botanist who lived in Mobile, Alabama, was charged with finding trees in the Gulf Coast states. (Records show that the first specimen to be received may have been Yucca treculeana, or Spanish dagger, an arborescent species, if not precisely a tree, sent from Texas by Mohr.11) Samuel B. Buckley, a botanist and long-time resident near Austin, Texas, began collecting nearby and at points across the southern interior of the state. Allen H. Curtiss, a naturalist living in Jacksonville, Florida, was sent to explore southern Florida, the Florida Keys, and the interior Southeast; in his first season, Curtiss sent more than forty specimens, and he ultimately contributed more than any other collector. George W. Letterman, a schoolteacher and amateur botanist in Allenton, Missouri, began his work that spring in Arkansas, made numerous collections in southern and central Missouri, and later ventured as far as northeastern Texas and Louisiana. Henry W. Ravenel, an accomplished botanist of Aiken, South Carolina, sent specimens from the Piedmont and coast of South Carolina and Georgia that year. Starting in the fall of 1881, John H. Sears, a naturalist in Salem, Massachusetts, explored the \"Atlantic forests\" of northern New York state and eastern Massachusetts. For the first two years, Vermont botanist Cyrus G. Pringle traveled well beyond his home state to collect in Arizona, California, and the Pacific Northwest, and later sent logs of several species from Texas and northern Mexico, as well; second only to Curtiss in number of specimens sent, Pringle certainly traveled more extensively for the project than anyone else. The collecting corps came to include physicians, veterans of state geological surveys and departments of agriculture, itinerant botanists, horticulturists, foresters, several of Sargent's professional acquaintances in the lumbering and milling industries, Sargent himself, and even the collection's caretaker, Samuel D. Dill, at the museum. The majority of specimens were collected by a handful of men, but over time more than fifty individuals contributed material to the Jesup Collection. Sargent initially envisioned an ambitious schedule, entailing just one or two years to complete the explorations necessary to find and acquire the specimens.12 That, like the costs involved, turned out to be underestimated\u2014not 28 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 only were there unforeseen delays but more species in newly explored places were discovered over time, in part as a result of Sargent's own studies. As time went on, Jesup sometimes questioned the necessity for including extraneous, noneconomic species, noting to Sargent, \"Its completeness in a scientific or botanical sense, to my mind is secondary.\"13 To Bickmore privately, he observed that many tree species, \"while they may be rare and valuable in a scientific sense, are useless economically owing to the remote and inaccessible districts where they grow and the necessary cost of transportation to manufacturing centres.\"14 Sargent nonetheless continued to send collectors far afield and on special trips for newly discovered or rare species in the interest of amassing a comprehensive collection. He had taken on the project gratis, with an eye toward his own long-term interests in American forests. With the collection's scientific contributions as his priority, Sargent advised Jesup early in 1881, \"It is not too late for us both to retire altogether from the undertaking, which unless carried out largely will add neither reputation to the Museum, nor credit to the parties most interested.\"15 The project went on, and fifteen years later he emphasized the significance of the work to Jesup: \"The formation of your Collection, the publication of my book, and other causes have led to an unprecedented activity in dendrological exploration and study in all parts of the country and several new species of trees have been discovered.\"16 Sargent's aim was to represent the arboreal flora of the continent, and he wanted Jesup's vision to match his own. It Should Contain Every Tree As the sponsor of the collection, Jesup not only funded the collector's activities but organized logistics for travel and shipping. He was wealthy and generous, but disciplined and frugal in his philanthropy, interested to see that his money was well spent for the greatest benefit. To this end, he set as a goal keeping costs of travel and freight to a minimum, even zero, whenever possible. Nonetheless, the cost of transportation, shipping, and tracking the specimens across the country represented the majority of the project's expenses and occupied much of the correspondence between Sargent and the museum during these early years. In the early weeks of 1881, Jesup personally communicated with the officers of dozens of railroad and steamship companies in order to procure travel passes for the collectors and free shipping for the weighty specimens they were expecting to send to New York from points around the country. Because the favors granted were often specific to individual collectors, over certain routes, and good only for specified periods of time, this became for him a never-ending task that strained his ample reserves of tact and humility. Through Jesup's general success in securing waivers, Sargent could then assign collectors to regions where they could travel freely and ship at no or reduced cost. In practice, there were frequent misunderstandings on the part of station agents who were unaware of these unconventional arrangements or would not act on them. Specimens were sometimes shipped from points or by routes other than what had been agreed upon, exceeded the weights and dimensions originally anticipated, were delayed so long that they decayed in transit, or were occasionally even lost. The railroads, and Jesup, wanted definite parameters ahead of time, whereas Sargent better understood the idiosyncrasies and exigencies of field work and insisted that flexibility was necessary. It was Jesup's money, and indeed his reputation, at risk, and these overages and losses were routine points of contention between the two principals almost from the beginning.17 As the true scale of the task became apparent, Jesup questioned Sargent's early estimates about the cost of the project. He had initially thought that the collection could be completed for ten thousand dollars or possibly less,18 but that sum was exceeded before the end of the second year of work; total expenditures multiplied fivefold before the sixth field season and continued to grow from there.19 Although Sargent promised to proceed as economically as he could, he maintained his emphasis on the need for a complete and scientifically valuable set of specimens. Following one expensive expedition in 1885, for example, Sargent countered Jesup's objections, telling him, \"I hope you will not endeavor to separate practical value from Jesup Collection 29 scientific value in your mind when considering this collection. They cannot safely be separated. And it is because I have always refused to do this in the treatment of the matter that the collection is what it is, the best of its kind.\"20 Bickmore and Jesup at the museum recognized that ceding some control to Sargent (and absorbing additional expense) was necessary both to achieving that goal and to maintaining goodwill in general.21 Nearly two decades after the project's inception, as he and Jesup revisited this same familiar disagreement in 1899, Sargent argued, \"It should contain every tree described and illustrated in my Silva of North America.\"22 Although their differences in philosophy did not entirely fade over time, Jesup grudgingly found himself obligated to continue to subsidize these missions\u2014 well into the 1890s and, for a few species, even past the turn of the century\u2014rather than risk the appearance of incompleteness once so many others had been gathered. Early on he remarked to Sargent, \"To have our museum contain that which cannot be found at any other will fully compensate me for the cost.\"23 A Grand Showing Unlike the small blocks of wood Sargent prepared for his census investigations24 or the short logs cut lengthwise for display at the Centennial Exhibition, the museum's specimens were to be whole logs, over five feet long when collected, and of such diameters as necessary (from a few inches to three feet or more) to represent the best-grown examples of the trees. Collectors routinely shipped thousands of pounds of specimens at once, where certain individual logs could weigh hundreds of pounds when freshly cut. At the outset, Sargent anticipated that about four hundred species would need to be assembled, but that number increased by another one hundred or more over time. Within the year, Bickmore reported to Sargent, \"We have been frequently receiving the magnificent series of logs your agents have gathered until they make a grand showing in the cellar.\"25 After the first full year of fieldwork, nearly three hundred were in various states of preparation at the museum, with more arriving by the month.26 Incoming shipments were initially delivered to the museum's \"new building\" (opened in December 187727) on Manhattan Square, west of Central Park. When space became limited, the logs were directed instead to the historical Arsenal building, where the museum's collections were originally housed, near the eastern boundary of the park. When the logs were prepared in the field, collectors were careful to wrap each one in burlap or other \"bagging\" material, sometimes also in rawhide, and to construct crates in which the log could be shipped with ample padding to preserve the bark intact. Once at the museum's workshop, they underwent a lengthy process of preparation for eventual display. Because the logs were shipped \"green\" and were full of moisture, the primary concern was for drying them carefully to prevent \"checking\" or splitting that would ruin them for display. Bickmore himself devised a method of boring holes into the bottom of a log to allow the wood to \"season\" or dry out more evenly.28 Bickmore notified Sargent further, \"We have a fire under the boilers in the cellar constantly so that that is probably the driest room in the building, and the heat is gentle & slow and I believe particularly well adapted to preparing the fine logs that are now coming in, and I think there will be no necessity of having the specimens kiln dried, unless you have reason to suspect they contain destructive larvae.\"29 It was estimated that logs could lose up to half their weight in drying, and that thorough seasoning could sometimes require one or two years.30 Following the drying process, the logs were cut to a uniform fifty-six inches in height; the upper twenty-four inches was sawn longitudinally in half, and the top edge of the cut end was beveled, resulting in the grain of the wood being exposed in three directions. Finally, one half of the cut surface was finished with varnish to provide a clear view of the grain. Sargent requested that a diagram be made of each log to show the pattern of the bark, the widths of the sapwood and heartwood, and the growth rings apparent in cross-section;31 these data, as indicators of growth rate, were eventually reported for many species in Sargent's fourteen-volume Silva of North America, but the diagrams themselves have not survived. 30 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Jesup's initial hopes that the collection would be ready for public viewing by the autumn of 1882 were not realized, but both he and Sargent agreed that the collection's \"value and permanence,\" from a scientific standpoint, and its \"beauty and usefulness\" to the public would be favored by postponing until all the specimens were fully seasoned, prepared, and labeled.32 The exhibit space dedicated to the Jesup Collection was intended to be on the third floor of the Arsenal, an area the museum regarded as \"dangerous\" even when exhibits had been open to the public there a decade earlier.33 Almost immediately, there were concerns about the combined weight of the specimens.34 When the walls of the building were observed to have to spread slightly by October 1882, the Department of Public Parks architect, Calvert Vaux, insisted that the excess weight be removed to comply with his specifications: not to exceed thirty-eight and a half tons, evenly distributed in the halls and the octagonal alcoves at each corner.35 At that time, there were 388 logs onsite and in preparation, with 60 more expected to \"complete\" the collection.36 This circumstance hinted at another persistent theme that would follow the collection through time: housing it would always present substantial, even prohibitive infrastructural challenges. Soon, the allotted hall at the Arsenal became a workshop and storeroom for the log specimens rather than their exhibit space. By the spring of 1883, construction at the museum's new building included the installation of \"a large glass case, in two sections, extending along the middle of the Lower Hall,\" meant to accommodate the log collection but necessarily displacing an exhibit of shells to another floor.37 By that autumn, there were two large cases, each 135 feet long, with six additional cases along the side.38 The initial delay of six months had extended to a full year, and even then, opening by the following year was in doubt. In February 1884, Sargent estimated that just 105 specimens were \"finished and ready\";39 in April, he wrote to Jesup and Bickmore to suggest delaying until the spring of 1885, when he thought that as many as 350 specimens would be fully prepared for exhibition.40 A Credit to the City With a date finally fixed for the exhibit's opening, Bickmore promoted it as \"the first effort yet made in this country to gather the native woods together in one collection on a scale commensurate with the extent of the new continent and the importance of its forests.\"41 Sargent had been at work on a condensed version of his census report, enumerating 412 species as The Woods of the United States, which would serve as a guidebook to the collection.42 In April, he reassured Jesup, \"The geographical labels will be finished this week. They have cost me an immense amount of labor & bother, but I think they will be a great success, and are certainly the best things of the kind ever attempted. I shall be in N.Y. next week, long enough to see that everything is properly arranged.\"43 In his annual report to the trustees of the museum, Jesup hoped that the collection \"will prove another popular attraction to the museum, and be the means of largely increasing the knowledge and information of the people on the subject of our forests, now demanding so large a share of public attention.\"44 The exhibit opened to visitors on May 18, 1885, to popular acclaim. In addition to 350 logs with their labels, the new exhibit featured about eighty watercolor illustrations of the foliage, flowers, and fruit of tree species, prepared by Mary Robeson Sargent (Sargent's wife) at Jesup's request. These, in particular, met with high praise: \"The artist has been true to nature, without loss of refined and purely artistic method, a combination almost unknown in what is called a scientific treatment of natural objects. The result is delightful \u2026 many persons will appreciate for the first time the beauty and grace possessed by the flowers and fruits of many of our common forest trees.\"45 For the benefit of individuals wishing to study the woods from a botanical perspective, a corresponding herbarium had been prepared by Charles Faxon, the assistant director and herbarium curator at the Arnold Arboretum, and shipped to the museum that spring. The Jesup Collection was soon described in the press as \"a credit to the city, and a lasting testimonial to the wisdom and public spirit of Facing page: The press lauded the opening of the Jesup Collection in 1885. This engraving by C. Graham appeared in Harper's Weekly shortly after the exhibition opening. COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR 32 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 the gentleman who caused it to be created.\"46 It was a first step toward Jesup's original ideal, still awaiting not only more species but examples of economic products and additional illustrations to fully represent the American forests. As far as Sargent's objectives, there was also more to come, but scientific visitors had already found it as informative as it was popular. Worthily Housed In its first incarnation, the woods exhibit occupied the lower floor of the Museum, \"in the space between the rows of side cases,\" leading to the observation on opening day that the space \"is too contracted for this use, and the floor has a cluttered appearance which those who recall its original spaciousness and light will regret. Plainly the time has come when a new wing for the Museum is demanded, so that this collection, unique in its scientific and industrial importance, shall have the sweep of an entire floor.\"47 At the time, the logs shared the hall with the collection of mammals, whose curator was critical of the disruption to those displays.48 Sargent, naturally, weighed in, complaining that \"nothing can be worse than the present mixture of mammals & woods.\"49 While there were already long-term plans for additions to the museum's building, Sargent proposed an alternative idea to Jesup: the museum should construct a separate one-story building for the purpose of housing the wood collection and associated forestry resources, including a library and herbarium, and call it the Jesup Building. He wrote to Jesup, \"The whole thing could be put up in a couple of A large cross-section of a Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) appears among cases in the American Museum of Natural History's Forestry Hall, shown in 1903. AMNH RESEARCH LIBRARY DIGITAL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, 42124 Jesup Collection 33 months and you could have your collection in safe quarters where it could never be interfered with by any one & arranged in such a manner that there never could be any danger of its becoming merged or mixed with the other collections.\"50 It is clear that Sargent wanted to resolve some of the fundamental curatorial problems that the collection was already experiencing, but it is also tempting to suppose that Sargent wanted his own museum of woods (and that Jesup would build it for him). That notion was never pursued, but the Jesup Collection did prevail in occupying the lower hall all to itself. A new display was opened to the public on November 15, 1890, revealing 425 species and almost 250 watercolors, arranged in family groups in the cases along each side of the hall.51 While this was seen as an improvement, and many visitors believed the collection actually was complete, Sargent advised Jesup not a year later, \"I don't think that we ought to consider the arrangement as final or that the collection is worthily housed or properly arranged until some radical change is made by which sufficient room for its display can be had.\"52 In 1893, planning began for the construction of the museum's southeast wing, part of the Seventy-Seventh Street facade, the ground floor of which would be dedicated to the wood collection when it was completed in 1895.53 As the new wing took shape and its opening drew closer, there ensued a paramount disagreement (most emphatic and least charitable on the part of Sargent) over plans for the new hall. In a two-page, typewritten response to Jesup's early scheme for cases and general arrangement, Sargent replied vehemently, and disproportionately: \"A good deal of additional work in connection with the Collection has been laid out for me but I confess I do not feel much like undertaking it if the results are to be as bad as you seem to be determined to make them.\" He asserted that his reputation among scientists could suffer if Jesup's plans were followed, concluding, \"This, from my point of view, is the unfortunate thing in the whole matter and why I believe that I have not been treated properly by you.\"54 Jesup wrote out a six-page reply (that he did not send) in which he recounted their previous discussions about the design. He concluded, \"It would be more agreeable to me in meeting with objections from yourself to have them presented to me in a spirit of help and friendliness \u2026 During the many years of our friendship I have exerted myself to please you, and shall continue to do so in any way I can, but I expect consideration at your hands also.\"55 In place of this letter, Jesup sent museum secretary John H. Winser to consult with Sargent in person about the central points of dispute, namely the design of the new cases and the placement of the immense cross-sections of coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) and giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum). In short, Jesup had wanted to include two or more round cases to break up the \"monotony\" of the exhibit, but doing so would have interrupted the botanical order to a degree that Sargent could not tolerate. At the same time, Jesup had arranged to place the cross-sections of the big trees just outside the main hall, on either side of the entrance, in part because of the architectural requirements for supporting them; Sargent was adamant that they should be placed in the center of the hall with the other logs, despite that this arrangement would require structural reinforcement of the floor. Jesup's proposal took into account the flow of visitors, the overall aesthetic, costs, and the physical constraints of the building; Sargent worried most about what other scientists would think of the exhibit and felt that those concerns had not been adequately considered.56 Citing engineering and safety factors, an Executive Committee of the museum resolved the practical question, temporarily, in favor of the original layout.57 Early in 1896, when the specimens were moved into the new hall and the watercolors were hung, the debate subsided, and Sargent's attention turned back to his usual curatorial concerns. Jesup assured the museum's trustees that the lower hall of the new East Wing had been designated for the \"permanent lodgment\" of the wood collection and concluded, \"It is thought that no better plan can be conceived whereby the effectiveness of the exhibit can be increased.\"58 Not surprisingly, however, even this latest arrangement would be revised again as specimens were added to the exhibit, at Sargent's urging, through the early 1900s.59 Cyrus Pringle \u2014 Pacirsc Northwest, Arizona, California, Texas, and Northern Mexico \u2014 \"He made for the Jesup Collection of North American Woods \u2026 a large collection of timber specimens from some of the most inaccessible and digscult regions \u2026 Becoming interested during this journey in the usora of Mexico, he has for the last twelve years devoted himself exclusively to its exploration. During his annual journeys, which have extended over many of the states, he has made large and unrivaled collections \u2026 and has discovered many undescribed genera and species.\" Samuel Buckley \u2014 Southern Texas \u2014 \"Buckleya, a remarkable Santalaceous genus, of which he discovered the usowers and fruit, and which is represented in the usora of America by a graceful shrub of the mountains of North Carolina \u2026 rstly commemorates Buckley's zealous and too little appreciated labors in the cause of science.\" Jesup Collectors \u2014 More than rsfty collectors helped with acquiring, packaging, and sending large wood specimens for the Jesup Collection of North American Woods. fse specimens originated from thirty-two states, along with four Mexican states and one Canadian province. Several collectors were especially prolrsc. fseir general collecting locales are shown on this map of coniferous and deciduous forests, prairies, and treeless regions, created for the 1880 Census of the United States. Charles Sargent often commemorated the careers of collectors in his Silva of North America. fsese excerpts suggest the nature of the collectors' accomplishments. State or province represented in the collection. Charles Mohr \u2014 Gulf Coast \u2014 \"He made his home at Mobile, Alabama. Here for many years he has been a successful manufacturing druggist, and has devoted his spare time to the study of the usora and the natural resources of the state.\" Allen Curtiss \u2014 Florida and Interior Southeast \u2014 \"He has found many plants, including a number of tropical trees, not known in the territory of the United States before his time.\" John Sears \u2014 Northern New York and Eastern Massachusetts George Letterman \u2014 Missouri, Arkansas, and Northeastern Texas \u2014 \"He rsnally in 1869 settled in Allenton, Missouri, a railroad hamlet about thirty miles west of St. Louis \u2026 fse distribution of the trees of this region before Mr. Letterman's travels was little known, and much useful information concerning them was rsrst gathered by him.\" Henry Ravenel \u2014 South Carolina and Georgia \u2014 \"No other American botanist, perhaps, has minutely studied so many forms of the vegetable kingdom as Ravenel, and none has been more respected or beloved.\" 36 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Practically Complete As Sargent's early work on the forest census had concluded in 1884, his focus shifted to taxonomically oriented investigations in support of his Silva of North America and other publications. For nearly two decades, the development of the Jesup Collection was synergistic with that work. Sargent never rested in his ambition to add species to the wood collection, even when his practice conflicted with Jesup's financial concerns and with the museum's pragmatic considerations for their curation. As early as April 1883, after more than two full years of collecting effort, Sargent had indicated that there were twenty-one species needed to complete the collection.60 Still, in February 1886, he reported that there were another \"18 or really 19,\" of which several had already been sent for.61 Just a year later, he wrote, \"I find that there are still a few species which must be added to the Jesup Collection in order to make it complete, and that, moreover, a few important species are not yet properly represented in the Collection.\"62 Sargent reflected in 1889, \"I consider that the collection is practically complete,\" 63 but that notion was short-lived. Sargent soon organized a special expedition to the West Coast and Arizona in 1891 for several unrepresented species. In January 1894, Jesup reported that Sargent had sent him \"the gratifying assurance\" that the collection \"is now complete\"64\u2014even as Sargent was preparing to leave on another collecting trip to Arizona to support his work on the Silva, resulting in at least one new specimen for the museum.65 In April 1898, another twenty-eight species were called for.66 In May 1900, Sargent wrote to museum secretary J. H. Winser, \"We have been finding a lot more trees in the United States during the last year. None of them are very large but all have a scientific interest.\u2026 Now what I want to know is whether I shall go ahead and use my discretion in obtaining such material as may be necessary to complete the Collection.\"67 A year later, Sargent ordered several more specimens from Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, and noted, \"I understand there is still a good deal more work to do on the collection before it can be considered complete.\"68 Very late in this process, Sargent occasionally accompanied his requests with a lament, such as, \"If it is not continued, I shall be saved a lot of disagreeable bother and letter-writing.\"69 Jesup at times wondered at the necessity of so many very similar species, the number of duplicate specimens that had been sent, and the many that needed to be replaced over time because of damage or decay. He was also not na\u00efve to the fact that he was often financing Sargent's research by supporting new collecting trips for certain trees, and he once expressed frustration about this habit.70 In a note to himself on the back of one letter, Jesup wrote, \"I wonder when the getting of specimens is going to stop.\"71 Both men were clearly tiring of the work of supervising and organizing the collection, wanting it to be both comprehensive and finished, but Jesup's support continued. Still additional specimens were received at the museum late in 1901,72 but by July 1902, Sargent was again discussing sending a collector for more.73 In 1908, the year of Jesup's death, thirty-five specimens (possibly the last) were added to the exhibit.74 Intelligence, Technical Knowledge and Enthusiasm While Sargent continued to direct the collection of new specimens, the opening of the museum's public exhibit in 1885 had added an informal duty: the role of absentee curator. Although S. D. Dill, an experienced carpenter, had been hired specifically to oversee the preparation and installation of the logs and related materials, as well as to build the cases for them, Sargent had ideas of his own about how the collection should be handled and displayed. Beyond persistently lobbying for more space, he involved himself in the minutiae of how logs should be arranged, directly supervised the preparation of labels, and critiqued the display of illustrations following his occasional visits to New York. Only months into the exhibition, Sargent wrote to Jesup with concerns that some specimens housed in new cases were \"already suffering from extremes of temperature as I feared that they would.\" He added that he was \"very anxious & troubled\" that Dill's workroom in the Arsenal was inadequately heated and exposed the specimens to \"danger of destruction by fire or at the hands of outsiders.\"75 Nearly fifteen years later, he offered a similar assessment and insisted that Dill be provided with a workspace Jesup Collection 37 Cross-sections of giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum, left) and coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) flank the entrance to Forestry Hall. The giant sequoia is the only specimen from the Jesup Collection now displayed at the museum. AMNH RESEARCH LIBRARY DIGITAL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, 5299 that better protected the specimens, adding, \"The money value and cost of these specimens is small in proportion to the expenditure of intelligence, technical knowledge and enthusiasm necessary to procure them, and it is discouraging after all the labor which has been expended in getting them if they are allowed to go to ruin in the Museum.\"76 Although work remained to be done, and to Sargent's dismay, Dill, the collection's chief preparator, caretaker, and de facto on-site curator for twenty years, left the museum for his native Nova Scotia in 1902. To facilitate interpretation of the specimens, museum director Herman C. Bumpus began an inventory of the wood collection in 1903 77 and enlisted Roy W. Miner from the Department of Invertebrate Zoology for the task. Even at that time, the museum's growing bias toward other facets of natural history, to the neglect of botany, was apparent to Bumpus, who frankly acknowledged the economic entomology and wood collections as the entirety of the museum's botanical holdings.78 The \"Forestry Department\" (comprising essentially the collection itself) was without a dedicated curator until 1907, when Alfred C. Burrill, an entomologist by training, was appointed to oversee the exhibit of woods.79 In 1909, Mary C. Dickerson was hired as curator of the Department of Woods and Forestry and served in that capacity for a decade.80 During her editorship of the American Museum Journal, forestry was several times a featured topic. In her 1910 guide to \"Trees and Forestry,\" 38 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 which drew examples from the Jesup Collection, she expanded on themes of ecology and conservation that were not only current but had long been advocated by the collection's progenitors, Jesup and Sargent.81 Just two years after Jesup's death, museum president Henry F. Osborn reported, \"The Jesup Collection of North American Woods is being rearranged and installed in a way to bring out more clearly the classification of trees, their relationship and their economic uses.\"82 With the wood collection numbering 505 specimens on display, additions were made for several more years in the form of watercolors, photographs, and wax models of foliage, flowers, and fruit;83 Mary Sargent had continued to add to the watercolor series, until more than four hundred paintings were on display with the logs. Space continued to be a problem as time went on (there, and throughout the museum), and activity centered around rearranging specimens to avoid crowding to the extent that was possible.84 Aside from Sargent, who had contributed his knowledge during the collection's genesis, only an oversight committee\u2014chaired in absentia by Gifford Pinchot (cofounder of the Yale Forest School) and James W. Toumey (the school's first Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silviculture)\u2014 afforded forestry expertise after the turn of the century. It was not until 1917 that the department had the benefit of an in-house, credentialed forester. During an era of very limited departmental budget, Yale graduate and future forest ecologist Barrington Moore had been hired as assistant curator, and it was hoped that his experience would contribute to topical research and education at the institution.85 He was shortly called to service in the First World War, however, and by 1920 both he (for other opportunities) and Dickerson (for health reasons) had left the museum. This loss of expertise and energy only compounded the obstacles faced by the wood collection and related subjects that Jesup had promoted. As institutional memory of the collection's formation had been episodically lost since the turn of the century, and the collection's place of priority eroded after the death of its creator and benefactor, its fate became inexorably linked to that of the department going forward. An Old-Fashioned Systematic Arrangement Unlike other collections and exhibits prepared by the various dynamic and actively growing departments of the museum\u2014especially Mammalogy and Ornithology, Paleontology, and Anthropology\u2014the wood collection remained little changed from the 1910s through the 1930s. While the curatorship went unfilled, the Jesup Collection had a champion in museum director Frederic A. Lucas, who in 1922 wrote to President Osborn, \"It is extremely important that we should revive our forestry department, for its own sake and also in memory of Mr. Jesup.\"86 Following Lucas's death in 1929, George H. Sherwood, as museum director and curator of the Department of Education, became its defender. After his death eight years later, the scientific staff of the museum proposed that \"an attempt be made to place some one in charge of the wood collection.\"87 For another decade, the Department of Forestry and Conservation was again chaired and staffed by scientists borrowed from other departments, until a curator was hired for the position in 1946. In the meantime, the finished logs not only occupied an entire exhibit hall but myriad smaller duplicates and miscellaneous wood samples took up valuable storage space when lack of such space at the museum was a chronic problem. Discussions about disposing of the Jesup Collection began to stir at least as early as 1937, when museum director Roy C. Andrews (Sherwood's successor) had suggested that the collection be donated to the New York Botanical Garden \"or some other institution\" in order to create space for new exhibitions. In response, the museum's Council of the Scientific Staff resolved that the collection remained important scientifically as well as to the work of the Department of Education, and argued that to give away this \"superb gift\" could discourage other donations to the museum.88 When the question resurfaced in 1942 under the museum's new director, Albert E. Parr, calls to abandon the wood collection were again met with protest. Informal opinions attributed to the museum's Advisory Committee on Plan and Scope included regret \"that serious proposals have been made to burn up the collecJesup Collection 39 tion,\" and indicated a strong consensus that the museum had an obligation to find \"a satisfactory or a better home for it\" in order to avoid a \"gross\" breach of trust.89 Parr's plans for the museum were dampened during the ensuing years of the Second World War as the institution adjusted to extended absences among curatorial and administrative staff who had joined the armed forces, changes in visitation and patronage, curtailed research activity, and altered demands on the museum's technical and human resources.90 Following the war, Parr discussed the process of \"reconversion\" from the distorted wartime operations of the museum to a post-war vision for its future. He made it clear that he saw this process, both inevitable and necessary, as an opportunity to focus the museum's scope and actively integrate its research and educational activities across disciplines and into the wider landscape of public consciousness. He wanted to find alternatives to standard approaches to exhibition, where \"an old-fashioned systematic arrangement of specimens, unrelieved by an occasionally freer use of artistry, becomes dull and boring to the spectator.\"91 Abandoning staid practices was the foundation for planning the museum's \"program of modernization\" in the years to follow.92 In addition to its orphan status among the departments of the museum, there may have been no single display in the museum at that After more than sixty years on public display, the Jesup Collection was dismantled in Forestry Hall in 1948. AMNH RESEARCH LIBRARY DIGITAL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, 2A1316 40 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 time that so epitomized a nineteenth-centurystyle exhibit than the Jesup Collection of North American Woods. Shortly after Parr became the museum's director in 1942, he initiated discussions with botanist Bror E. Dahlgren, once an assistant curator in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the museum, who since the 1920s had been affiliated with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Dahlgren was asked to reconsider how the subjects of forestry and conservation would be represented at the museum. Initially, his advice pertained to a rearrangement of the existing log specimens, \"to break up the single linear, traditional systematic arrangement,\" emphasizing instead the geographic distributions and associations of the many species represented. He envisioned this new scheme as representing the composition and structure of regional American forests, resulting in displays that were more like the dioramas familiar from the museum's zoological exhibits.93 Even with this new thinking toward repurposing the logs, however, the collection's future was not secure. In July 1946, botanist Henry K. Svenson became chair and curator of the reconstituted Department of Forestry and General Botany, which counted two other museum associates, Clarence Hay (anthropology) and Charles Russell (education), as its scientific staff. As a longtime consultant to the museum while a curator at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Svenson had AMNH RESEARCH LIBRARY DIGITAL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, 322587 Artists create detailed replicas of trees for the Olympic Forest diorama during the renovation of the Forestry Hall in 1952. Jesup Collection 41 been designing a new forestry hall and began his tenure at the museum with a preliminary plan for the new exhibits. He recognized the historical importance of the wood collection as \"a heritage of the America that is past, and that our forests would no longer provide such a fine assemblage of material,\" and noted that it would \"become of greater and greater value as time goes on.\" At the same time, Svenson recognized that the future of the department would be a departure from its past. The emphasis of its work would not be on specimens, which would be kept \"behind the scenes,\" but on illustrating the integrated relationships and landscape processes represented by forest vegetation.94 Toward this end, the existing Hall of Forestry was closed on November 1, 1948, after which the exhibits were dismantled.95 As exhibits were revised, Parr explained in 1951 that the role of natural history museums in the progress of science had been evolving over the prior decade. There remained an abiding interest in individual organisms, which were the realm of basic research and a staple of the museum's scientific program. At the same time and increasingly, the museum identified new objectives for their work: understanding the interactions of organisms with their environment (their ecology) and recognizing the necessity for their conservation in nature. It was in these areas where Parr saw the museum's most critical educational mission.96 An early expression of this philosophy was the Felix M. Warburg Memorial Hall of Ecology. Occupying the space where the Jesup Collection had been exhibited, several new exhibits were intended to illustrate the ecosystems of New York State and how the human population influenced the landscape. Adjacent to this, in the southeast corner of the first floor (formerly known as Darwin Hall or the Hall of Invertebrate Zoology), the new Hall of North American Forests was unveiled on May 14, 1958, featuring life-sized dioramas of eleven forest types from across the continent. Where the hundreds of individual trunk segments, separate models of foliage and flowers, and illustrations that populated the former hall had left their forests of origin to the imagination of visitors, the new displays revealed integrated forest ecosystems, with characteristic herbaceous plants, animals, and physical elements (sunlight, water, soils) conspicuously represented in three dimensions. The focus of the new hall was on forests as habitats, the interrelationships among organisms that live in forested regions, and the importance of maintaining these ecosystems.97 Although the tree species themselves were no longer the raisons d'\u00eatre of the new exhibits, the new hall was, effectively, an embodiment of the ideals that its namesake had hoped to promote through the assembly of the original Jesup Collection. The new exhibits were met with admiration.98 Of all the pieces formerly on display, only the large cross-section of giant sequoia remained, as it does today. Meanwhile, as the penultimate step toward disposition, the woods had been officially designated a \"scientific storage collection\" in 1953, and the specimens were sequestered elsewhere in the museum.99 Ponderous and Not Easily Handled In September 1956, Parr ultimately succeeded in convincing the museum's Management Board that \"there was no probability of this material [the wood collection] ever being put to any real use by The American Museum of Natural History.\" He asked the board to approve the transfer of the Jesup Collection to the Smithsonian Institution, which he hoped \"would guarantee proper care and use of the material in accordance with the purposes for which it was collected.\"100 With the board's approval to pursue disposition, then-curator of the museum's Department of Vegetation Studies, Jack McCormick, initiated correspondence with the National Museum to effect this transfer. Because the Smithsonian was preoccupied with the construction of new buildings and other exhibits, these discussions proceeded intermittently over the next two years. The director of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, Remington Kellogg, finally submitted a formal request to Parr in December 1957. His proposal outlined a dramatic new vision for the specimens: Our plans foresee the utilization of the collection in several ways. The large redwood, Sitka spruce, Douglas-fir, sugar pine, ponderosa pine, white pine, oak, walnut, and longleaf pine trunk 42 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 specimens are being considered in connection with exhibits, in the coming Museum of History and Technology, on early lumbering in the Northeast, the Lake States, the Central Hardwood Region, the Southern Pinery, the Pacific Northwest, and the California Redwood Region. A few of the other large specimens may possibly be halved lengthwise, one half being exhibited with tangentially and radially cut boards from the other half, and the remainder cut into study samples for distribution to educational institutions, colleges, universities, and museums. The remainder of the collection would eventually be cut into study samples for distribution as stated above. We would retain at least two specimens of each species that is cut.101 Parr expressed reticence toward the Smithsonian's plans to destroy the majority of the logs, but he was steadfast in his determination to relocate the huge collection.102 The museum's Board of Trustees approved the transfer at its April 1958 meeting.103 Despite this progress, the arrangements for the collection's transfer remained suspended for another two years. Parr retired, and James A. Oliver became the museum's new director in 1959. During this same time frame, both the directorship of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History and the curatorship of its Department of Botany (which included its wood collection) also changed. In 1960, William L. Stern became the Smithsonian's new curator of the Division of Woods. Stern, formerly the curator of the Samuel J. Record wood collection at Yale University, had earlier in that role declined the museum's offer of the Jesup Collection. He explained to McCormick, \"We refused on the grounds that the space needed for storage would be beyond our means, that many of the pieces were ponderous and not easily handled.\" At the Smithsonian, Stern was again faced with the prospect of acquiring the Jesup Collection. In January 1960, he noted to McCormick, \"If I had been Curator of the Division of Woods in the National Museum at the time the Jesup Collection was offered, I do not know how I would have reacted to the offer.\u2026 I just hope that there will be no restrictions on cutting the specimens and that there are no qualifications regarding the handling of the material once it is in the National Museum.\"104 Stern had expressed his opinion to the Smithsonian's new director of the Museum of Natural History, Albert C. Smith, that despite \"the historical importance and unique nature\" of the Jesup Collection, \"it would not greatly increase the usefulness of our present collections for anatomical study.\"105 In his correspondence with Oliver in June 1960, Smith explained, \"One of the problems that we both inherited, in connection with our new positions, concerns the Jesup Collection of Woods of the United States.\u2026 I am now in the embarrassing position of having to ask you to allow the Smithsonian Institution to reverse itself, as to acceptance of the Jesup Collection.\" 106 He indicated that although one or two of the monumental cross-sections might still be useful in their exhibits, the costs of relocation and the ever-present problem of storage were obstacles to their previously agreed-upon plans. Oliver, of course, was disappointed but acknowledged the Smithsonian's position.107 For the sake of the logs, it was certainly a fortuitous development: the very scope and volume of the collection that had inspired museum visitors had made it difficult to accommodate elsewhere, and just as onerous to cut up into tiny hand samples. These were only the first obstacles the museum encountered in its efforts to dispose of the Jesup Collection, but the reasons would not change going forward. McCormick next approached William C. Steere, director of the New York Botanical Garden. After initially suggesting that the garden could accept the Jesup Collection, however, the offer was declined later in 1961.108 Following McCormick's departure from the museum in August of that year, at which time the Department of Vegetation Studies disappeared forever, Oliver took up the cause himself. To an inquiry from Stanley A. Cain, of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources, he wrote: \"This collection is really a very important one and it should be transferred to a single institution intact. The bulk of the collection is one of the big problems that hinders anyone from accepting it. However, there are no restrictions on it and the wood samples could easily be cut up for other institutions.\"109 This Jesup Collection 43 latest offer was not pursued. With essentially the same preamble, Oliver next approached the Field Museum of Natural History, but received no favorable reply.110 Happy to Turn it Over As Oliver's frustrated efforts began to resemble desperation, a promising inquiry arrived from the Pacific Northwest. Early in 1963, Oliver had spoken with a man named Lloyd S. Millegan, a retired public servant who lived in McMinnville, Oregon, and ran a small marquetry business, Lloyd's of Oregon, in nearby Portland. Millegan envisioned mounting a display of the logs at the New York World's Fair in 1964, then displaying the collection in Portland to generate publicity and business for his handicrafts. Having been unsuccessful in finding another museum to accept the collection, Oliver explained that the museum was \"eager\" and \"would be happy to turn it over to anyone who will undertake the cost of packing and transporting the entire collection from the museum to the new location.\" He emphasized that \"the entire collection be taken in its entirety because we have no personnel to dispose of it properly piecemeal.\" 111 When another group, coincidentally also in Portland, inquired about the collection later that year, Oliver asked Millegan to submit a formal offer indicating his intentions and to confirm that the collection would be removed by February 1964.112 While Oliver awaited word from Millegan, he continued to entertain correspondence with Aldred A. Heckman, director of the Louis W. and Maud Hill Family Foundation in St. Paul, Minnesota. Through the common acquaintance of William Steere at the New York Botanical Garden, the Hill Family Foundation had been in discussions with the Gallery of Trees Committee, a group of industry and civic leaders as well as forestry professionals, about assisting them in acquiring the Jesup Collection for their museum in Portland. Heckman explained, \"There is real interest in having the Collection in Portland.\" He emphasized that there was both local expertise available to prepare and interpret the proposed exhibit, as well as an audience already interested in trees and forestry attending the existing forestry museum. Further, the City of Portland and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry had indicated willingness to participate in structuring the acquisition.113 Steere himself wrote to Heckman, \"Naturally I am deeply grateful to you for your personal interest in seeing that an exhibit of national importance is not reduced to veneer or small samples\u2014or ashes.\"114 At an early meeting in January 1964, the Gallery of Trees Committee proceeded to address questions about transportation of the collection and the siting, design, and construction of a new building to house it. The Hill Family Foundation offered to defray the costs of transporting the collection to Portland, provided that it be publicly owned and exhibited. The City of Portland's Park Bureau and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry were identified as the preferred partners.115 Whether it had intended to or not, the meeting illustrated the contrast between the committee's plans, for which the organizers could demonstrate institutional, technical, intellectual, and financial support, and those of Millegan, whose intentions had not addressed any of the real practicalities involved with adopting these specimens. Both the Gallery of Trees Committee and the Hill Family Foundation had been surprised to learn of Millegan's prior claim, but their strong interest in obtaining the logs for Portland's museum compelled them to include him in their discussions. Millegan was asked to explain his relationship to the collection. The meeting minutes recorded: \"He asked for it not knowing then what could be done with it. His offer was accepted.\u2026 [He] said he had no deed for the collection, merely a letter saying he could have it.\"116 He was asked what conditions he would place on forfeiting his \"claim\" to the collection so that the committee could proceed. Millegan stipulated first that the collection should be freely accessible and well presented; beyond that, he wanted to use the exhibit to educate visitors about marquetry and its use of various woods, and to display his marquetry products alongside the exhibit.117 At this time, Heckman indicated to Oliver that there would be no further discussion among the foundation and the entities in Portland until Millegan's position was clarified. He concluded, \"It seemed 44 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 to me that we were rapidly getting to the point of having too many cooks as far as the North American Woods Collection is concerned.\"118 The chair of the Gallery of Trees Committee, Thornton T. Munger, addressed Oliver shortly after the meeting, indicating that the committee was \"impatient\" to understand where they stood in relation to Millegan's plans to acquire the collection.119 Heckman soon wrote to Oliver, as well, reinforcing the message of progress that had been made toward planning for the collection's move to Portland under the assumption that Millegan would cede the collection. He added, \"We thought that if funds were assured to cover the costs of transporting the Collection to Portland and preparing it for display, the decisions regarding these other matters would be made with reasonable speed. This is as far as we can go. The next steps will have to be taken in Portland.\"120 Millegan subsequently contacted the committee to revise his terms for relinquishing his claim to the collection, introducing the demand that he be allowed \"to operate in the exhibit area a concession where selected gift and educational items in wood could be purchased.\" The committee's chair, Munger, was a retired forester of long tenure in the U.S. Forest Service whose career and research had been devoted to developing methods for sustainable forestry and conservation. He and the Gallery of Trees Committee envisioned a much broader mission for the collection, that it would illustrate the forest resources of the country for the benefit of public education. Neither the committee, nor the City of Portland, nor the Hill Family Foundation approved of the idea of using the collection to support a commercial enterprise, which in terms of the proposed new building would also be prohibited by city ordinance.121 Although the committee was at an impasse as the negotiations stretched into April, May, and June, Munger had continued to plan as though a compromise would eventually be reached.122 After hearing again from Munger following a meeting in May, Oliver decided to finally draw the matter to a close. He informed Millegan in June, \"You have repeatedly stated that you were interested in acquiring this collection and were given several deadlines for the acquisition of the collection.\u2026 I think we have been exceedingly patient in waiting for you to fulfill your intentions. Therefore, your option to the collection has been withdrawn and we shall seek to dispose of the collection through other channels.\" 123 Oliver notified Munger of the transaction and renewed his offer to the Gallery of Trees Committee, with the only requirement being \"that we hope it will be exhibited for the benefit of the public and will be available to students for study.\" He urged that the collection be transferred by September 1.124 The Gallery of Trees Committee was relieved, the Hill Family Foundation was satisfied, and the City Council and Oregon Museum of Science and Industry all agreed that the collection would finally belong to Portland. In the meantime, the Gallery of Trees Committee had reached a consensus about the location for the new exhibit. Rather than constructing a new building, the Jesup Collection could be displayed on the unoccupied second story of the old Forestry Building, a stupendous log structure that had been built in northwest Portland for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. The main floor was already in use as a museum of forestry and the logging industry, and it was thought that the log specimens would complement these exhibits. Because the aging balconies required engineering changes to accommodate the collection, the committee intended to store the collection once it arrived in Portland while funding was raised for the renovations.125 Just a month after the final July meeting that approved of these plans, tragedy swept them all aside. A fire started in the office of the Forestry Building on the evening of August 17 and rapidly spread to the entire structure. The next morning, Munger observed the smoldering remains, which included the entire contents of the city's forestry museum that he had helped to oversee.126 By 1971, when the new Western Forestry Center building opened, the story of the calamity in the museum's own informational materials had come to include the Jesup Collection and its miraculous escape of this fate by having still been in storage in Portland.127 Twenty years after the fire, the story read: \"When the old log museum burned in August Jesup Collection 45 1964, two box cars full of the Jesup collection had just arrived. Sidetracked and waiting to be unloaded, the collection narrowly missed destruction in the fire. The exhibit then was stored by the city until the new forestry center opened in June 1971.\"128 In fact, the Jesup Collection had still been safely in New York. Munger wrote to Oliver just days after the fire, expressing the committee's sadness at the loss and explaining its plans to rebuild. He noted, \"It is very fortunate that the Jesup Collection was not there.\"129 At the museum, Oliver and his staff were solidifying plans for an early October moving day. The Santini Brothers moving company was contracted to pack and transport the collection.130 On October 6, 1964, the specimens departed the museum aboard three moving vans destined for Portland, Oregon (the surviving paperwork gives no indication that railroad cars were employed).131 How they were stored once they arrived there is not recorded, but it is possible that the Gallery of Trees Committee took advantage of one of the offers for local warehouse space that had been made during their planning process.132 The Jesup Collection would not be put on display for nearly seven more years while a new building was constructed, but that building promised to include dedicated space for the logs. At the new Western Forestry Center, which opened in June 1971 in Washington Park, west of downtown Portland, the Jesup Collection In 1971, the Jesup Collection of Woods reopened in a new home at the Western Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon. ARCHIVES OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM 46 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 was \"the background theme that links together feature displays at the Forestry Center. Some of the largest logs are stationed at the entrance and around the outdoor covered walkway; inside, smaller specimens circle the first-floor display room. Other logs fill corners and file along corridors.\" 133 Following their move, the logs had been cleaned, refinished, and given new labels by local members of the Society of American Foresters and the International Wood Collectors Society. The historical value of the 505 logs said to be on display, representing trees of such stature that in many cases could no longer be observed in the United States, was well appreciated, and the collection remained a popular exhibit.134 As the Western Forestry Center expanded its educational mission and shifted its focus to forests at a global scale, taking on the name World Forestry Center in 1986, the collection's relevance was again eclipsed by its physical footprint. About January 1994, the collection was donated to Agricenter International in Memphis, Tennessee.135 Although exhibited there for several years, the logs have since spent more than two decades in storage. A Heritage Following Jesup's death, Sargent reflected, \"The formation of the Jesup collection of North American Woods \u2026 was a matter of national importance. The preparation of this collection enabled us to study the distribution of the economic value of many trees which, before Mr. Jesup's undertaking, were largely unknown. I think it can be said that this collection is the finest representation of forest wealth that exists in any country.\"136 In its time on exhibit, the collection was marveled at by audiences for more than eighty years altogether. It provided not only Jesup and Sargent but some early influencers of American forestry\u2014including Heinrich Mayr, Carl A. Schenck, Gifford Pinchot, Bernhard E. Fernow, Barrington Moore, and later even Thornton Munger\u2014with inspiration and a platform to promote a growing movement supporting the conservation of American forests. What the logs represent has not changed, and their historical significance has only grown. Apart from the varied circumstances leading to their assembly in New York from all across North America, as a group the collection has twice crossed the country; it has evaded annihilation more than once, each time saved by wellmeaning caretakers facing formidable logistical challenges. More than 120 years since the consolidation of the collection, although many of the logs are superficially weathered and show wear and tear from handling and the elements, their number is mainly intact. The wood itself has largely not suffered and will be restorable in some future, truly permanent, home. Research to document the geographic origins of individual logs is ongoing; these findings will enable many of them to retake their scientific potential, where study of the wood itself may contribute meaningfully to the knowledge of our environmental past. All of them may yet function as emissaries for their species and for the forested regions from which they came\u2014 possibly even more so today than at the time of the collection's unveiling, when many contemporaries believed that such trees would be lost from America's forests in time, even as forests generally were disappearing, and that such a collection could never again be made.137 Acknowledgments This research was supported in part by a 2019 Sargent Award for Visiting Scholars from the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. For their assistance, the author is grateful to the curators of the Harvard University Herbaria; Lisa Pearson at the Arnold Arboretum; Rebecca Morgan and Gregory Raml at the Archives of the American Museum of Natural History; Alex Wiedenhoeft and Regis Miller at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin; John Butler and John Charles Wilson at Agricenter International, Memphis, Tennessee; and Mark Reed, Beavercreek, Oregon. Notes 1 A Noble Gift, Sun (New York), 17 May 1885, p.8. 2 American Woods, Harper's Weekly 29(30 May 1885), p.350. 3 Brewer, 1877: 4. 4 Norton, 1879: 110. 5 A. S. Bickmore to C. S. Sargent, 12 Sep 1880, Letterpress Books, 3a: 273, AMNH. 6 Joseph H. Choate, in Hovey 1907: 5. 7 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 2 Nov 1885, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 8 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 11 Nov 1880, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 9 Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History 1881. 10 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 14 Dec 1880; C. S. Sargent to J. J. Bargin, 20 Apr 1881, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. Jesup Collection 47 11 M. K. Jesup to C. S. Sargent, 12 Mar 1881, Letterpress Books, 4: 19, AMNH. 12 A. S. Bickmore to C. S. Sargent, 29 Jun 1881, Letterpress Books, 4: 55; C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 5 Jul 1882, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 13 M. K. Jesup to C. S. Sargent, 1 Sep 1881, Letterpress Books, 4: 80, AMNH. 14 M. K. Jesup to A. S. Bickmore, 1 Sep 1881, Letterpress Books, 4: 82, AMNH. 15 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 25 Apr 1881, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 16 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 18 Feb 1896, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 17 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 20 Aug 1881, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 18 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 25 Apr 1881, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 19 M. K. Jesup to C. S. Sargent, 21 Jun 1882, Letterpress Books, 4: 277; J. J. Bargin to M. L. Saley, 3 Mar 1886, Letterpress Books, 9: 83, AMNH. 20 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 2 Nov 1885, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 21 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 25 Apr 1881, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I; A. S. Bickmore to C. S. Sargent, 17 Aug 1881, Letterpress Books, 4: 73, AMNH. 22 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 17 Jun 1899, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 23 M. K. Jesup to C. S. Sargent, 28 Apr 1881, Letterpress Books, 4: 35, AMNH. 24 Sargent, 1884. 25 A. S. Bickmore to C. S. Sargent, 3 Dec 1881, Letterpress Books, 5: 50, AMNH. 26 J. J. Bargin to C. S. Sargent, 10 Apr 1882, Letterpress Books, 4: 235, AMNH. 27 Osborn, 1911. 28 The Woods of America\u2014A Great Collection of 394 Specimens, New York Times, 22 Oct 1882, p.13. 29 A. S. Bickmore to C. S. Sargent, 17 Aug 1881, Letterpress Books, 4: 72, AMNH. 30 S. D. Dill to M. K. Jesup, 8 Nov 1882; C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 1 Jun 1884, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 31 J. H. Winser to M. K. Jesup, 26 Jan 1899, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 32 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 9 May 1882, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I; M. K. Jesup to C. S. Sargent, 16 May 1882, Letterpress Books, 4: 250, AMNH. 33 Osborn, 1911: 19. 34 S. D. Dill to J. J. Bargin, 24 Oct 1882, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 35 C. Vaux to Department of Public Parks, 13 Nov 1882, Early Admin Files, CN1739, AMNH. 36 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 1 Nov 1882, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 37 Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History 1883: 6. 38 American Wood Specimens: Mr. Jesup's Present to the Museum of Natural History, New York Times, 26 Dec 1883, p.8. 39 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 15 Feb 1884, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 40 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 30 Apr 1884; C. S. Sargent to A. S. Bickmore, 7 Jun 1884, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 41 Bickmore, 1885: 778-779. 42 Sargent, 1885. 43 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 26 Apr 1885, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 44 Jesup, 1885: 6-7. 45 A Noble Gift, Sun (New York), 17 May 1885, p.8. 46 American Woods, Harper's Weekly 29(30 May 1885), p.350. 47 The Jesup Collection\u2014All the Woods of the United States, Formal Opening To-day at the Museum of Natural History, New York Times, 18 May 1885, p.1. 48 J. J. Bargin to M. K. Jesup, 9 Oct 1885, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 49 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 13 Oct 1885, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 50 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 13 Oct 1885, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 51 An Interesting Collection\u2014Mr. Jesup's Gift to the American Museum of Natural History, New York Times, 16 Nov 1890, p.9; Sargent 1890b; Jesup 1891. 52 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 9 Jun 1891, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 53 Jesup, 1894. 54 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 2 Jan 1895, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 55 M. K. Jesup to C. S. Sargent, 17 Jan 1895, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 56 J. H. Winser to M. K. Jesup, 23 Jan 1895, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 57 Extract of Minutes, Regular Meeting of the Exectutive Committee, 20 Dec 1895, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 58 Jesup, 1896: 14. 59 Jesup, 1898, 1899, 1907. 60 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 6 Apr 1881, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 61 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 19 Feb 1886, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 62 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 11 May 1887, Early Admin Files, CN2169, AMNH. 63 C. S. Sargent to B. Strong, 12 Feb 1889, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 64 Extract of Minutes, Regular Meeting of the Exectutive Committee, 19 Jan 1894, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 65 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 13 Sep 1894, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 66 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 21 Apr 1898, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 67 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 29 May 1900, Early Admin Files, CN3540, AMNH. 68 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 26 Oct 1901, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 69 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 7 Jun 1899, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 70 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 7 May 1898, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 71 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 1 Nov 1898, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 72 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 4 Dec 1901, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 73 C. S. Sargent to J. H. Winser, 23 Jul 1902, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 74 Osborn, 1909. 48 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 75 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 6 Oct 1885, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 76 C. S. Sargent to M. K. Jesup, 7 Jan 1899, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 77 H. C. Bumpus to C. S. Sargent, 14 Oct 1903, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 78 H. C. Bumpus to H. H. Kopman, 28 Oct 1904, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. I, AMNH. 79 Osborn, 1908. 80 Osborn, 1910. 81 Dickerson, 1910. 82 Osborn, 1910: 41. 83 Osborn, 1911: 118. 84 Dickerson, 1912. 85 Dickerson, 1917. 86 H. F. Osborn to F.A. Lucas, 11 Dec 1922, Central Archives, 777, AMNH. 87 H. E. Anthony, Meeting Minutes, p.88, Council of the Scientific Staff, 4 Oct 1937, Departmental Records, 086, AMNH. 88 H. E. Anthony, Meeting Minutes, pp.88-89, Council of the Scientific Staff, 4 Oct 1937, Departmental Records, 086, AMNH. 89 Papers presented by the Advisory Committee on Plan and Scope, 6 May 1942, Central Archives, 1232, AMNH. 90 Parr, 1943. 91 Parr, 1946: 13. 92 Davison, 1946: 4. 93 B. E. Dahlgren to A. E. Parr, 6 Jul 1943, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 94 H. K. Svenson, Report: Department of Forestry and General Botany, 1947, Departmental Records, 091, Ser. IV, AMNH. 95 AMNH Department of Education Division of Publications 1949. 96 Parr, 1943, 1951. 97 Burns, 1958. 98 Museum Opening Hall of Forests, by S. Knox, New York Times, 14 May 1958, p.35. 99 A. E. Parr, Report of the Management Board, Special Meeting of the Board of Trustees, 20 Apr 1953, Central Archives, 1118, AMNH. 100 Extract of Minutes, Management Board Meeting, 27 Sep 1956, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 101 R. Kellogg to A. E. Parr, 19 Dec 1957, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 102 A. E. Parr to R. Kellogg, 26 Dec 1957, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 103 Extract of Minutes, Spring Meeting of the Board of Trustees, 28 Apr 1958, Central Archives, 1117, AMNH. 104 W. L. Stern to J. McCormick, 15 Jan 1960, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 105 A. C. Smith to J. A. Oliver, 24 Jun 1960, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 106 A. C. Smith to J. A. Oliver, 24 Jun 1960, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 107 J. A. Oliver to A. C. Smith, 5 Jul 1960, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 108 J. McCormick to J. A. Oliver, 20 Jun 1961, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 109 J. A. Oliver to S. A. Cain, 26 Dec 1961, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 110 J. A. Oliver to J. Millar, 26 Dec 1961, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 111 J. A. Oliver to L. S. Millegan, 19 Feb 1963, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 112 J. A. Oliver to L. S. Millegan, 15 Nov 1963, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 113 A. A. Heckman to J. A. Oliver, 15 Jan 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 114 W. C. Steere to A. A. Heckman, 17 Jan 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 115 Minutes of Meeting to Discuss Prospects of Getting for Portland the Jesup Collection of Woods, 15 Jan 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 116 Minutes of Meeting to Discuss Prospects of Getting for Portland the Jesup Collection of Woods, 15 Jan 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 117 Minutes of Meeting to Discuss Prospects of Getting for Portland the Jesup Collection of Woods, 15 Jan 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 118 A. A. Heckman to J. A. Oliver, 15 Jan 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 119 T. T. Munger to J. A. Oliver, 17 Feb 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 120 A. A. Heckman to J. A. Oliver, 20 Feb 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 121 T. T. Munger to J. A. Oliver, 14 Apr 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 122 Minutes of Meeting of Committee on the Jesup Collection of Wood, 29 May 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 123 J. A. Oliver to L. S. Millegan, 24 Jun 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 124 J. A. Oliver to T. T. Munger, 24 Jun 19","distinct_key":"arnoldia-2021-Such a Fine Assemblage: The Jesup Collection of North American Woods"},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Such a Fine Assemblage: The Jesup Collection of North American Woods","article_sequence":7,"start_page":24,"end_page":49,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25742","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160af27.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Mauz, Kathryn","article_content":"64, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 125 Statement to the City Council of Portland regarding transfer of the Jesup Collection to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 14 Jul 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 126 Curator Watches as Embers of History Linger On\u2014 Oregon Logging Associates Consider Plans to Restore Forestry Building, Oregonian, 19 Aug 1964, p.1. 127 Press release: Jesup Wood Collection, Western Forestry Center, Portland, Ore., ca. 1971, I G 9.1 WUS: Woods of the United States Exhibit Records, AA. 128 Jesup Wood Collection historic, enduring exhibit, by J. Sansregret, Oregonian, 28 Sep 1984, p.D7. 129 T. T. Munger to J. A. Oliver, 22 Aug 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 130 P. H. Grouleff to J. A. Oliver, 29 Sep 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 131 Bill of Lading and Freight Bill, United Van Lines, 6 Oct 1964, Central Archives, 1203, AMNH. 132 T. T. Munger to J. A. Oliver, 2 Jul 1964, Departmental Records, 125, Ser. I, AMNH. 133 Sansregret, 1984: 50. 134 Reed, 1987. 135 Meeting minutes, 25 Jan 1994, Agricenter International (Memphis, Tennessee). 136 Brown, 1910: 165-166. 137 The Woods of America\u2014A Great Collection of 394 Specimens, New York Times, 22 Oct 1882, p.13; Sargent 1890a. Jesup Collection 49 Primary Sources Archival resources have been used with permission and are housed at the Archives of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Boston [AA]; the American Museum of Natural History Research Library Archives, New York [AMNH]; and elsewhere as indicated. Published Sources Cited AMNH Department of Education Division of Publications. 1949. General guide to the exhibition halls of the American Museum of Natural History. Science Guide 118 (5th ed.). American Museum of Natural History. Brewer, W. H. 1877. General report of the judges of Group VI and report on awards. Pages 1-50 in: Walker, F. A. (Ed.), Reports and awards, Group VI. United States Centennial Commission. J. B. Lippincott & Co. Brown, W. A. 1910. Morris Ketchum Jesup, a character sketch. Charles Scribner's Sons. Burns, W. A. (Ed.). 1958. General guide to the American Museum of Natural History. Science Guide 118 (revised ed.). American Museum of Natural History, Man and Nature Publications. Davison, F. T. 1946. Seventy-seventh report of the President. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 77: 1-6. Dickerson, M. C. 1910. Trees and forestry: An elementary treatment of the subject based on the Jesup Collection of North American Woods in the American Museum of Natural History. Guide Leaflet 32. American Museum of Natural History. Dickerson, M. C. (Ed.). 1912. Museum notes. American Museum Journal, 12: 35-40. Dickerson, M. C. (Ed.). 1917. Museum notes. American Museum Journal, 17: 76-80. Hovey, E. O. (Ed.). 1907. Introduction: Pioneers of American science: An account of the exercises held and the addresses delivered at the American Museum of Natural History, December 29, 1906. Guide Leaflet 25. American Museum Journal, 7(Supplement): 3-7. Jesup, M. K. 1891. Twenty-second annual report. Annual Report of the Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History ... for the Year 1890-91: 7-13. Jesup, M. K. 1894. Twenty-fifth annual report. Annual Report of the President of the American Museum of Natural History ... for the Year 1893: 7-15. Jesup, M. K. 1896. Twenty-seventh annual report. Annual Report of the President, Act of Incorporation, Contract with the Department of Public Parks, Constitution, By-laws and List of Members for the Year 1895: 7-23. Jesup, M. K. 1898. Twenty-ninth annual report. Annual Report of the President of the American Museum of Natural History ... for the Year 1897: 9-27. Jesup, M. K. 1899. Thirtieth annual report. Annual Report of the President of the American Museum of Natural History ... for the Year 1898: 9-26. Jesup, M. K. 1907. Thirty-eighth annual report. Annual Report of the President of the American Museum of Natural History ... for the Year 1906: 11-34. Norton, F. H. 1879. Illustrated historical register of the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876, and the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1878. The American News Co. Osborn, H. F. 1908. Thirty-ninth annual report. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 39: 15-48. Osborn, H. F. 1909. Fortieth annual report. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 40: 15-42. Osborn, H. F. 1910. Forty-first annual report. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 41: 15-51. Osborn, H. F. (Ed.). 1911. The American Museum of Natural History: Its origin, its history, the growth of its departments to December 31, 1909 (2nd ed.). New York: The Irving Press. Parr, A. E. 1943. The year's work. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 74: 5-21. Parr, A. E. 1946. In transition. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 77: 7-21. Parr, A. E. 1951. Purposes and progress report of the Director. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 82: 7-36. Reed, M. 1987. The Jesup Collection of Woods. Forest World Magazine, 3(1): 7-11. Sansregret, J. 1984. A history in wood. American Forests Magazine, 90(9): 50. Sargent, C. S. 1884. Report on the forests of North America (exclusive of Mexico). Tenth United States Census, vol. 9. Census Office, Department of the Interior. Government Printing Office. Sargent, C. S. 1885. American Museum of Natural History Jesup Collection: The woods of the United States. D. Appleton and Co. (John Wilson and Son). Sargent, C. S. 1890a. Recent publications: The forests of North America, I. Garden and Forest, 3: 193-194. Sargent, C. S. (Ed.). 1890b. The Jesup Collection of the Woods of the United States. Garden and Forest, 3: 570. Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History. 1881. Twelfth annual report. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 12: 5-12. Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History. 1883. Fourteenth annual report. Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 14: 5-10. Kathryn Mauz writes from Colorado. Previous publications include a 2018 book on Jesup collector Cyrus Pringle: C. G. Pringle: Botanist, Traveler, and the \"Flora of the Pacific Slope\" (1881-1884).lants imported from Europe and farther afield. William Jr. and his son William Robert Prince took up the cause of identifying and describing plant material so that it could be offered to the public\u2014and they were highly invested in acquiring newly introduced species. In 1804, for instance, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked upon the Missouri River to explore the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase. The expedition had been commissioned at Jefferson's request, and when the explorers returned east, they came bearing seeds and other botanical collections. The Princes were among the first nursery operators to grow and distribute plants from the expedition, and the Oregon grape holly (Mahonia aquifolium) became one of their most successful new products. The Princes were also among the first American nurseries to offer ornamental species from East Asia, like the golden rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata), lacebark elm (Ulmus parvifolia), and Chinese wisteria (Wisteria sinensis). By the mid-1830s, William Jr. had ten nursery outbuildings, of which several were greenhouses that contained tropical and subtropical plants from Africa and Asia. Visitors could pay an admission fee to experience the warmth and humidity of the greenhouse\u2014a rewarding respite to escape the dark, cold New York winter. The nursery catalogue listed ten tropical hibiscuses (Hibiscus) and two gardenias (Gardenia) that bloomed in their greenhouses. Prince grew tropical fruits and flowers specifically for winter viewing. For variety, they also exhibited insectivorous plants such as sundew (Drosera), pitcher plant (Sarracenia), and Venus flytrap (Dionaea). Moreover, in 1833, The New-York Annual Register reported that the gardens and nursery covered up to forty In 1793, William Prince Jr. purchased twenty-four acres alongside the original nursery, naming the new property the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery. In the decades to come, a cohort of nurseries would open in Flushing, including Parsons Nursery and Bloodgood Nursery, both mapped nearby in 1841. SMITH, 1841\/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION ies cultivated in America, other than apples. (While the father and son intended to treat apple cultivation with a third volume, the work was never published.) Like A Short Treatise on Horticulture, this book was widely read in America and became influential among aspiring horticulturalists. Moreover, the Princes paid particular attention to the nomenclature of the fruits covered in all of the publications, untangling confusion occurring in the field. This interest in the accurate classification of horticultural plants began with the work of William Sr., and it was among the family's most significant contributions to American horticulture. As a testament to William Jr.'s interest in classification, he displayed in his home a bust of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who formalized the modern system of botanical nomenclature. William Jr. received the statue in a presentation by New York governor DeWitt Clinton at a meeting of European and American scientists to honor Linnaeus's birthday in 1823. A simultaneous celebration in Virginia was officiated by Thomas Jefferson, an honorary member of the Linnaean Society of Paris. By the time William Jr. died in 1842, Flushing had become a vibrant center for American horticulture. Bloodgood Nursery had been established there in 1798 and would become known as a specialist in maples. (A common Japanese maple even bears the name of the nursery: Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood'.) G. R. Garretson Nursery, a seed company specializing in flowers and vegetables, was established in 1836 and would grow to cover one hundred acres, supplying wholesale seeds to nurseries across the United States and offering retail via mail order. But the most famous of these newer operations was Parsons Nursery, established in 1838; the Parsons family would later play a central role in introducing plants from East Asia, especially Japan. Meanwhile, William Robert had been assuming increasing responsibility for the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries. In the 1820s, he expanded the nursery, purchasing three large parcels so that his land holdings may have totaled up to 113 acres. These properties were located adjacent to a house he bought for himself in 1827. The home had a wide center hall, \u222b 20 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 acres and contained approximately ten thousand species of trees and plants, with particular attention devoted to grapes and mulberry trees. Visitors had free access to the outdoor gardens every day, except for Sundays. At the same time, the commercial operations of the nursery expanded rapidly, as evidenced by William Jr.'s increasingly thicker plant catalogues. He also began to subdivide the products among smaller specialized catalogues. In addition to his standard Annual Catalogue for Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Plants, which covered his earlier offerings, he began to issue catalogues that focused on items such as bulbous flowers and tubers, greenhouse plants, chrysanthemums, and vegetable and flower seeds. William Jr. attracted additional attention in 1828 when he published one of the first strictly horticultural books to come from the United States: A Short Treatise on Horticulture: Embracing Descriptions of a Great Variety of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Grape Vines, Bulbous Flowers, Green-House Trees and Plants, &c. The book described all the plant offerings at the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery, in some sense serving as an extended advertisement. The treatise also comprehensively covered horticultural topics, such as planting, pruning, and propagation. It even included information about soil preferences and methods for fungal disease control. Over the next three years, William Jr. worked with his son, William Robert, on two additional books, for which his son was the primary author. The first, A Treatise on the Vine, was published in 1830 and was the first significant book written in America on grape cultivation. The Princes had systematically tested scores of European grape varieties (Vitis vinifera), along with improved varieties of native North American grapes (like V. labrusca and V. riparia), and interspecific hybrids. The book described over two hundred European grape varieties and eighty American. This work helped to establish viticulture as a fullfledged branch of American horticulture, and for William Robert, grape breeding and cultivation remained a lifelong interest. The second book, The Pomological Manual, published in 1831, was a two-volume cyclopedia that attempted to catalogue all fruit varietwith two solid Dutch doors on either end and a bust of Linnaeus (likely from his father) on a bracket against the wall. The house's formal gardens contained two ginkgos (Ginkgo biloba), which were among the oldest in the country, and an old cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) that the Princes had imported from France. Under William Robert's leadership, however, the business began to struggle. In the 1830s, he speculated heavily in the domestic silk industry and may have been a key contributor to the skyrocketing prices for mulberry trees (Morus alba), the food source for silkworms. He imported more than one million mulberry trees from France in 1839, and shortly afterward, the price for mulberry trees crashed. When this venture failed, the Princes could not keep up with mortgage payments on the nursery, and by 1841, they lost the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries in foreclosure. These events spawned a bitter controversy with the property's new owner, Gabriel Winter, who was married to one of William Jr.'s cousins. Although William Robert continued to raise and sell plants from an adjacent nursery property, he and Winter competed in horticultural publications over the right to sell plants as the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries. Ultimately, the Princes kept the name, and Winter sold the remaining plant inventory and subdivided the original property for housing development. By 1846, the finances at the new Prince nursery began to stabilize, and William Robert published Prince's Manual of Roses, his third and final significant contribution to horticultural literature. At his new botanic garden, William Robert grew over seven hundred rose varieties, and the book provided detailed descriptions of varieties and featured many roses from China. He also included information about horticultural care and propagation. It was one of the very best works on this subject. Still, it was eclipsed in popularity by Samuel B. Parsons's book published the following year: The Rose: Its History, Poetry, Culture, and Classification. Parsons\u2014the proprietor of Parsons Nursery in Flushing\u2014ultimately revised his book as Parsons on the Rose: A Treatise on the Propagation, Culture, and History of the Rose. The competition between these books suggests the horticultural foment that was occurring in Flushing during this period. William Prince Jr. and his son William Robert Prince (above) authored seminal American horticultural manuals. In A Treatise on the Vine, published in 1830, they promoted new grape varieties, including 'Isabella', which became a favorite of American viticulturists. HEDRICK, 1908 AND 1911\/ARCHIVE OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM 22 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Later, William Robert went on two extended botanical expeditions, to California (in 1849) and Mexico (in 1850). While these trips suggest that the business was doing reasonably well, William Robert began to gradually withdraw from the day-to-day management of the nursery around 1855, at the age of sixty. Instead, he devoted his energy to other botanical interests, including research on botanical medicinal remedies. He also continued to breed and evaluate new varieties of fruits and ornamental plants, especially grapes, strawberries, and roses. His oldest son, William III, meanwhile assumed increasing responsibility for the enterprise. William Robert's career reflected the changes that were going on in the American horticultural community. His father had been a founding member of the New York Horticultural Society in 1818 and joined the Massachusetts Horticultural Society after it was established in 1829, but he was also a member of the Linnaean Society of Paris, the Horticultural Society of London and Paris, and the Academy of Georgofili, based in Florence, Italy. William Robert invested his energy into the increasingly sophisticated American horticultural societies rather than those in Europe. He contributed many articles to the leading American agricultural magazines of the day, such as The Rural New Yorker and Gardener's Monthly. Moreover, he was a member of the American Institute of the City of New York and the American Pomological Society. On March 28, 1869, William Robert died at his home in Flushing, and as it turned out, the esteemed business died with him. William III had enlisted for the United States Army during the Civil War, and he chose to remain in the military. William Robert's second son, LeBaron Bradford, pursued a career in law and politics. Gardener's Monthly printed a two-page obituary for William Robert. It was a sad and respectful tribute to his horticultural brilliance while nonetheless remarking on his combative personality. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society issued a full resolution commemorating his life as a \"pioneer in the field of horticulture,\" a title that seems equally appropriate for the three generations of Princes that came before him. In 1939, efforts were made to move William Robert's house to the site of the New York World's Fair, to demonstrate a historic colonial homestead, but the campaign came to no avail. Later, New York City park commissioner Robert Moses rejected a proposal to move the structure to Flushing Meadow Park. Moses's vision for a \"modern city\" had little space for old wooden buildings. In its last few years of use, the structure served as a rooming house and a club. The shabby, unpainted building was then boarded up and surrounded by billboards and a gas station. The house was torn down in 1942. Of course, by that point, the lush greenhouses that once welcomed winter visitors had long ago disappeared, and the nursery property had been subdivided and sold for development. Yet, the 150-year story of the Prince family lives on today. The family built a foundation for commercial horticulture in the United States. They championed the cultivation of plants from across the country and around the world, and their publications promoted best practices in horticulture. They even helped with establishing a more systematic approach for horticultural nomenclature. Moreover, the success of the Prince nurseries is inextricably linked to the subsequent generation of horticulturists who established businesses in Flushing. This expanding group of nursery owners became leaders in their own right. In this way, a horticultural legacy that began with one family who lived on the edge of Flushing Creek became a national and international story. Acknowledgment I'm grateful for the support of Susan Lacerte, who recently retired as executive director at the Queens Botanical Garden, located near the former Prince Nurseries. Susan's knowledge of horticulture in Flushing, both present and historical, has been an inspiration. References Cornett, P. 2004, January. Encounters with America's premier nursery and botanic garden. Twinleaf: 1-12. Downing, A. J. 1845. The fruits and fruit trees of America: Or the culture, propagation and management in the garden and orchard of fruit trees generally; with descriptions of all the finest varieties of fruit, native and foreign in this country. New York: Wiley and Putnam. \u222b The Prince Family 23 Gager, C. S. 1912, October. The first botanic garden on Long Island. Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1(4): 97-99. Hedrick, U. P. 1911. The plums of New York (Report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station). Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hedrick, U. P. 1908. The grapes of New York (Report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station). Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hedrick, U. P. 1925. The small fruits of New York (Report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station). Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hedrick, U.P. 1933. A history of agriculture in the State of New York. Printed for the New York State Agricultural Society, Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. Hotchkiss, T. W. 1934. Prince house, Lawrence Street & Northern Boulevard, photographs, written historical and descriptive data. Dist. No. 4, Southern New York State, Historic American Building Survey, HABS No. 4-19. Jacobsen, A. and Williams, J. D. 2009. Prince family nurseries (ca. 1737- post- 1851). Bulletin of the Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation, 21(1): 4-7. Johnson, J. 1887. The village of Flushing, map of desirable building lots, Flushing: A historical sketch. New York: John P. Stock, Printer. Manks, D. S. 1967. How the American nursery trade began. Plants & Gardens, 23(2). McGourty, F. 1967. Long Island's famous nurseries. Plants & Gardens, 23(3). Munsell, W. W. 1882. History of Queens County, New York, with illustrations, portraits, & sketches of prominent families and individuals. New York: Press of George MacNamara. Prince, B. and Mills, S. F. 1823. A treatise and catalogue of fruit and ornamental trees, shrubs, &c., cultivated at the Old American Nursery. New York: Wm. Grattan. Prince, W. 1771. To be sold, by William Prince, at Flushing-Landing, on Long-Island, near New- York, a large collection of fruit trees, as follows. New York: H. Gaine. Prince, W. 1790. To be sold, by William Prince, at Flushing-Landing, on Long-Island, near New- York, a large collection, as follow, of fruit trees and shrubs. New York: H. Gaine. Prince, W. 1825. Annual catalogue of fruit and ornamental trees and plants, bulbous flower roots, green-house plants, &c. &c., cultivated at the Linnaean Botanic Garden, William Prince, proprietor. New York: T. and J. Swords. Prince, W. 1828. A short treatise on horticulture: Embracing descriptions of a great variety of fruit and ornamental trees and shrubs, grape vines, bulbous flowers, green-house trees and plants. New York: T. and J. Swords. Prince, W. R. and Prince, W. 1830. A treatise on the vine; Embracing it history from the earliest ages to the present day, with descriptions of above two hundred foreign, and eighty American varieties, together with a complete dissertation of the established culture, and management of vineyards. New York: T. & J. Swords. Prince, W. R. and Prince, W. 1831. The pomological manual; or a treatise on fruits: containing descriptions of a great number of the most valuable varieties for the orchard and garden. New York: T. & J. Swords. Prince, W. R. 1846. Princes' Manual of roses: Comprising the most complete history of the rose, including every class, and all the most admirable varieties that have appeared in Europe and America, together with ample information on their culture and propagation. New York: Clark & Austen, Saxton & Miles, Wiley & Putnam, and Stanford & Swords. Ross, P. 1902. A history of Long Island: From its earliest settlement to the present time. New York: Lewis Publishing Co. Smith, E. A. and Hayward, G. 1841. The village of Flushing, Queens County, L.I.: nine miles east of the city of New York: lat. 40\u00b0 45' 1\"N, lon. 73\u00b0 09' 58\"W. [Flushing?: s.n., ?] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https:\/\/www.loc. gov\/item\/2008620796 St. George's Episcopal Church, Baptismal Records, 1800- 1840, Flushing, N.Y., 135-32 38th Avenue, Flushing, N.Y., Rev. Wilfredo Benitez, Rector. Trebor, H. (Ed.) 1938, October. Garden center: The four Princes\u2014William of America. So This is Flushing. Flushing, N.Y.: Halleran. U.S. Department of Agriculture. 1976. The Prince family manuscript collection: A register of their papers, in the National Agricultural Library (Library list 101). Beltsville, MD: U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library. Waldron, R. K. 1958. Prince's plants. The Call Number, 20(1). J. Stephen Casscles is an attorney, winemaker, and horticultural writer living in the Hudson Valley. His publications include Grapes of the Hudson Valley and Other Cool Climate Regions of the United States and Canada, published by Flint Mine Press.","distinct_key":"arnoldia-2021-Such a Fine Assemblage: The Jesup Collection of North American Woods"},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Thomas Meehan: The Horticultural Popularizer","article_sequence":8,"start_page":50,"end_page":61,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25743","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160af6b.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Aiello, Anthony S.","article_content":"Aside from details exchanged among horticultural history buffs or students of botanical Latin (who know Meehania, a genus in the mint family), little is widely known or remembered of the life and work of Thomas Meehan, a Philadelphia nurseryman, author, editor, and social reformer who rose to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century.1 Meehan immigrated to Philadelphia when it was still a set of disparate and unincorporated townships on the cusp of transformation into a major industrial city. Upon his arrival, he inherited a horticultural mantle from the Philadelphia Quakers who had studied the flora of the eastern United States and built notable collections of plants in their gardens. Meehan looked to these established collections and assumed the role of the horticultural popularizer. During his long career, he used his nursery and publications to encourage the cultivation of an ever-widening palette of plants. Meehan's desire to engage a broad horticultural audience was clear from the start. In his first book, The American Handbook of Ornamental Trees, published in 1853, Meehan described his intention of creating something for \"extensive popular use.\"2 This goal persisted as he continued to write and edit a series of prominent horticultural magazines, and towards the end of Meehan's career, Charles Sprague Sargent, the director of the Arnold Arboretum, described Meehan's accomplishments as \"a most important factor in increasing the cultivation of American trees and shrubs.\"3 In Philadelphia, Meehan led a remarkable life, contributing to a staggering array of fields. His work is hard to encapsulate, so this article will not offer a complete accounting; instead, to use Meehan's own words, it will present \"an anthology, and will not aim at anything further than to cull the most beautiful, interesting, and important.\"4 Thomas Meehan: The Horticultural Popularizer Anthony S. Aiello At Bartram's Garden Meehan was born in Potter's Bar near London, England, in 1826. From an early age, he was trained in horticulture by his father, himself a well-known gardener. Meehan held several prominent gardener positions as a teenager, before pursuing his formal education at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, graduating in 1848.5 Having been refused a gardening position in England based on religious grounds, Meehan saw the opportunities offered in the United States. By March of the same year, he arrived in Philadelphia, where he would spend the remaining fifty-three years of his life.6 Once in Philadelphia, Meehan quickly became acquainted with the leading horticulturists of the city. He began by working for Robert Buist, who was establishing Rosedale Nursery on what was then the rural edge of southwest Philadelphia. The nursery was famous for its seed business and its selections of fruit and ornamental trees. After one year with Buist, Meehan accepted an offer to work at Bartram's Garden.7 At that point, the garden was transitioning from ownership by the Bartram family to Andrew M. Eastwick, a railroad magnate, who had recognized the garden's importance and built an elaborate Victorian home there, preserving the original Bartram house and its famous plant collection. Until 1850, Bartram's Garden had been operated by the founding family. John Bartram, the patriarch, had been a royal botanist for the king of Great Britain. He and his son William explored the eastern United States, collecting seeds that they propagated for their garden and distributed to other respected horticulturists throughout America and Great Britain. William maintained the garden upon his father's death. In turn, William's niece Ann Bartram Carr and her husband, Robert, were the third generation AIELLO, A. S. 2021. THOMAS MEEHAN: THE HORTICULTURAL POPULARIZER. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 50-61 Facing page: Thomas Meehan was a central booster of American horticulture in the late nineteenth century. As a nursery owner, he promoted an ever-widening palette of plants, and as a horticultural writer and editor, he did the same. He is photographed here for the Centennial Exposition of 1876. PORTRAIT COURTESY OF THE FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA, PRINT AND PICTURE COLLECTION Earth 51 52 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 to build the collection, continuing the family's international trade in seeds and plants. One can only imagine Meehan's fascination with this plant collection, undoubtedly one of the best in the United States at the time and one primed for study by a keen student of horticulture. While he was there, Meehan began collecting notes for his first book, The American Handbook of Ornamental Trees. He fitted out a place to write in the woodshed that John Bartram had used for potting and packing seed.8 It is difficult to imagine what Meehan's experience was like in that woodshed, but from a photograph that he published of the structure years later, it appears analogous to an artist's garret, cramped quarters but perhaps a place with little to distract the author from his work. In the garden, what would Meehan have experienced? From the Handbook, published in 1853, we get a sense of the diversity and size of the trees growing there. Fittingly, many of the trees that Meehan described would have been potted up in the very same building where he collected his observations as much as a century later. Meehan first intended for the book to list the trees growing at Bartram's Garden, but it evolved into a more comprehensive project that included all the trees (and some shrubs) cultivated throughout the Delaware Valley and presumably across the Northeast. In 1852, while he worked on the project, Meehan left Bartram's Garden to work for Caleb Cope, the former president of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Cope's Springbrook estate was located along the Delaware River in far northern Philadelphia.9 In presenting his authorial credentials, Meehan acknowledged his time at Kew and several \"superior establishments\" in Philadelphia. He added that \"nothing has been admitted into the body of the work that has not been the result of the personal experience of the author. No tree is described as being in cultivation which the author has not himself seen.\" Meehan's horticultural ambitions are evident from his ability to visit and bear first-hand witness to so many trees in such a short period. The pace is even more remarkable given that travel on unimproved roads among the surrounding counties was challenging. Yet, Meehan's inveterate field research not only allowed him to understand the regional horticultural diversity but also brought him into the gardens of prominent botanical collectors. The Handbook documented the gardens of the early Philadelphia Quaker botanists and described the transition from the local horticultural heritage to a broader palette of plants from Europe and Asia. Here we see Meehan serving as a bridge between two eras: from the horticultural legacy of the late 1700s and early 1800s to the broader and more outward-looking horticultural developments of the late nineteenth century. The Handbook provides glimpses into the most renowned collections of the time. Of course, Meehan describes numerous notable trees at Bartram's Garden, including an old Franklin tree (Franklinia alatamaha, listed as Gordonia pubescens), which was likely one of William Bartram's original eighteenth-century collections. Meehan also lists massive specimens like a ninety-three-foot-tall Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) and a fifteenfoot- tall cornelian-cherry (Cornus mas), a European species that would have been a collector's tree at that time. Meehan also describes plants at the home of Humphry Marshall\u2014author of Arbustrum Americanum: The American Grove, who lived near West Chester\u2014and the now-forgotten arboretum of John Evans, which was one of the most significant collections of its time, located in Radnor, about fifteen miles west of Philadelphia. The best extant example of a nineteenthcentury arboretum that Meehan visited is that of the Peirce family, which now comprises the core of Peirce's Park at Longwood Gardens. The Peirces began their collection in the early 1800s, creating one of the finest regional arboreta by building on their forerunners, the Bartrams and Marshalls. The collection became renowned for its scale and diversity. Meehan describes several notable trees at this location, some of which remain today. For example, in his description of eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), Meehan mentioned that he had \"seen fine specimens of this in Mr. Pierce's [sic] fine avenue.\" Similarly, he listed a cucumbertree magnolia (Magnolia acuminata var. subcordata, then M. cordata) with a four-foot circumference in Peirce's arboretum. In recent years, this tree was named as the cultivar 'Peirce's Park', and although the original tree was lost during a storm in April Thomas Meehan 53 2020, several young ones are planted throughout Longwood Gardens. Meehan's horticultural explorations were not limited to prestigious gardens. A favorite tree citation in the Handbook is of paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera), a curious species native to East Asia. Meehan wrote that it \"thrives on the sea-shore,\" growing in Cape May, New Jersey. Boat travel from Philadelphia to Cape May was then much easier than overland travel, and Cape May's geography led to its development as a Victorian-era resort. One can picture Meehan taking a busman's holiday to the beach, recording notes even during precious personal time. At the time, he would have been courting his future wife, Catherine (Kitty) Colflesh, and one can imagine her joining him on tree-hunting excursions. Meehan's appendix is equally informative for students of horticultural history because it lists tree species recently introduced but which he had not observed. This detail helps to date the introduction of these species into the United States, or specifically Philadelphia. For example, Meehan lists nine species of maple in the main text: six native to the eastern United States, along with two common European species, the hedge maple (Acer campestre) and Norway maple (A. platanoides). In his appendix, however, he listed maples that he was aware of but had not seen. These included the vine maple (A. circinatum) from the Pacific Northwest, and the Bosnian and Italian maples (A. obtusatum, and A. opalus, respectively), which were just appearing on the East Coast. Germantown Nurseries In 1854, Meehan started a nursery in partnership with William Saunders of Baltimore in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, well outside the developed portions of the city.10 While Saunders's involvement lasted only a year, the Germantown Nurseries quickly became one of the regional leaders in growing and selling trees, shrubs, and perennials. Meehan's brother Joseph joined the operation in 1859, and his Thomas Meehan compiled notes for his first book in John Bartram's woodshed\u2014a place where the Bartram family likely potted some of the very trees that Meehan described decades later. ARCHIVES OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM; MEEHAN'S MONTHLY (VOL. 6) 54 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 three sons (Thomas B., J. Franklin, and S. Mendelson) came on board in the decades to come. As evidence of the success of the operations, what had begun as a few acres of land in Germantown grew to 75 acres by the late 1800s and then to 150 acres by the turn of the twentieth century, encompassing property in Germantown and suburban Dresher, Pennsylvania.11 The nursery was especially known for its diverse offerings of North American trees. By 1893, a correspondent for Garden and Forest noted that \"Mr. Meehan early recognized that \u2026 American plants are the best for America\" and went on to say that \"in no other place are American trees and shrubs raised in such quantities.\" Their offerings included native species that were difficult to find at other nurseries. Yet, Meehan simultaneously offered and promoted non-natives species as they became available.12 This Janus-like approach to horticulture continued the link to Philadelphia's horticultural heritage while recognizing the changing demography and tastes of the city's gardeners. American nursery catalogues from the mid- 1800s reveal that most ornamental trees offered were from North America and Europe, with a smattering from Asia Minor and Asia.13 A watershed moment in the availability of greater plant diversity occurred at the Centennial Exposition, the first official world's fair held in the United States, which took place in Philadelphia from the spring to autumn of 1876. As a celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the event exposed a vast audience to a wide array of modern conveniences, inventions, and international cultures. Also, through various horticultural exhibits, the Exposition introduced Asian (particularly Japanese) plant species to a broad American audience. Prior to the Exposition, GERMANTOWN HISTORICAL SOCIETY\/HISTORIC GERMANTOWN Elms flank the entrance to Meehan's Nurseries, photographed around 1902. Thomas Meehan 55 Japanese species were slowly making their way into Boston and New York but had yet to see wider availability.14 Meehan created an arboretum of over seven hundred trees for the Exposition. Local newspapers described it as a \"grand miniature forest\" that was especially noteworthy for its collection of \"trees and shrubs of the United States.\"15 Other prominent nurserymen had displays nearby, including Josiah Hoopes (whose display included twelve hundred evergreens and forty varieties of ivies), Robert Buist (showcasing trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants), and S. B. Parson & Sons (who were reported to have \"remarkable Japanese plants, maples, evergreens, azalias [sic], new shrubs, and half hardy plants\").16 After the Exhibition, Meehan and the other nursery owners provided portions of their outdoor collections to Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. Therefore, the diversity of their displays is suggested in Joseph Rothrock's catalogue of the trees and shrubs in Fairmount Park, published in 1880. The catalogue documents early introductions of Asian species, including Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), Asian magnolias (like Magnolia campbellii and M. denudata), panicle hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata), and the lacebark pine (Pinus bungeana).17 After the event, the diversity of plant offerings from Japan rapidly increased, and by the end of the 1800s, many now-familiar plants, and many that we still think of as \"rare and unusual,\" were regularly offered for sale. Meehan was quick to recognize the importance of these introductions. When he wrote about the other nursery displays at the Exhibition in Gardener's Monthly, a magazine that he had edited since 1859, he remarked on the \"special bed\" of Japanese plants shown by S. B. Parsons & Sons. Among the most striking plants, he reported, was the red-leaved Japanese maple (now Acer palmatum forma atropurpureum).18 By 1882, Meehan's nursery catalogue offered one-foot-tall specimens of this for two dollars, then among his most expensive offerings. On the back cover of the same catalogue, he proudly advertised the \"Japan Snowball\" (Viburnum plicatum), claiming that his nursery had been first to introduce it into the United States. This claim was accompanied by the only illustration in the catalogue, suggesting that Meehan fully recognized the commercial importance of these newcomers.19 By the 1890s, Meehan's nurseries were offering a weeping Japanese cherry (what would now be considered Prunus subhirtella), Asian magnolias and maples, and even umbrella pine (Sciadopitys verticillata) and Hiba falsearborvitae (Thujopsis dolabrata).20 In some sense, Meehan's nursery served as a laboratory for him to study plants. A perfect example of this is the daimyo oak (Quercus dentata). At a meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1886, Meehan presented a short description of the floral structure of Quercus dentata, grown from seed that he had received from Japan at the time of the Centennial Exposition.21 By 1895, the daimyo oak was offered by his nursery, described as \"a rich addition to our list of oaks \u2026 in May the yellow flowers, in long aments, make it attractive in a way no other oak is.\"22 Despite his ever-increasing interest in nonnative species, Meehan maintained a strong affinity for native plants. In the same 1895 catalogue in which he advertised the daimyo oak, Meehan wrote that \"for twenty years or more we have been trying to impress upon American planters the importance of using Native Oaks in landscape works \u2026 and finally, after all these years, planters began to realize that we were right and to recognize in the American Oak, the 'King of Trees.'\"23 And while Meehan is often most associated with woody plants, his catalogues have a large diversity of native herbaceous perennials and hardy ferns\u2014many sought out by today's keen gardeners. Meehan's nursery distributed plants to botanical institutions, including the Arnold Arboretum where a few dozen specimens are still alive. The most historically significant are two Franklin trees (Franklinia alatamaha, accession 2428-3*A and *B), propagated in 1905 from a plant that Meehan provided about thirty years earlier. These are believed to be the oldest living representatives of the species.24 Other Meehan plants at the Arboretum include a group of five black oaks (Quercus velutina, accession 1237), acquired in 1873, when the Arboretum was only a year old, and a Southern red oak (Q. falcata, accession 3333*A). These North American oaks are now living reminders of Meehan's commitment to the \"King of Trees.\" 56 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Horticultural Writer and Editor Meehan was a prolific author throughout his career. He served as editor of the Gardener's Monthly until 1888, when its publisher, Charles Marot, died. A few years later, Meehan's Monthly was born and continued until 1902. Over his forty years as the editor of monthly publications, Meehan generated a vast amount of material to read. His prodigious output is hard to encapsulate or even anthologize. The tone of the publications was conversational and newsy, and his personal writing style was both informative and approachable. In a period before easy (not to mention instant) communication, these journals regularly shared information and current trends, mixed with a bit of human interest.25 In the initial issue of Garden and Forest, in 1888, an unsigned editorial (perhaps written by Charles Sargent, who \"conducted\" the magazine) commented on the loss of the Gardener's Monthly: \"Ever since we have been interested in the cultivation of flowers we have looked to the Monthly for inspiration and advice, and its pages have rarely been turned without finding the assistance we stood in need of.\" The editorial continued by celebrating Meehan's imprint on the publication. \"Fortunately, the Gardener's Monthly, and its modest and accomplished editor, Mr. Thomas Meehan, were one and the same thing. It is Mr. Meehan's long editorial experience, high character, great learning and varied practical knowledge, which made the Gardener's Monthly what it was. These, we are happy to know, are not lost to us, as Mr. Meehan will \u2026 continue to delight and instruct the horticultural public.\"26 In the late 1870s, Meehan had also begun a multivolume work titled The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States. The project is another testament to his long-standing love of North American plants. In the preface to the first volume, Meehan described how the project emerged from his desire to write a scientific treatment on the North American flora. Although he pitched this idea to a publisher, he ultimately decided, once again, to focus on engaging a more general audience. \"A purely scientific and systematic treatise \u2026 must necessarily be limited to a small circle of readers,\" he explained, \"and even in this small circle there would be but a few who would care to subscribe to a work, the end of which they might never live to see.\" Four volumes were produced, and Meehan's voice shines through them. He lushly described almost fifty species in each volume, often incorporating history, poetry, and horticultural information. The entry for each species included a lavish color illustration.27 The project was revived in 1891 when Meehan's Monthly was launched. While Meehan's Monthly was a newsy horticultural periodical, in keeping with the style and tone of the Gardener's Monthly, each issue began with a description of a native species and was accompanied with illustrations prepared for unpublished volumes of the Native Flowers and Ferns project. Garden and Forest celebrated the arrival of this new periodical: \"Mr. Meehan's return to horticultural journalism will be welcomed by many readers of the Gardeners' Monthly who felt something like a personal bereavement at the discontinuance of that excellent magazine.\"28 Along with these horticultural pursuits, Meehan maintained a long-running correspondence with many notable botanists of his time, including George Engelmann, Asa Gray, and Charles Darwin. Much of this correspondence concerns specific observations or botanical questions, often relating to articles that Meehan would eventually publish in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where he long served as the vice president. Advocate for Urban Green Space In the later years of his life, Meehan became actively involved in urban improvement. In 1883, he accepted a role on the Philadelphia Common Council in order to ensure the creation of city parks and preservation of Bartram's Garden.29 Meehan was instrumental in forming the City Parks Association, creating lasting green space in the most urbanized neighborhoods. He is credited with introducing nature study and kindergarten to Philadelphia public schools, and he strived to improve the educational system for working-class families throughout the city.30 Among these accomplishments, it is the preservation of Bartram's Garden that is the most noteworthy. In 1879, Andrew Eastwick died, Thomas Meehan 57 Thomas Meehan's work on The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States serves as one of the clearest examples of his lucid writing style. Each of his entries was accompanied by chromolithograph illustrations prepared by Louis Prang of Boston. The illustrations and excerpts here appeared in later installments of the project in Meehan's Monthly. Pinkshell Azalea (Rhododendron vaseyi) \" It is one of a number of beautiful plants missed by the early explorers of the Mountains of North Carolina, and which have been brought to light only in modern times.\" MEEHAN'S MONTHLY (VOL. 7) ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM 58 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Coast Cholla (Cylindropuntia prolifera) \" Animals take the fruit to their haunts, use the fl esh, and scatter the undigested seeds in various directions,\u2014certainly many fruit-bearing plants are widely distributed in this manner. Those who think this feature a special adaptation will see in the absence of spines in the fruit of this species, strong confi rmation of this view. The plant would be spiny, it would be contended, in order to protect it against browsing creatures; while, when consumption instead of protection became useful to the plant, the production of spines would be arrested.\" MEEHAN'S MONTHLY (VOL. 3) Thomas Meehan 59 Rosebay Rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum) \" In a state of nature the Rhododendron inhabits wild, rocky places, in uninhabited regions where the foot of the traveler is rarely seen \u2026 So far away are they generally in their gloomy homes that even the great traveler, John Bartram, had not met with them anywhere west of the Schuylkill river.\" MEEHAN'S MONTHLY (VOL. 1) 60 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) \" It is remarkable that a plant so attractive in so many ways should not have become more attached to the public mind, or received more attention from polite writers, but the author can recall no instance in American poetry or general literature in which the Partridge berry plays a conspicuous part.\" MEEHAN'S MONTHLY (VOL. 3) and for nearly a decade, the resolution of his estate and the fate of Bartram's Garden remained unresolved.31 Shortly after Eastwick's death, Sargent, using his connections in Philadelphia, tried to organize a group of \"liberal gentlemen\" to purchase the property.32 This effort was unsuccessful because the owners of the estate believed that \"they could make more [profi t] by destroying its botanical associations, and turning the whole into building lots.\"33 Sargent continued to provide support on a national level through Garden and Forest, arguing in an unsigned editorial that \"the name of Bartram's Garden should be preserved and \u2026 should be maintained in as near the condition as its fi rst owner left it.\"34 Meanwhile, Meehan and members of the City Parks Association continued the local campaign. Ultimately, the City of Philadelphia appropriated funds to purchase Bartram's Garden in 1889, took ownership in 1891, and fi nalized the purchase in 1893.35 As a result, more than forty years after Meehan had fi rst worked at the historic garden, it became preserved in perpetuity. This achievement must have been remarkably gratifying for Meehan, seeing the preservation of the place that helped to launch his career and that had such horticultural signifi cance in his adopted city. Once the future of Bartram's Garden was settled, Meehan's foresight in creating open space throughout the city was acknowledged with another Garden and Forest editorial: \"The fact that the people of Philadelphia are securing a series of small parks is largely due to the publicspirited and tireless efforts of Mr. Thomas Meehan, the well-known horticulturist \u2026 Many generations of Philadelphians will have a good reason to remember with gratitude his disinterested efforts for the improvement and happiness of his fellow men.\"36 Meehan's Legacy As a coda to his life, Meehan was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1901, a few months before he died. He followed Sargent and Liberty Hyde Bailey as the third American to win this honor. In conferring it, the Royal Horticultural Society recognized his \"distinguished services in botany and horticulture.\" Seeing Meehan in the company of these two towering fi gures of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Thomas Meehan 61 American horticulture affirms his stature among his peers: Sargent, one of the great dendrologists of his era, who brought the Arnold Arboretum to prominence, and Bailey, a man of astoundingly broad interests and accomplishments who combined the science of botany with the art of horticulture. Meehan pursued similar combinations and was interested not only in the world of horticulture but in using it for the betterment of his fellow citizens. It is worth pondering what Meehan would think if he were to see the state of contemporary horticulture. Certainly, many if not most of the trees that are commonly planted across the Northeast would be familiar to him. Having straddled the divide between native and nonnative plants, he might think that there would be no need for invidious comparisons between the two groups. And he might be bemused at the trends in \"new\" native plants, having promoted many of those species in his various publications and through his nursery. If nothing else, although his name may have faded, Thomas Meehan's impact as a promoter of modern horticulture has not. Endnotes 1 Oberle, S. G. 1997. The influence of Thomas Meehan on horticulture in the United States. University of Delaware, M. S. Thesis Dissertation 2 Meehan, T. 1853. The American handbook of ornamental trees. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, and Co. 3 Sargent, C. S. 1890. Silva of North America (vol. 9). New York: Peter Smith. 4 Meehan, T. 1878. The native flowers and ferns of the United States in their botanical, horticultural, and popular aspects (vol. 1). Boston: L. Prang. 5 Meehan, S. M. 1902. A brief sketch of the life of Thomas Meehan. Meehan's Monthly, 12: 13-19. 6 Harshberger, J. W. 1899. The botanists of Philadelphia and their work. Philadelphia: T. C. Davis. 7 Meehan, T. 1896a. Meehan letter to C. S. Sargent, 16 August 1896. Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927) papers, Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library, Harvard University. 8 Meehan, T. 1896b. John Bartram's wood-shed. Meehan's Monthly, 6: 17. 9 Meehan, 1902. 10 Meehan, 1902. 11 Oberle, 1997. 12 S. 1893, September. The Meehan Nurseries and the trees of Germantown. Garden and Forest, 6(289): 377-378. 13 See, for instance: Hoopes, Bro. & Thomas. 1870. Annual trade list of the Cherry Hill Nurseries, West Chester, Pa.: Spring of 1870. West Chester, PA: Hoopes, Bro. & Thomas. 14 Del Tredici, P. 2017. The introduction of Japanese plants into North America. The Botanical Review, 83: 215-252. 15 Thomas Meehan of Germantown. 1876, April. Reading Times (Reading, PA), 37(22): 2; An interesting display. 1876, May. The Daily Evening Express (Lancaster, PA), 39(105): 2. 16 Burr, S. J. 1877. Memorial of the International exhibition. Hartford: L. Stebbins. 17 Rothrock, J. T. 1880. Catalogue of trees and shrubs native of and introduced in the horticultural gardens adjacent to Horticultural Hall in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. 18 Meehan, T. 1876. Horticulture at the Centennial. The Gardener's Monthly, 18(212): 254-256. 19 Germantown Nurseries. 1882. General price list for the fall of 1882. Germantown, PA: Germantown Nurseries. 20 Meehans' Nurseries. 1895. Catalogue. Germantown, PA: Thomas Meehan & Sons. 21 Meehan, T. 1886. Note on Quercus dentata. Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 38: 280-281. 22 Meehans' Nurseries, 1895. 23 Meehans' Nurseries, 1895. 24 Del Tredici, P. 2005. Against all odds: Growing Franklinia in Boston. Arnoldia, 63(4): 2-7. 25 Oberle, 1997. 26 The Gardener's Monthly. 1888, February. Garden and Forest, (1)1: 1. 27 Meehan, 1878. 28 Notes. 1891, March. Garden and Forest, 4(161): 144. 29 Meehan, T. 1897. In Bartram's Garden. Meehan's Monthly, 7: 50. 30 Harshberger, 1899; Meehan, 1902. 31 Fry, J. 2004. John Bartram House and Garden. Historic American Landscape Survey, (HALS) PA-1. 32 Fry, 2004; Meehan, T. 1885. The old botanic garden of Bartram. The Gardener's Monthly and Horticulturist, 27: 26-27. 33 Meehan, 1885. 34 Notes. 1889, February. Garden and Forest, 2(52): 86. 35 Fry, 2004. 36 Notes. 1889, March. Garden and Forest, 2(54): 120. Anthony S. Aiello is the associate director of conservation, plant breeding, and collections at Longwood Gardens."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"The Intertwined Attractions of Plants, Moths, and People","article_sequence":9,"start_page":62,"end_page":67,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25744","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160b36e.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Bawa, Kamaljit S.","article_content":"The Intertwined Attractions of Plants, Moths, and People Kamaljit S. Bawa It was a warm and humid night in September of 2003. In a tropical forest by the coast of Madagascar, Phil Devries, an entomologist and noted nature videographer, swatted mosquitoes hovering around his face. He had been waiting eagerly for a visitor since seven o'clock. As the night transitioned to early morning, without any signs of the visitor, the tension and anxiety in Phil's mind increased. For the visitor, Phil Devries was inconsequential; the desired object was Darwin's orchid near which Phil (or the Butterfly Man, as he is popularly known) had parked himself to photograph the orchid's pollinator. \"Good Heavens what insect can suck it,\" Charles Darwin is said to have remarked in reference to the nectar in the long floral tube of Angraecum sesquipedale, now known as the Darwin's orchid, native of Madagascar.1 Darwin had received the orchid on January 25, 1862, from James Bateman, a businessman, collector of plants, and horticulturist, who grew orchids. Darwin then famously predicted that A. sesquipedale must be pollinated by a hawkmoth with a proboscis that measured at least eleven inches in length.2 In 1903, almost forty years after Darwin intuited its existence, a hawkmoth with long mouth parts was described by Walter Rothschild and Karl Jordan. It was isolated from moth specimens collected on an earlier expedition to Madagascar by Jules Paul Mabille, a French naturalist. Rothschild and Jordan named the species Xanthopan morganii. However, it was not until 1992, a good ninety years later, that Lutz Wasserthal, a German biologist, observed X. morganii visiting the flowers of A. sesquipedale in real life. Only then was the connection between orchid flowers and moths finally confirmed.3 Visits of moths to flowers in the wild are hard to observe. And so, Wasserthal had to use large flight tents to photograph the two partners engaged in the mutually beneficial relationship. Finally, in 2003, after spending several nights in the Madagascar forest, Phil Devries was able to photograph the evasive moths visiting the flowers of A. sesquipedale in the wild\u2014at around three o'clock in the morning.4 The correlation between the length of the floral tube and the length of moth's proboscis led Darwin to infer the process of coevolution, in which natural selection favors reciprocal increases in the length of the floral tube and moth's proboscis. Heritable variation\u2014in this case, variation in floral tube and the length of proboscis in moths\u2014is the raw material on which natural selection acts. Between Darwin's original prediction and the eye-witness observation, 130 years had passed. Nothing in science comes easy. Not even for Darwin. It was Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, who proposed the principles of inheritance in 1865, based on his experiments with peas. From Darwin's orchids to Mendel's peas, plants have played an important role in the study of evolution. Curiously and coincidentally, both Darwin and Mendel were contemporaries, and although Mendel's work filled a critical gap in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the two men did not know of each other's work! While Darwin is noted for his work on evolution, he is much less known as an ardent botanist. He was greatly interested in the reproduction of plants, particularly orchids. He wrote several books on plants: The Power of Movement in Plants, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, On the Good Effects of Intercrossing, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, and Insectivorous Plants. Plants were critical to the formulation of his ideas both about inherent variation and how natural selection acts on this variation to enable evolution. Facing page: Darwin's orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) is one of thousands of night-flowering plants pollinated by moths. In this case, only one pollinator can accomplish the task\u2014Xanthopan morganii. SENCKENBERG COLLECTION \/ PHOTO: SAMMLUNGSFOTOGRAFEN.DE BAWA, K. S. 2021. THE INTERTWINED ATTRACTIONS OF PLANTS, MOTHS, AND PEOPLE. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 62-67 Moths and Sex Pheromones It is March 1974, and I am waiting, at evening time, under a large Luehea speciosa. The tree stands in a dry tropical forest in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. The previous day, I had seen its large white flowers start to bloom around eight o'clock in the evening. And so, the next day, under the tree and in the light of the moon, I staked a vantage point and started my watch. At exactly a quarter to eight, and almost like magic, the large white petals start to unfurl. In a quarter of an hour, almost a hundred flowers in my field of view have opened in near-perfect synchronicity. In my five decades of fieldwork in Costa Rica, that night was one of the most memorable and remains permanently etched in my memory. Plants depend on a wide variety of animals to get cross-pollinated. The diversity of these pollination systems is on full display in tropical evergreen forests, the world's most speciesrich ecological communities. On any given day, at any time during a short walk through the forest, one can encounter flowers of many sizes, shapes, and colors that are pollinated by insects\u2014largely bees, butterflies, and flies\u2014 and, at times, birds. For a different set of plant species that start to open their flowers around dusk and at night, insects (beetles and moths) and mammals (primarily bats) take over the role of major pollinators. All across the globe, but mostly in the tropics, tens of thousands of plant species are pollinated by an equally large number of moth species at night. Moth-pollinated flowers are almost always white and tubular, with nectar at the base of the tube. They blossom in the evening, soon after dusk, and the blooms last for one or two nights. During this time, the moths visit them frequently, making multiple forays throughout the hours of the night. Insect pollinators visit flowers for food, but, to them, flowers are more than a food source. They are also sites of mating and, often, a source of compounds that play an important role in facilitating these sexual encounters. Flowers produce a variety of volatile compounds to attract insects, such as moths. Smell plays an important role in attracting insects from afar, especially at night, when visual cues can only function once the pollinators approach the flower closely. Female moths use volatile compounds produced by flowers to synthesize sex pheromones, which they release to attract males. In some cases, the volatiles associated with the floral smell simply induce female moths to produce large amounts of sex pheromones, but in others, the female moths can absorb or ingest the volatiles and convert the compounds directly into pheromones. The males are not left behind. In some species of moths, males sequester pyrrolizidine alkaloids from flowers to use them as precursors for the synthesis of pheromones. Sometimes, the males even transfer the alkaloids to the female during mating, for the defense of eggs against predators.5 Thus, flowers play a critical role not only in the provision of food and nutrition but also in the mating and reproduction of pollinators. Evening Fragrances and Romantic Nights Thirty years later, I am in Bangalore, the techno-hub of South India. It is again late evening, and I am passing through a small market buzzing with people. Walking in front of vegetable and food stores, I am overpowered with fragrances emanating from buds and flowers of jasmine (Jasminum) strung together for hair adornments. And indeed, I see many women walking around with their long hair arranged in many different styles and adorned with strings of fragrant jasmine. Throughout remembered history, and for millennia, flowers have been a part of daily life in India, as adornments for gods and humans. The Hindu epic Ra\u02c9ma\u02c9 yana about the life of Ram, one of the most celebrated gods of Hindus, includes references to Sita, Ram's wife, decorating her hair with floral arrangements. And in a well-known epic poem written in the fourth century CE, the playwright Ka\u02c9 lida\u02c9 sa included a verse in which sensuality and pollination merge: Sensuous women in summer love weave flower earrings from fragile petals of mimosa 64 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 while wild bees kiss them gently 6 Anthologies of classical Tamil, written between 100 BCE and 250 CE, describe the flowers that women bear as those of jasmine. For men, too, flowers have been a bedtime adornment for ages, and the exchange of flowers between individuals has always carried unspoken and covert sexual connotations.7 From trees in Costa Rica that use flowers to attract moths to women in India who use flowers for adornment, the fundamental motives of life are the same irrespective of geographies, gender, or species. But the enchantment of union does not stop there. The collision of these seemingly different worlds gets closer and more intimate. Jasminium sumbac and other species of Jasminum are native to South India and other parts of tropical Asia. Jasmine flowers are highly fragrant, pollinated by moths, and here, too, the maximum production of aromatic compounds is between seven and eight o'clock in the evening!8 Moon and Sex Back in Costa Rica and on another moonlit night, I am driving to my campsite after a full day of fieldwork in the dry deciduous forest. Chains of white jasmine (Jasminum) are worn as a hair adornment in Tamil Nadu, India. The flowers become increasingly fragrant in the evening. MCKAY SAVAGE (CC BY 2.0) Intertwined Lives 65 There is little traffic on the Pan-American Highway, which means that I can easily observe the star-studded trees of Bombacopsis quinata, a relative of the silk cotton tree, on both sides of the road. Under the full moon, it is a beautiful sight, with a tree coming into view every few minutes. The \"stars,\" indeed, are large, white, moth-pollinated flowers, perched high in the leafless crowns of these very large trees. For the past several evenings, I have been passing by these trees in flower, but this time, the number of flowers on the trees appears to be unusually large. Flowers in this species last for a single night, but individual trees flower over many weeks, with a new batch opening every night. It seemed that the intensity of flowering was associated with lunar cycles, with the largest number of flowers opening on nights with the full moon. While, on this evening drive, I cannot confirm the correlation between the intensity of flowering and phases of the moon, researchers would later document such trends for other species. Moths are known to be more active on moonlit nights, and pollination can be more intense during a full moon for moth-pollinated species, as, for example, in Ephedra foeminea, a gymnosperm. In contrast to most gymnosperms, which are wind-pollinated, this species attracts moths by secreting a pollination drop from its cones. Individual plants produce their maximum amount of pollination drops during full moons. Meanwhile, a related species of Ephedra is wind-pollinated, and in that case, there is no connection between pollination and lunar cycles.9 Is there a general correlation between lunar cycles and pollination intensity for the thou- Flowers of Bombacopsis quinata open at sundown, seemingly more abundant in the treetops when the moon is full. REINALDO AGUILAR (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) 66 Arnoldia 78\/5-6 \u2022 October 2021 sands of night-blooming plant species? We do not know. Recently, researchers have shown that a desert cactus (Cereus peruvianus), presumably pollinated by bats, puts on its largest display of flowers around the full moon. The species flowers over a few months with the number of flowers going up and down with the lunar cycles.10 The moon has always been associated with romance in our own human cultures. Surprisingly, there is insufficient data to establish a link between sexual activity with lunar cycles. Interestingly, though, research has shown that a larger proportion of females demonstrate ovulation during the full moon, and all genders experience higher aggression levels and less sleep.11 Intertwined in the Web of Life It is evening again, and the sex lives of plants, moths, and humans intertwine. All of these organisms use the same compounds to attract mates: smell is a main stimulant for each. Plants, indeed, cannot smell, yet floral volatiles are a major incentive for moths to visit flowers. Among the three partners, plants reign supreme. They seem to dictate the terms of the relationships. Moths, in fact, are held in bondage. They cannot attract mates without pheromones for which the plants hold the precursors. Humans also seem to be dependent on plants as intermediaries, although they, of course, can do without them. For those who study life on earth, the interconnections among plants, moths, and humans are not surprising. We are a part of the web of life that has celestial connections with other planets. These connections are vital for maintaining all lives, especially ours. We should celebrate and value these connections that enrich our lives by ceasing our assault on nature. Endnotes 1 Arditti, J., Elliott, J., Kitching I. J., and Wasserthal, L. T. 2012. \"Good Heavens what insect can suck it\"\u2014Charles Darwin, Angraecum sesquipedale and Xanthopan morganii praedicta. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 169: 403-432. https:\/\/doi. org\/10.1111\/j.1095-8339.2012.01250.x 2 Netz, C. and Renner, S. S. 2017. Long-spurred Angraecum orchids and long-tongued sphingid moths on Madagascar: A time frame for Darwin's predicted Xanthopan\/Angraecum coevolution. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 122(2): 469-478. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/biolinnean\/blx086 3 Wasserthal, L. T. 1997. The pollinators of the Malagasy star orchids Angraecum sesquipedale, A. sororium and A. compactum and the evolution of extremely long spurs by pollinator shift. Botanica Acta, 110(5): 343-359. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/j.1438-8677.1997. tb00650.x 4 See video in: Tartaglia, E. 2015. Year of the Sphingidae\u2014Co-evolution. National Moth Week. https:\/\/nationalmothweek.org\/2015\/07\/17\/year-ofthe- sphingidae-co-evolution\/ 5 St\u00f6kl, J. and Steiger, S. 2017. Evolutionary origin of insect pheromones. Current Opinion in Insect Science, 24: 36-42. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.cois.2017.09.004 6 Miller, B. S. 1984. Theater of memory: The plays of Ka\u02c9 lida\u02c9 sa. New York: Columbia University Press. 7 Goody, J. 1993. The culture of flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 323-324. 8 Braun, N. A. and Sim, S. 2012. Jasminum sambac flower absolutes from India and China\u2014Geographic variations. Natural Product Communications, 7(5): 645-650. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/1934578x1200700526 9 Rydin, C. and Bolinder, K. 2015. Moonlight pollination in the gymnosperm Ephedra (Gnetales). Biology Letters, 11(4): 10-13. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1098\/ rsbl.2014.0993 10 Ben-Attia, M., Reinberg, A., Smolensky, M. H., Gadacha, W., Khedaier, A., Sani, M.,\u2026 Boughamni, N. G. 2016. Blooming rhythms of cactus Cereus peruvianus with nocturnal peak at full moon during seasons of prolonged daytime photoperiod. Chronobiology International, 33(4): 419-430. https:\/\/ doi.org\/10.3109\/07420528.2016.1157082 11 Moore, B. 2019. The effect of the lunar cycle on the female reproductive system. South Carolina Junior Academy of Science. https:\/\/scholarexchange.furman. edu\/scjas\/2019\/all\/242\/ Acknowledgments I thank my wife, Tshering Bawa, for encouraging me to write this manuscript when I first discussed the idea with her almost twenty-five years ago. A series of discussions with Rohini Nilekani about Brahma Kamal (Epiphyllum oxypetalum), a nocturnal blooming cactus from Mexico and South America, but widely naturalized in Asia, was another source of inspiration. Meena Narayanswamy suggested several improvements in the manuscript. Kamaljit S. Bawa is president of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru, India, and distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Intertwined Lives 67"},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Otherworldly Wingnuts: <i>Pterocarya x rehderiana</i>","article_sequence":10,"start_page":68,"end_page":69,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25745","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d160b726.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"","article_content":"A rarely visited corner at the Arnold Arboretum is nestled beneath the tall stone wall that separates the hickory collection from traffic on Centre Street. In late summer, the area feels otherworldly. The heavy overstory filters the light and cools the air; the humidity seems to increase; and densely planted shrubs block out the surrounding views and noises. The corner is dominated by a planting of seemingly colossal hybrid wingnuts (Pterocarya x rehderiana), with their drooping Spanish moss-like fruits and twisted forms. Standing next to their large multistemmed trunks can make you feel miniature. Wingnuts are closely related to hickories (Carya) and walnuts (Juglans). There are six species of Pterocarya, with native ranges clustered in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Caucuses. In addition to cultivating representatives of five of the six species, the Arnold Arboretum has eight specimens of this unusual hybrid, all of which grow in this out-of-the-way corner. The oldest of the eight originated at the Arboretum from seed sent, in 1879, by Pierre Alphonse Lavall\u00e9e of the Arboretum de Segrez, outside of Paris. At the time, the Arboretum de Segrez was one of the largest in the world (and a noteworthy landscape where Marcel Proust once suffered an asthma attack but still managed to write a poem about its beauty). Lavall\u00e9e collected the seeds from a Chinese wingnut (P. stenoptera) in his arboretum, and, once they germinated in Boston, the seedlings were planted along Centre Street. Two decades later, Alfred Rehder, an Arnold Arboretum taxonomist, noticed that the trees didn't look quite like the Chinese wingnut. \"The trees in the Arnold, known as Pterocarya stenoptera \u2026 I can no longer consider, after much study, as the real species of that name,\" Rehder wrote to the German Dendrological Society in 1903, \"but now consider [them] a cross between this and P. fraxinifolia [the Caucasian wingnut], which in its characteristics almost exactly stops between the two species.\" Rehder hypothesized that pollen from a Caucasian wingnut growing at the Arboretum de Segrez must have landed on the flowers of a Chinese wingnut growing nearby. We don't know who collected and brought the Chinese and Caucasian wingnuts to Paris, but it may well have been the first time that the two species, normally separated by the thousands of miles between the Caucasus Mountains and eastern China, were growing in the same place. Rehder conferred with Camillo Schneider, a taxonomist working at the Vienna Natural History Museum, who agreed with Rehder's assessment. Based on their correspondence, Schneider published the first botanical description of the new hybrid in 1906. Writing in German in the Illustriertes Handbuch der Laubholzkunde, he identified the unique characteristics of the buds and rachises of the \"Bastardes\" growing at the Arnold Arboretum and officially named the hybrid for his friend, choosing the Latin name Pterocarya x rehderiana. Four trees (accession 1191) from Lavall\u00e9e's 1879 shipment still grow along the Centre Street wall, hidden behind the hickory collection. In addition, four neighboring trees (23119) were accessioned as seedlings from the original trees. When the wingnuts fruit in midsummer, they offer a dazzling display of long, pendulous clusters of winged nutlets (hence the common name) that dangle from what seems like every branch. One particularly large specimen, accession 1191*E, has an incredible form, with leaders that shoot up more than 125 feet and droop over the Works Progress Administrationconstructed bus shelter on Centre Street. As with many hybrids, Pterocarya x rehderiana seems to display hybrid vigor and, according to Rehder, are \"much hardier and more satisfactory than their supposed parents.\" A windstorm in October 2020 took out one of the leaders from accession 1191*E, but overall, the hybrids don't seem terribly affected by the cold New England winter, even after more than 140 years growing at the Arboretum. While the hybrids are a product of a chance cross that would likely have never been possible in the wild, the trees have more than claimed their uncanny home. Jared Rubinstein is an associate project manager at the Arnold Arboretum. For more on the taxonomic history of the Rehder wingnut, see his 2020 article with Michael Dosmann in Novon, issue 28(4). Otherworldly Wingnuts: Pterocarya x rehderiana Jared Rubinstein RUBINSTEIN, J. 2021. OTHERWORLDLY WINGNUTS: PTEROCARYA x REHDERIANA. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 68-69"},{"arnoldia_cover":true,"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25699","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d270af27.jpg","title":"2021-78-5-6","volume":78,"issue_number":"5-6","year":2021,"series":null,"season":null},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Field Botany in the Time of COVID-19","article_sequence":1,"start_page":2,"end_page":6,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25729","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25eb328.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Brown, Emma; Maynard, Brian","article_content":"The students in our University of Rhode Island field botany class exclaimed with surprise as they tried to balance atop lopsided hummocks of tussock sedge (Carex stricta). The mounds arose between expanses of boot-sucking sphagnum moss. Red cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) dotted the shimmering surface around them. This was the first time most of the students had seen cranberries in the wild\u2014a powerful learning moment. Memories of the sour explosion of the cranberries would become associated with the comradery of learning how to differentiate this flowing fen from a typical bog\u2014or how to identify the three-way sedge (Dulichium arundinaceum) on the fen's edge and the delicate beaked sedge (Rhynchospora capitellata) breezily waving in the center of the scene. Six months later, in March 2020, the pandemic had hit. As university classes pivoted online, we, as instructors, were forced to figure out how the unique shared experiences of the previous fall's classes, held in the field, could be translated meaningfully into a remote format for the upcoming summer and fall offerings. Field Botany and Taxonomy has been taught at the University of Rhode Island since the late 1940s. Professor Elmer Palmatier, a local botanical legend, established the class and was known to say: \"There should be no monotony when studying your botany.\" His legacy\u2014 students quickly learning hundreds of wild plants\u2014has been maintained by a lineage of memorable naturalists. Today, it continues in summer and fall classes led by Professor Brian Maynard, botanist Robin Baranowski, and their teaching assistants. The summer is an intense marathon to identify every plant found between late May and the end of June\u2014over 300 plants in a typical term. The sessions are composed of fast-paced, four-hour meetings, held four days a week. In the more traditional fourteen-week fall semester, the class heads out together twice a week to explore natural habitats around Rhode Island and identify about 250 plant taxa using sight, scent, texture, and even taste. Students collect and bind samples in herbarium presses for both courses and are constantly quizzed on plant names in the field. The courses cover both native and naturalized plants, with detailed units on grasses and mosses. The fall session becomes a race against time, given the threat of frost, and attention turns to autumn colors and winter twig characteristics. The coronavirus pandemic forced virtually all college courses online, many for the first time. Higher education as we knew it would change dramatically. While adequate tools for online education have been around for nearly two decades, most professors and students of the natural sciences had little experience with online learning, as it had never been necessary before. Now we had just a few weeks to move our courses entirely online before students returned from an extended spring break. Our most significant concern\u2014other than fears about keeping ourselves and our students safe from COVID-19\u2014was that we would not be able to provide our students with the quintessential field botany course experience. After much deliberation, we settled on a progressive learning structure that involved \"flipping\" the course. Instead of loading students up with plants to memorize through the usual sage-on-the-stage approach, we would hold the students responsible for finding and identifying plants on their own. While the traditional field course had emphasized learning a shared list of plants, this version would prioritize the development of skills that students could employ to identify any plant they encountered. Using an online learning platform called Brightspace, we created a series of modular lessons about the major groups of plants: wildflowers, trees and shrubs, ferns, and grasses. Each module included daily activities to train students on identifying the plants that they Field Botany in the Time of COVID-19 Emma Brown and Brian Maynard When Field Botany and Taxonomy at the University of Rhode Island went remote during the pandemic, the authors found that online tools like iNaturalist supported independent and flexible learning. This iNaturalist map from the summer term shows the wide distribution of class observations. MAP COURTESY INATURALIST; PLANT PHOTO BY SARAH MCDONOUGH found on their own. We centered these activities around multimedia tutorials on how to navigate four different field manuals (one for each major plant group) and two of the online keying systems found on the Native Plant Trust's GoBotany website. This was the first time we had used online keys for the class. The students would identify plants using the field manual or online keying system taught each week and then document their observations with photographs and notes using iNaturalist, a citizen-scientist app and website. These digital herbarium vouchers, as we call them, were formated according to a template we developed and took the place of the herbarium collection the students would have created for the inperson class. The new keying and vouchering skills of our students culminated in a capstone project. Each student designed a vegetation survey in a nearby natural area safely accessible during the pandemic. Students used iNaturalist to record the plants found along a transect line, pacing step-by-step and pausing at regular intervals to document the plant species encountered. The integration of iNaturalist into the class and requiring a vegetation survey were other firsts for the course. The summer session began in late May 2020 with eighteen students enrolled. Instruction was entirely asynchronous, meaning students could watch presentations and complete assignments on their own schedule. Students communicated with us by email, text, phone, and video calls. Challenges included making sure students had the necessary technology and access to natural spaces. We also needed to ensure that students understood the language of botany and, perhaps most importantly, that they could distinguish between native or naturalized plants and those in managed landscapes (which might not be found in their field guides). Fortunately, most students had smartphones that automatically tagged the photos uploaded to iNaturalist with GPS data. After keying and identifying a plant, the student would create a voucher with three clear images taken in the field and a description of the plant's shape, foliage characteristics, and other identification features. We guided students through the process of taking clear images. As a set, the photos should zoom to capture the entire plant silhouette, the branch arrangement, and finally up-close details of foliage, twigs, and flowers. Vouchers also included the steps used to identify the plant in the specified field guide, a link for that plant to the Consortium of Northeast Herbaria (a digital collection of herbarium sheets from dozens of herbaria), and an image of the plant on a plain white background with a digital herbarium label. The students posted the photos and notes to the class iNaturalist page, where the instructors, teaching assistants, and other iNaturalist users confirmed or challenged their identification. As new observations popped up on the iNaturalist map for the class, the difference from the in-person course was apparent. Instead of everyone learning the same plant in the same location, all in Rhode Island, we now racked up twenty-three unique records of sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis) from southern Maine to Philadelphia. One student reported plants sighted in a Maine salt marsh. Another documented vegetation in Manhattan parks. Each week, the students expanded one voucher into a presentation and posted it to a discussion blog. The presentations included a range map and notes on plant family characteristics, habitat, ecological relationships, and historical human uses. Blog conversations around these presentations became surprisingly animated: students enjoyed finding similarities in their plant-hunting adventures and learning new facts about plants they had also discovered, as well as about plants they had never seen before. Our learners went above and beyond our expectations by sharing photographs of the habitats and wildlife surrounding their botanical entries. Pictures of herons flew back and forth in the discussion posts, along with wild tales of adventurous plant-hunting escapades. Even a cinnamon-colored housecat participated in the fun as a model to show the size of cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) fronds against a large enough white surface for the digital herbarium voucher. These blog entries fostered engagement and interactions that we had thought were only possible in person, when we could walk back to the vans afer foraging cranberries, with fen water sloshing in our boots and conversations gushing. As it turned out, the blogs still allowed 4 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 the students to share their experiences with excitement and passion. In the last week of the class, the vegetation survey capstone tested the students' plant identification skills. After proposing a study area (which ranged from vacant lots to pristine forests), each student walked their transect and identified every plant species they found, posted their findings on iNaturalist, and produced a final report that they shared with the class. As the course unfolded, we found that the switch to the online format had created new learning opportunities. Students continued hands-on learning with greater independence. Resources designed for the course could be reused by students time and again, and we improved accessibility by captioning videos and narrating PowerPoints. Several students completed classwork from out of state, adding to the diversity of plants that the class found. The asynchronous schedule allowed students with personal or work obligations to participate fully. While our students all reflected that the course was time-intensive, they enjoyed the motivation to spend more time outdoors each week. After our success with eighteen summer students, we took stock of what worked best and ramped up for a fall course of fifty students. We ended up using many of the same tools developed for the summer class, but the material was now spread out over ten weeks and focused on the vegetation we would encounter in New England in late summer and fall. An added challenge of the pandemic was that students were scattered far and wide\u2014from Maine to Philadelphia\u2014 and could be forced into lock-down or quarantine at any time. For quarantined students, we prepared contingency samples, which included collections of photos and descriptions of habitat and plant characteristics that we observed in the field. While many fall students still attended remotely, we were finally permitted to meet in person, in small recitation groups, if students could get to campus. Twice a week, we helped up to five in-person students at a time with their keying and plant vouchers. We were initially concerned that students would learn only a fraction of the usual number of plants, but these concerns were assuaged by the depth of knowledge the students acquired Students created \"digitial herbarium vouchers\" for the class. Each voucher included at least three photographs of the plant in the field and one photograph showing the plant against a white background. ROBIN BARANOWSKI 6 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 for each plant and the confidence they gained in keying on their own. Across the summer and fall classes, our students posted nearly three thousand individual observations to iNaturalist\u2014about 360 unique species in each class. This number far surpassed the 300 or so plants taught in the past. Moreover, our students can now apply their plant identification skills anywhere in the world. We foresee that these tech-savvy citizen scientists will continue to use iNaturalist, including for BioBlitzes, which are intense twenty-four-hour events in which groups find and identify as many species of life as possible in a specific area. In explaining to our students how to learn their plants, we always stress that the best way to learn is to teach. The act of teaching others is a higher-level step in the learning process. The same students who initially had shied at the prospect of the online format shared plans to use their new knowledge for future careers and reported passing along what they had learned to friends and family. A select few students admitted to not liking plants before this class but noted that they learned to appreciate and even love the plants they encountered. Even as we return to in-person instruction this summer, we will use many of the tools we developed in 2020. We have committed to teaching a blended (online and in-person) field botany course to thirty-six students this fall. Moving forward, we expect to keep several of the teaching strategies that encourage independence and foster flexibility: keying modules, digital plant vouchers, a vegetation survey capstone experience, and the integration of iNaturalist and GoBotany. We are growing with the plants we teach. While the format may be different, the class is definitely a new sport off an old tree that we will continue to cultivate. For more information Visit our class iNaturalist sites at https:\/\/www.inaturalist. org\/projects\/uri-bio-323-summer-2020 and https:\/\/www. inaturalist.org\/projects\/uri-bio-323-fall-2020. GoBotany\u2014the Native Plant Trust's online tool for plant identification\u2014can be accessed at https:\/\/ gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org\/. This provided a valuable complement to the four field manuals that we also taught: Newcomb's Wildflower Guide by Lawrence Newcomb and Gordon Morrison, A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs by George Petrides and Roger Tory Peterson, Northeast Ferns by Steve Chadde, and Grasses, Sedges, and Rushes by Lauren Brown and Ted Elliman. Acknowledgment Thanks to iNatauralist for permission to republish the map in this article. iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. Emma Brown is completing her master of science degree at the University of Rhode Island and writing a thesis analyzing the experience of taking field-based courses online during the pandemic. This summer, she will return to her native Delaware, where she practices horticulture and compiles the Delaware Native Plant Society newsletter. Brian Maynard is a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and Entomology at the University of Rhode Island. He teaches courses in plant propagation and production, landscape management, arboriculture, and field botany. Brian received the Gold Medal Award from the Massachusetts Horticulture Society in 2009 and the Award of Merit from the International Plant Propagator's Society in 2016. Students also submitted detailed notes with each digital herbaruim voucher. This section describes the steps taken to identify periwinkle (Vinca minor) using Newcomb's Wildflower Guide and also includes a link to a digitized specimen of this species at an herbarium. ROBIN BARANOWSKI"},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"The Conference Must Go On","article_sequence":2,"start_page":7,"end_page":9,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25730","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25eb36c.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Iles, Jeff","article_content":"The Conference Must Go On Jeff Iles Like a shimmering mirage on some lonely two-lane blacktop, the end of our global pandemic remained out of reach during the last academic year. No backyard barbeque with humans from another pod. No hockey games or theatre. No going anywhere sans facial covering. In my circle of fellow plant nerds, in-person trade shows and educational conferences topped the list of favorite social events that vanished. Remember those days? Striding up to the registration desk, receiving your official conference name badge, pawing through a complimentary tote bag filled with an eclectic assortment of swag, and then rushing off to the opening plenary session and, without giving it a second thought, sitting next to, or even shaking hands with, your randomly chosen seatmate. As 2020 dragged on and the 2021 conference season loomed on the horizon, it became abundantly clear to conference planners that inperson, traditional educational events were not a possibility, at least not for events scheduled for prime conference season between January and March. But the show must go on, right? This was my challenge as I contemplated strategies for keeping the flame alive for an educational conference I've managed since 1995: the annual Iowa State University Shade Tree Short Course, held on the university campus in Ames, Iowa. The event, which was heralding its sixty-fifth year in 2021, was the brainchild of Harold \"Sande\" McNabb, a forest pathologist at Iowa State. As the story goes, Dutch elm disease and its assault on our American elm (Ulmus americana) provided the impetus for the first gathering, which occurred at the McNabb residence. Now, many years later, the short course has become the can't-miss event for arborists and allied industry professionals in Iowa and surrounding states, drawing well over six hundred participants annually and featuring notable presenters like the late Alex Shigo, who encouraged us to \"touch trees\" and learn about their biology, care, and responses to wounding via compartmentalization. The themes, points of emphasis, and methods of instruction (handson workshops are always popular) vary from year to year. So, too, does the number of presenters (approximately thirty). But we never stray too far from discussing the benefits and maintenance requirements of these large, lifebreathing, woody friends. Not to overstate the importance of this conference or my hand in bringing it to fruition, but there can be no denying that the Shade Tree Short Course has earned its reputation as a trusted platform for arboricultural and horticultural education in Iowa and the upper Midwest. As the new year dawned, I felt an almost parental responsibility for the conference\u2014in part to continue McNabb's steadfast tradition, but also, even more importantly, to continue serving our loyal audience, some having attended since the late 1970s. Of course, our short course was not alone in facing this dilemma. Seemingly every educational conference around the country (even the world) was simultaneously confronted with the same set of circumstances and arrived at the same conclusion: \"If we're gonna do this, we're gonna have to go online.\" The world of video conferencing is a frightening place\u2014or at least it was for me. My fear was born out of the personal experience of witnessing even the simplest of virtual meetings with a handful of participants devolve into realtime lessons in frustration and futility. Who hasn't experienced the same? Poor or indecipherable audio. Low bandwidth prompting the meeting host to switch faces and voices into muted squares with names. Video conference platforms requiring tedious and sometimes confusing downloads\u2014and yet another password. If the downloads had required social security numbers and bank account information, I wouldn't have been surprised. Of course, I'm exaggerating for effect, but for those who grew up using technological advances such as the telephone, fax machine, electric typewriter, and those cute little personal computers (a.k.a., word processing machines) from the mid-1980s, 8 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 The Iowa State University Shade Tree Short Course is an annual conference that draws well over six hundred participants. In 2021, the event went online. JEFF ISLES Shade Tree Short Course 9 receiving a link that, if it worked, would transform desktop computers into portals to another realm could be a bridge too far. But what other choice did I have? Enter my grand plan. Historically, the Shade Tree Short Course takes place over two full days, but I knew that convincing an audience accustomed to working outdoors to stare at a computer screen for two solid days was going to be a nonstarter and, by extension, could have a dampening effect on attendance. Instead, I reasoned smaller chunks of virtual interaction and educational content would be far more palatable. Therefore, with wise counsel and advice from a university conference coordinator, we devised a week-long event at the end of February. Presentations would begin at eight in the morning and wrap up most days by eleven. Next, we needed to determine a fair registration fee for a virtual conference. Because I no longer had to worry about transporting and feeding my presenters, nor feeding participants, and because the number of educational sessions was reduced from previous years, I knew the registration fee used in 2020 ($170 early and $220 late) had to be reduced. With the intent of covering my remaining expenses (conference management fee and speaker honoraria), we decided on $40 for early registration and $55 for those coming late to the party. We also offered a reduced fee for university staff and students. But had I gone too far? In my attempt to provide an affordable product that would maintain registration numbers at least at a break-even point, had I committed the unforgivable sin of devaluing my own conference? As it turns out, full value for conference attendees was never in doubt thanks to the impressive lineup of speakers who, to a person, agreed at once to participate. And, to their credit, many graciously reduced or declined to accept their standard speaker fee, an acknowledgment perhaps of the reduced time commitment for a virtual conference. As the first day of the Shade Tree Short Course approached, however, one problem continued to silently orbit my conference, and its threat was potentially devastating: we needed to find the right video-conferencing platform. My unease was validated during a preconference practice session when our chosen video-conferencing platform performed in a less-than-satisfactory way. Most of my presenters were unfamiliar with the platform and found it user-unfriendly. When the same old audio problems surfaced, I knew it was time for plan B. Much to my relief, equipped with an alternate and reliable virtual conferencing platform and even a dose of unseasonably good late-winter weather (a nice touch even though we didn't need it), everything went swimmingly. No, we weren't able to offer the traditional scope of topics and workshops (over forty-five concurrent sessions spread over two days), but the aforementioned cadre of top-quality speakers made up for any deficiency in quantity. In the end, we attracted an audience of over 370 participants, including many longtime attendees and a few who'd never attended the short course before. In fact, many first-timers remarked that they attended in 2021 only because the program was offered online. And therein lies my next problem. Now that we've explored the realm of virtual education and witnessed its many benefits (the chat room was incredibly popular), many attendees would like our short course to preserve and integrate aspects of virtual programming in all future conferences. Ideally, a hybrid version could allow attendees to select from in-person sessions that would either be livestreamed or recorded for viewing later. In the end, cost and practicality will dictate the feasibility of such a hybrid model. Honestly, my preference would be for a return to our triedand- tested in-person roots; however, I also must allow for and accept that, in so many ways, the world has changed. This not-so-sudden immersion into the world of virtual conferencing has transformed the thinking of this reluctant conference chair. I now possess a new set of skills and have thoughtfully reconsidered what an educational conference should be. Just the same, while I can freely agree that learning doesn't necessarily require in-person, face-to-face interaction, virtual conferencing will always fall short as a replacement for engaging conversation around the coffee dispenser, in the buffet line, or gathered inside the pub at day's end. Jeff Iles is professor and chair of the Department of Horticulture at Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Into the Valley of <i>Parrotia</i>","article_sequence":3,"start_page":10,"end_page":15,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25731","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25eb76f.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Douglas, Phillip; Sj\u00f6man, Henrik","article_content":"The triumph and anguish of plant collectors can often be summed up with a single word: timing. No matter how well an expedition has been planned, collectors often confront either empty capsules or immature fruits. At other times, however, the fates align. In September of 2017, we embarked with colleagues on a collecting expedition to Azerbaijan, searching for multiple species poorly represented in botanical collections. The Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica) was our primary target, and for this species, our timing could hardly have been more auspicious. The Persian ironwood is an ornamental workhorse in the witch-hazel family (Hamamelidaceae) and is one of two species in its genus. Documented collections of Parrotia persica in public gardens tend to be from nurseries, and plants of known wild provenance are mostly sourced from populations in Iran. Although descriptions of the species' range tend to focus on the Alborz Mountains in northern Iran, plants do not typically recognize geopolitical boundaries, and thriving populations of Parrotia also exist in areas of the Hyrcanian forest and the Talysh Mountains of southern Azerbaijan. The flora in these biomes is considered a relict of a forest type that was much more widespread before glaciation events in the Quaternary, starting around two and a half million years ago. The Talysh region, in particular, includes more than ninety endemic species.1 Herbarium vouchers for Parrotia indicate a disjunct population in the country of Georgia, but it is widely believed these specimens were planted. In mid-September, our team departed the Azeri capital city of Baku and drove southward along the coast towards Lankaran. The trip had been organized by the Plant Collecting Collaborative, an organization consisting of eighteen botanical institutions, and our collaborators on the trip included Peter Zale from Longwood Gardens, Matt Lobdell from the Morton Arboretum, and Vince Marrocco from the Morris Arboretum. Vast agricultural fields dominate this landscape along the Caspian Sea, irrigated with the waters of the Kura River, which flows throughout the Caucasus region. Cotton, tea, grapes, and various citrus trees are the primary crops. Along the drive, we saw roadside plantings of Quercus castaneifolia, the chestnutleaved oak, which was another one of our species of interest. These plantings were the first we saw of the species in the country. After a long and bumpy drive, we were met in Lankaran by Hajiaga Safarov, deputy director of science at Hirkan National Park. Hajiaga committed his career to exploring southern Azerbaijan, documenting the flora and fauna. He graciously agreed to guide us over the next three days and assured us that he knew of several populations of Parrotia persica in the area. Departing from our hotel the following morning, Hajiaga led our team southwest of the city to the rural farming village of Az Filial. As we gained elevation, the paved highway soon ended, and we continued driving on a hard-packed, single-lane road. Cresting the top of a small hill, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of Parrotia-dominant forest. Scant herbaceous vegetation existed under the canopy of these magnificent trees, a result of intense grazing pressure from the surrounding farms. We parked under the shaded canopy of ironwoods and began to hear tapping on the car's roof, as though a light rain were passing over. The cloudless sky was not precipitating; the sound we heard was something much more miraculous. Plants in the witch-hazel family exhibit a unique form of seed dispersal. As the capsules of Parrotia persica begin to dry, the exterior walls (technically the exocarp) shrink in size and begin to apply pressure to the seed, causing its forceful ejection. This method of seed dispersal\u2014the so-called drying squeeze catapult2\u2014was the source of the light raining sound. When we exited our vehicle, we witnessed small, black seeds bouncing off the roof Into the Valley of Parrotia Phillip Douglas and Henrik Sj\u00f6man DOUGLAS, P. AND SJ\u00d6MAN, H. 2021. INTO THE VALLEY OF PARROTIA. ARNOLDIA, 78(4): 10-15 The Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica) fills a valley near Lerik, Azerbaijan. When the authors first encountered this overlook in 2017, the diversity of fall color and form was unmistakable. This photo was taken on a return trip in 2019. ALL PHOTOS BY PHILLIP DOUGLAS UNLESS NOTED and hood. In a marvelous turn of fate, we had timed our trip to document and collect Parrotia at the most advantageous time. Witnessing the forceful ejection of these seeds only added to the intrigue of the species. All hands worked quickly to obtain fruits that had not yet dehisced. We gathered several hundred capsules from throughout the population. Diversity in the Wild The Hyrcanian forests extend from southern Azerbaijan into Iran, wrapping around the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. In Azerbaijan, Parrotia occurs at elevations between sea level and around 1,600 feet (500 meters). Strong cultural influences of forest grazing, active felling of trees for firewood, and coppicing for fencing materials and winter feed have transformed the landscape. Farmers also coppice trees to minimize the shading of valuable meadow environments that provide winter fodder for sheep, cattle, and goats. The extensive coppicing in this region has made it difficult to see the natural habitat and variability of Parrotia. Examining the approximately fifty trees within the small population that we first encountered, it quickly became clear that an impressive amount of genetic variability was present. Bark characteristics alone were distinctly different, with variation including creamy, dappled camouflage mottling and golden, iridescent, paperthin flakes. It was far too early in autumn to see any fall color in this population, but we suspected that variation might exist for this trait as well. After making another collection from a heavily fruited Caucasian zelkova (Zelkova carpinifolia), we departed from the site and headed farther south towards the Hirkan National Park. Driving along the Lerik-Lankaran highway, we saw the Talysh Mountains begin to slowly build elevation as the forested areas became more dispersed between meadows and xeric terrain. Hajiaga was leading us to a historic cemetery and mosque outside the village of Babagil. In addition to Parrotia, our group was targeting several other unique woody species: the chestnut-leaved oak and a subspecies of the common boxwood that is endemic to southern Azerbaijan, Buxus sempervirens subsp. hyrcana. We encountered both species outside of the cemetery and mosque. This site dates to the sixteenth century and contains many enormous planted specimens of Caucasian zelkova and chestnut-leaved oak. Across the road from the cemetery is a remnant piece of the The first population of Parrotia persica that the authors visited in Azerbaijan revealed a typical, overgrazed understory. Yet the trees displayed variable and unique bark. Parrotia 13 Hyrcanian forest. Here, we discovered large boxwood growing in the heavy shade of Parrotia persica. Just beyond the roadway, we encountered our first large specimens of the chestnut-leaved oak. They created a towering forest canopy over 65 feet (20 meters) tall, with trunk diameters reaching over 3 feet (1 meter). Unfortunately, these two species develop seed at the opposite ends of autumn; the boxwood had already dehisced, and the oaks were not yet ripe enough for collection. We were able to make a large collection of intact seed capsules from the Parrotia on the property. This collection, at 1,510 feet (460 meters), marked the highest elevation at which we found Parrotia growing, and it should make for an interesting evaluation for cold hardiness. Departing westward, our group continued towards Lerik, a historic mountain town perched at 3,600 feet (1100 meters), overlooking the border with Iran. Gazing southward from the windows of our vehicles, we came across a magnificent sight: a sprawling forest of Parrotia persica filled the expansive valley beneath us. Towering velvet maple (Acer velutinum) dominated the upland areas, and enormous Caucasian alder (Alnus subcordata) were dotted along a slow-moving creek. Azerbaijan had been plagued in 2017 with a major drought, leaving the herbaceous layer completely dormant in autumn and adversely affecting the quality of autumn color. Despite this drought, the Parrotia in this valley showed deep hues of burgundy, red, orange, and yellow. Throughout this population, a diversity of form was also present. We noted many trees with dense conical crowns and a strong branching hierarchy. These structural characteristics would be well suited for trees selected for urban plantings. We were unable to access the forest because we had much more work ahead of us, but the memory of this valley remained with us after the trip. A Return to the Valley In late October 2019, the two of us traveled again to Azerbaijan to attempt collecting the chestnut-leaved oak from throughout its northern range. Similar to Parrotia persica, this species only occurs in the mountains of southern Azerbaijan and northern Iran. Its acorns don't fully ripen until late in the season, and we hoped to collect them before they fell to the ground, where insects and herbivores can render them useless. The drive south from Baku to Lankaran took half of the time during this trip, as construction of a multilane freeway had been completed, connecting Baku to Tehran, Iran. Our failure to collect acorns from this rare oak had haunted us for the past two years, and we were eager to determine if we had properly timed our trip. The landscape throughout southern Azerbaijan looked vastly different compared to 2017. Precipitation had fallen evenly through the year, and the previously dormant herbaceous layer was putting on an amazing show. The meadows surrounding the Babagil cemetery and mosque were filled with flowering geophytes. Two species of crocus (Crocus speciosus and C. caspius) carpeted the landscape and appeared almost as a monoculture lawn in areas that were heavily grazed. Pink-flowered cyclamen (Cyclamen coum) dotted the shaded understory of the endemic boxwood. The flowering spectacle was a wonderful sign of good seed development, and we were able to make three separate collections of chestnut-leaved oak at elevations ranging from 1,540 to 2,900 feet (470 to 900 meters). After finishing our oak collecting early, we had time to indulge in the forests of Parrotia persica. As we drove along the highway from Lerik, back to our accommodations outside of Lankaran, we made a familiar stop to gaze across the valley of Parrotia that we had discovered two years before. Our timing was once again rewarded with amazing views of the valley in full autumn colors. It is difficult to describe the array of colors. Individual trees within the canopy exhibited shades of deep burgundy, brick red, orange, and buttery yellow. We decided to use our remaining day of the trip to attempt to access and document this population. We collected GPS coordinates and headed back to our accommodations to plan the next day's work. After looking over various maps and satellite images, we were able to devise a way to drive as close as possible to the ridgeline across the valley, where several small houses stood. Our goal was to closely examine the trees in this population, taking photographs to document autumn color and differences in form. Trees The authors ventured into the valley of Parrotia in late October 2019. Fall color took on rich variation. Trees with dense, pyramidal habits (left) suggest exceptional potential for urban plantings. Phillip Douglas (bottom right) stands with a large Parrotia observed at another location earlier in the trip. HENRIK SJ\u00d6MAN Parrotia 15 with exceptional qualities would be geotagged so that we could return to them for propagation material in the coming years. The following morning, we departed the hotel and headed towards the valley, excited by the prospect of getting to walk beneath the canopy of the relict forest. The paved road quickly turned into a dirt path, and after crossing over a shallow creek, it became a deeply rutted, muddy quagmire. Our translator and driver, Ilgar Guliyev, guided us through the terrain with expert precision. We soon found ourselves parked outside of a small farmhouse, and Ilgar went in to inquire about accessing the valley below the property. After a short conversation with the owners, we were informed that the valley belonged to the state, and our collecting permits would allow us access to the site. Basing our navigation on several massive chestnut-leaved oaks and oriental beech (Fagus orientalis) along the top of the ridge and a group of towering Caucasian alder at the bottom, we began traversing towards several Parrotia we had photographed the day before. The first selection that we documented exhibited a uniform, brick-red autumn color throughout the canopy. We continued to traverse up and down the steep slopes of the hill, documenting selections with peachy-pink autumn color, dense and pyramidal habits, and even dappled burgundy and green foliage. The diversity of the species within this singular valley was amazing to see. We hope to return to the valley in late spring to obtain scion wood from these selections to begin growing and evaluating their performance in various climates and conditions. From the Wild, Into Cultivation The study and documentation of plants in situ is a valuable means of determining species that are well suited for urban horticulture and other specific uses. In Lankaran, we were also able to see how Parrotia persica has been used locally in extensive urban plantings. The species could be seen in park environments as well as in small curbside planter spaces. The hot, dry summers of Lankaran coupled with challenging site conditions of urban environments did not seem to affect this highly adaptable species. As a street tree, the species often becomes too wide, resulting in unflattering pruning efforts, but this issue could be solved with more intentional selection. As we had observed, an extensive variation in the size and expression of Parrotia occurs in the wild, suggesting the fantastic development potential of the species for public plantations in both Europe and North America. In cultivation, Parrotia is mainly represented by seed-propagated material, which results in large variations, making it difficult to predict mature size and habit. Presently, cultivars of Parrotia persica available on the market include 'Vanessa', 'Ruby Vase', and 'Persian Spire', which all represent narrow-growing forms. Based on our field observations, the species has significantly more expressions that deserve to be evaluated in cultivation. We hope to develop new cultivars of this species that will have uniform size and fall color characteristics. The species' adaptability to periods of intense heat and dry soil conditions, coupled with its tolerance for high pH soils, makes it a perfect candidate for further development as an urban tree. Hopefully, we will once again be blessed with perfect timing to collect from these populations and continue working with this relict species. Endnotes 1 Safarov, H. M. 2009. Rare and endangered plant species in Hirkan National Park and its environs. In N. Zazanashvili and D. Mallon (Eds.). Status and protection of globally threatened species in the Caucasus (pp. 193-198). Tbilisi: CEPF, WWF. 2 Poppinga, S., B\u00f6se, A. S., Seidel, R., Hesse, L., Leupold, J., Caliaro, S., and Speck, T. 2019. A seed flying like a bullet: Ballistic seed dispersal in Chinese witch-hazel (Hamamelis mollis Oliv., Hamamelidaceae). Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 16(157): 1-10. http:\/\/ doi.org\/10.1098\/rsif.2019.0327 Acknowledgment This work would not have been possible without the guidance and expertise of our partners at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Botany and Central Botanical Garden of Azerbaijan, and the Hirkan National Park of the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, Republic of Azerbaijan. Funding was generously provided by the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Foundation. Our work is dedicated in memoriam of Dr. Hajiaga Safarov (March 1, 1963-November 17, 2018). Phillip Douglas is the director of plant collections for the Chicago Botanic Garden and also serves as the chair of the Plant Collecting Collaborative. Henrik Sj\u00f6man is a senior researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the scientific curator at the Gothenburg Botanical Garden."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"An Impermanent Inventory: Plant Collections for a Changing Climate","article_sequence":4,"start_page":16,"end_page":23,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25732","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25ebb27.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Elkin, Rosetta S.","article_content":"Barrier islands are young landscapes. Although absolute dates are hard to pin down, the barrier islands that ring Florida's coast are only about five thousand years old and represent some of the most dynamic landscapes in the world. In the context of earthly timescales, the islands surfaced at the end of the Stone Age, around the same time that written language was developed in Ancient China and humans began to interact with yeast microorganisms for producing alcohol and bread. At the time, plant life was already well established for millions of years, taking root firmly and resolutely across landscapes that were only slightly more intact than not. Today, Florida's coastline extends 1,350 miles, of which 700 miles are structured by barrier islands that are characterized by urbanization rather than earthly formation. Development is intended to prevent the young landscape from further formation, arresting worth in property value while securing costly infrastructure projects. Young soils are paved and only tend to host disturbance-adapted plants that creep in along built lines, chain-link fences, beachfront terraces, and in the obvious cracks between sidewalks. The most iconic plants are the mangrove species (Rhizophora mangle, Laguncularia racemosa, Avicennia germinans) that silhouette the shoreline, while florific beach sunflowers (Helianthus debilis), green-fruited pond apples (Annona glabra), and sea grapes (Coccoloba uvifera) with dense crowns are commonly found inland. In this setting, few remnants of the barrier island ecology remain amidst the rich imported flora of the mixed tropical and temperate zones. If you consult a map of Florida on your handheld device, the string of thin barrier islands that contour the coast is barely legible. Zooming in yields more clarity between land and water. Each barrier island floats along the shore of the mainland, stitched together by a line of causeways and interstate roads that seem to pull the islands landward, or stop them from moving seaward. Now, zoom in on the west coast near Fort Myers. Here, the stitch is called the Sanibel Causeway, which starts at a small crossing known as Punta Rassa. The causeway is supported by a sandy spit that separates Pine Island Sound from the Gulf of Mexico. The route extends into Periwinkle Way and stretches the length of Sanibel until it turns into the next stitch line at Blind Pass, a managed inlet known for shelling and fishing. Blind Pass is the last stop before arriving on Captiva Island. Consider the same map, and zoom in again on Captiva Island: the gray asphalt of parking lots and sidewalks, the vectorized streets and alleys, and the blank fills of the private space around each foundation. If you search for directions, the route leads you past green golf courses and beige beaches, while the rest of the landscape is defined by different shades of gray. There is no public information beyond the built form, and certainly no recognition of plant life. The lack of public knowledge about plants always strikes me as unusual, although it comes up frequently in my work as a practicing landscape architect and as a professor and An Impermanent Inventory: Plant Collections for a Changing Climate Rosetta S. Elkin \"Permanence doesn't really interest me. My whole focus has been on the activity of my life. Out of the activity has come a mass of works, which are really just evidence that I'm still paying attention.\" \u2014Robert Rauschenberg Facing page: Captiva Island, on the southwestern coast of Florida, is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including sea-level rise. In 2017, the author was commissioned to develop a landscape-adaptation plan for the former home of Robert Rauschenberg on Captiva. A dynamic plant inventory would be essential. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR ELKIN, R. S. 2021. AN IMPERMANENT INVENTORY: PLANT COLLECTIONS FOR A CHANGING CLIMATE. ARNOLDIA, 78(4): 16-23 18 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 researcher, studying the interactions between human and plant life. Within landscape architecture, the prominence of pathways and built structures seems to resonate with the public more than careful attention to particular plants. Presumably, this is one reason why landscape architecture is losing plant knowledge.1 So when it comes to finding your way in a new landscape, it is no wonder that the only means of tracking distance and not getting lost are found in the gray surfaces that demarcate outward appearance and built materials. But, as streets are inundated, seawalls fail, and foundations erode, might the endurance of plant life be appreciated in new ways? Designing a Plant Inventory In 2017, I was commissioned to study the changing conditions at the home of Robert Rauschenberg on Captiva Island, in order to propose a landscape-based adaptation plan to the effects of a changing climate.2 These effects include, but are not limited to, sea-level rise. Across Florida, the effects cascade: warmer waters increase the velocity of hurricanes, increased salination threatens drinking water supplies, the blooms of red tide devastate sea life, while blue-green algae amalgamate with heavy erosion to suppress tourism. The risks brought on by our warmer climate are not singular, which is why there is no simple solution. Rauschenberg cared deeply for Captiva both in terms of creative inspiration and also because it appealed to his ideas of impermanence, so elegantly stated in an interview about his art process: \"Permanence doesn't really interest me.\" When we were guided through our first site visit, intricacies of the built landscape were prioritized, including workshops for printmaking and dance studios, a beach house, the main studio, and the historic Fish House\u2014a building perched in the bay.3 Yet, the grounds are most remarkable because they encompass twenty acres of uninterrupted barrier island, a landscape that bridges the bay and the beach sides. Most properties either enjoy views of the beach or the bay, but rarely both. The Rauschenberg campus is verdant and alive with a continuous canopy that distinguishes it from the rest of the island because Rauschenberg valued the dynamic landscape and never sought to arrest and define it. The grounds\u2014now used to host an internationally recognized artist residency program\u2014are so culturally rich and ecologically lively that there was no lack of inspiration, and I was eager to get started. At its widest, Captiva is two thousand feet wide; at its narrowest, only about four hundred feet. The Rauschenberg campus sits along the widest portion. Despite its verdant ecology, a standard map registers gray tones, presumably because private land is not rendered beyond building footprints. As the project began, I sought more detail from standard site plans and surveys, the basis of architectural traditions, anticipating more specificity because Rauschenberg himself was so committed to his plants. In particular, he was committed to maintaining an area that he called the jungle, a ramble of sprouting spontaneous plants that makes up almost half the site.4 Rather, we were handed a site plan that outlined the property lines and included the building footprints, connected by a path system. The rest of the site was white. A site plan without any indication of plants is not only blank; it creates the impression of a landscape devoid of life. As a result, our first act of design was to put the plants back on the map. Creating a plant inventory for a landscape architectural project is not a normative or established convention. But a plant inventory is a curatorial tradition that supports research within the living collections of arboreta and botanic gardens. An inventory charts long-term change and unlocks the puzzles of horticulture, so it is surprising that inventories are not more of a standard in professional practice. The objective of a plant inventory is to document and describe the current status of a collection. Over time, the inventory can be compared to past iterations, revealing landscape changes.5 In turn, this secures a plan for future plantings. A plant inventory must be updated in order to remain dynamic, which requires ongoing interaction in the field. This is especially true because plants move, die back, transform, and sometimes shift from their original locations. Captiva Island Inventory 19 Typically, an inventory is established at the same time as a garden and creates a baseline to determine future accessions and deaccessions. For instance, the first accession records at the Arnold Arboretum date to 1872, the year the institution was founded, although it took about a decade for the initial card-file system to be refined. In an account from 1881, Charles Sprague Sargent outlines the importance of the inventory but admits that accurate records are often abandoned because they are \"too expensive for practical working.\"6 He references the future value of recording each plant despite the challenge, suggesting that the effort must bear the test of time. At the Rauschenberg campus, our team believed that the strain of changing climates made the connection to time even more powerful. Establishing a curatorial tradition within an undocumented collection posed two important challenges to the inventory from the start: first, to establish what constituted a \"tree\" among a host of woody plants, and second, to assess a largely spontaneous collection. Both challenges forced us to make value judgments based on what to count, and thus what to omit, a puzzle that raised more questions than we could answer alone. The Inventory Process The Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF) was founded in 1974 by a group of Islanders committed to the preservation of the island ecosystem. At the time, SCCF successfully opposed development in Sanibel by incorporating as a city, enabling votes on dredge-and-fill policy, uprooted mangroves, seawall construction, and overscaled condominiums. 7 The same constituency hired the firm of Ian McHarg, the renowned landscape architect who wrote Design with Nature, an Initial site plans and surveys for the Rauschenberg campus emphasized the built infrastructure. Notably, the plants were unrepresented, even in the densely vegetated area known as the jungle. Captiva Island Inventory 21 influential ecological treatise.8 Captiva did not follow suit and has experienced the consequences of haphazard planning ever since. This is one of the main reasons that the Rauschenberg campus is so uniquely important: it is an anomaly in the landscape that might help inform Captiva's future. Our team, based in Massachusetts, worked with local horticulturist Jenny Evans from SCCF to initiate the process of developing a baseline for the plant inventory. Without a baseline, neither preservation nor conservation exists. It creates a reference for measuring and assessing disturbance. Although Jenny and her team had little experience establishing a plant inventory, she saw value in the challenge due to the extremities of change expressed by plant loss throughout the hurricane season. The baseline would help us chart the rapidity of change in both the loss of material in hurricane season and, hopefully, the regrowth of disturbance-adapted species. Collectively, we were motivated to tackle the questions raised about the process of gathering and digitizing the data because we saw the importance of creating publicly accessible plant knowledge. Our inventory would prioritize woody plants, but as we worked through our initial questions, we found that trying to define a \"tree\" at Captiva proved conceptually hazardous in itself.9 Many woody plants do not behave as trees with a single trunk, but clump or spread. To capture this distinction, we created two categories of data: rather than discriminating between trees and shrubs, we suggested points and areas. Points recorded the center of woody plants with single trunks. Areas recorded the total diameter of the woody plant\u2014the perimeter of all trunks and shoots. Each point was recorded in a discrete location using latitude and longitude, while areas were recorded by walking the perimeter of the plant and recording the path.10 The system of areas was especially useful for taking stock of the mangrove fringe on the bay side, yet flexible enough to allow us to indicate where specific points were noticeable as major trunks within the tangle. The points within the mangrove area are only one example of how the standards of defining a tree helped us standardize a method across a site full of exceptions. As trees were defined and included in the inventory, a workflow developed between the on-site project team and the data input team. First, the site was divided into 75-by-75-foot quadrants in order to work systematically across the landscape. The quadrants did not have to be delineated in physical space: they were charted by datasets of a handheld GPS device. The on-site team then recorded woody plants using the system of points and areas, and the data from each quadrant was shared with our team sitting at our studio in Massachusetts. This workflow enabled the field team to move from one quadrant to the next and continue to amass data.11 Our team uploaded their new field data to a global information system (GIS) and aligned this work with site surveys used in the original design documents.12 We checked the data, cleaned duplicates or errors, and assigned a unique catalog code in GIS, which was exported with labels and integrated into the site survey. The process raised questions about what type of data was most useful to contain on the map label and how the information could be read by those both familiar with and unfamiliar with plants. Therefore, we decided on two distinct categories: standard and custom. Standard data included common, Latin, and family names, along with trunk diameter (at breast height) in centimeters, height taken in meters, geospatial location (latitude, longitude), location on site (quadrant), and the year recorded. To include canopy cover in the standard category, Jenny came up with a novel expression\u2014a range from one to five\u2014that corresponded to how much of the sky could be seen when standing at the trunk. If 80 to 100 percent of the sky was obscured, she would give the canopy a five; 60 to 80 percent obscured would be a four, and so on. This might not seem relevant in the context of temperate trees, but in a tropical site that is largely overgrown by densely sprouting palms, the canopy can still lack density, which affects overall shade and comfort despite height and maturity. We also assigned a Florida Exotic Pest To develop the plant inventory at the Rauschenberg campus, a field team collected GPS points, measurements, and detailed observations for all woody plants growing on the twenty-acre property. The complete inventory can now be accessed on a handheld device. 22 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 Plant Council category to each plant. Finally, we created a unique identifying code for each woody plant in the inventory. The custom category necessitated the most creative collaboration as we imagined what future residents and stewards might wish to know about the plants of the present. The first section within the custom category includes descriptions of environmental influences (damaged or broken limbs, leaning habit, and so forth), notes about neighboring plants in relation to the spread (consider for instance Ficus aurea, the strangler fig, which envelops a host tree), and surveyor comments. The collaboration with SCCF was crucial to the comments section and includes remarks about character or significance that were personal, such as \"never seen it grow this way\" or \"covered in lianas,\" a crucial input to research in heavily urbanized landscapes that resist standards. The subsection also provides space for more nuanced assessments of the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council criteria, with notes such as \"typically invasive, but not aggressive on this property\" that overcome the binaries of what typically counts and what doesn't count in a living collection. In the Context of Change Landscape design often implies stability and predictability. Yet, the dynamics of the landscape are changing, which invites practices to change in turn. This need is especially pronounced on the Florida coast. As we looked for models for our project, we consulted with curatorial staff at public gardens and found a range of concerns. At the Arnold Arboretum, for instance, staff pay especially close attention to evidence of infestations, as some of the most devastating losses to the living collection are brought on by foreign pathogens.13 While the rise of foreign pathogens is certainly not bound to the Northeast, Florida must first contend with the intensely localized effects of increased storm damage brought on by rising seas. A more apt comparison might be made to the inventory at Montgomery Botanical Center in Coral Gables, Florida, a historic collection specialized in the conservation of palms, cycads, and conifers from across the world. The garden is a coastal site vulnerable to episodes of increased storms and the very real effects of about one-third of an inch (nine millimeters) of rise in sea level per year.14 Thus, Montgomery is grappling with a concern common to all coastal living collections in a time of rapid climate change: How far into the future should we plan? While this is an enduring question in relation to living collections, it finds amplified resonance considering that Montgomery calculates an increased inundation of forty-three acres, or 36 percent of the entire garden.15 While this number is staggering, the plant inventory confirms that only 8 percent of the collection will be lost in this scenario. Although the figure does not include storm damage, salt intrusion, and other vulnerabilities, it does significantly change the answer to the question: planning can no longer occur in one-hundred-year increments. The status of any living collection is dependent on maintaining an inventory, which raises questions as to why plant inventories are not more commonly practiced beyond the world of public gardens. In the context of barrier islands, like Captiva, change is noticeable seasonally as hurricanes sweep across the surface of the land while fluctuating sea levels remake the coastline. But, of course, landscapes everywhere are increasingly in states of flux. The knowledge of how to create and maintain an inventory is critical to engendering a unique collaboration between plant and human life within our everyday landscapes. A plant inventory is a record of human and biotic adaptation, a neutral middle ground that accumulates experience and data. It helps visually connect the public to the effects of accelerated climate change, and in a practical sense, it inspires care and helps humans take notice of the plants in their environment. After the success of developing the plant inventory at the Rauschenberg campus, our team's ensuing idea is to adapt the same open-source technology into a handheld, userfriendly platform that could form the basis of a public inventory for landscapes anywhere, populating our blank site plans and challenging generic street views. We imagine citizen scientists learning to create a site history, as plants under their stewardship become a baseline for future generations. Plant inventories are cruCaptiva Island Inventory 23 cial to increasing an awareness of change, especially in the face of both chronic and episodic stresses of the twenty-first century. Perhaps we can shape an understanding of change by visualizing and valuing impermanence. Endnotes 1 A number of authors, myself included, write about the loss of plant knowledge in design. See, for instance: Raxworthy, J. and Harrisson, F. 2018. Overgrown. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2 Practice Landscape includes Emily Hicks and Joanna Lombard, and we were commissioned by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to work as part of a team in collaboration with WXY architects and eDD engineers. 3 Rauschenberg bought the Fish House from Jay Norwood \"Ding\" Darling, chief of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (formerly the Biological Survey). Ding Darling is best known for ushering in the Federal Duck Stamp Program to expand the federal purchase of wildlife habitat. See, for instance: Ding Darling Wildlife Society. n.d. Our namesake. https:\/\/ dingdarlingsociety.org\/articles\/our-namesake 4 The cultural history of the plantings is culled from various oral accounts and conversations, especially with Matt Hall, the site manager who worked closely with Rauschenberg on Captiva, until Rauschenberg's passing in 2008. 5 The Arnold Arboretum plant inventory claims that to meet objectives \"the Arboretum fields expert curatorial staff able to conduct inventories as well as troubleshoot an array of taxonomic, cartographic, and horticultural puzzles.\" See: Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. 2011. Plant inventory operations manual (2nd ed.). http:\/\/arboretum.harvard.edu\/ wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/plant_inventory_ operations_manual.pdf 6 Sargent, C. S. 1882. In Harvard University, Annual reports of the president and treasurer of Harvard College, 1881-82 (pp. 122-123). Cambridge, MA: University Press. 7 SCCF's mandate continues to advocate through education and outreach, supported by an intellectual generosity and a spirit of collaboration. For a short history of SCCF in the context of early development see: Davis, J. E. 2017. The Gulf: The making of an American sea (pp. 406-410). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. 8 McHarg, I. L. 1969. Design with nature. Garden City, NY: Published for the American Museum of Natural History [by] the Natural History Press. 9 We initially turned to a definition of trees provided by the Arnold Arboretum's Peter Del Tredici: \"A tree can be defined as a plant that, when undisturbed, develops a single, erect woody trunk. A shrub, on the other hand, is a woody plant that, when undisturbed, branches spontaneously at or below ground level to produce multiple stems. In general, a tree will develop secondary trunks in response to injury to its primary trunk or root system, to displacement of its primary stem out of the normal vertical orientation, or to a dramatic change in surrounding environmental conditions.\" Despite the usefulness of this definition, in practice, we found the distinction was difficult to apply at Captiva. Del Tredici, P. 2001. Sprouting in temperate trees: A morphological and ecological review. The Botanical View 67: 121-140. 10 Data was collected using a handheld Trimble, a GNSSbased data collector that is integrated with ArcMap GIS and is the standard in forestry surveys. This system allows for ease of data entry and storage that works well with our needs for both quantitative and qualitative data. Model: Trimble Geo 7X. 11 The field team received the initial GIS data for each quadrant as a CSV and shapefile. 12 This data alignment involves changing the coordinate system to a projected coordinate system. 13 Emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) and hemlock wooly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) are of particular concern in eastern Massachusetts. Among numerous scientific studies on monitoring, see, for instance: Knight, K. S., Flash, B. P., Kappler, R. H., Throckmorton, J. A., Grafton, B., and Flower, C. E. 2014. Monitoring ash (Fraxinus spp.) decline and emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) symptoms in infested areas. General Technical Report NRS-139. Newtown Square, PA: United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station. 14 Wdowinski, S., Bray, R., Kirtman, B. P., and Wu, Z. 2016. Increasing flooding hazard in coastal communities due to rising sea level: Case study of Miami Beach, Florida. Ocean & Coastal Management, 126: 1-8. 15 According to a one-hundred-year projection: Griffith, M. P., Barber, G., Tucker Lima, J., Barros, M., Calonje, C., Noblick, L. R., Calonje, M., Magellan, T., Dosmann, M., Thibault, T., and Gerlowski, N. Plant collection \"half-life:\" Can botanic gardens weather the climate? Curator: The Museum Journal, 60(4): 395-410. Rosetta S. Elkin is an associate professor at McGill University, an associate of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, and the founder and principal of Practice Landscape. Rosetta's work considers living environments with a particular focus on plant life and climate change. She teaches planting design, fieldwork, and seminars that advance a theory of plant life between ecology and horticulture."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"William Purdom: The Forgotten Arnold Plant Hunter","article_sequence":5,"start_page":24,"end_page":37,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25733","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25ebb6b.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Gordon, Francois","article_content":"William Purdom spent three years collecting in northern China and Tibet on behalf of the Arnold Arboretum and the British nursery James Veitch & Sons. Here, Purdom passes through a gate in the Great Wall, in Shanxi Province, in the spring of 1910. PHOTO: \u00a9 BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD It was early March 1912, on the banks of the Yellow River, 450 miles south of Beijing. An Arnold Arboretum plant collector and his three-man escort had ridden more than five hundred miles east from Minxian, in Gansu Province, through a region devastated by the Xinhai Revolution. The revolution had toppled the last Qing emperor and replaced the centuries- old imperial system of government with a republic, which was struggling to establish its authority against a plethora of regional warlords. The roads were alive with bandits, and food and shelter hard to find, but the collector's journey to date had been uneventful. He and his escort were drawing near their destination, the railhead to Beijing in Honan (now Luoyang), the provincial capital of Henan Province. Suddenly, they were ambushed by a group of mounted men, who fired as they charged, killing two horses in the first moments of the attack. It's unlikely that the bandits knew what the travelers' saddlebags and packhorses' loads comprised, still less that they coveted the herbarium specimens and the seeds and tubers laboriously collected in Gansu and Tibet over the previous year. But a foreigner was sure to be carrying silver specie to pay his way on the road, and the surviving horses would fetch a good price. The botanist, however, had other ideas. He drew a lever-action rifle from the scabbard beside his saddle and, as he would later write, \"made a stand,\" shooting three of the attackers and several of their horses. His escort joined in, driving off the bandits, and the party galloped to the small city of Shenchow, from where they eventually continued their journey to Beijing, which passed without further incident.1 The plant collector was William Purdom, at the conclusion of a three-year expedition on behalf of the Arnold Arboretum and the British firm of James Veitch & Sons to northern and northwestern China and the Tibetan region of Amdo. In the course of his expedition, he sent to Boston 550 packages of seeds and well over one thousand herbarium specimens.2 Purdom, born in 1880, was a head gardener's son from the Lake District in northern England. He served an apprenticeship with his father before working for two distinguished London nurseries, then joining the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as a student gardener. The Kew course of training for botanists and horticulturalists was internationally renowned and correspondingly demanding to join and to pursue. Purdom had done well and had proved a particularly skilled propagator, especially of woody plants. But Kew's director, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, did not appreciate Purdom's activism as the secretary of the Kew Employees Union, and in 1905, Purdom was dismissed for \"agitation.\" Purdom promptly petitioned the Board of Agriculture, Kew's parent ministry, which agreed that he was perfectly entitled to join a trade union and ordered his immediate reinstatement. Thiselton-Dyer, unable to bear this humiliating public reversal, resigned. The new director, Colonel David Prain, then had to contend with the only strike there has ever been at Kew, efficiently organized by Purdom. All in all, it's perhaps not surprising that when, in 1908, Charles Sprague Sargent enquired whether Kew could recommend someone to undertake a three-year expedition to China, Prain enthusiastically recommended Purdom as the very man for the job!3 Sargent had come to Britain in August 1908 to engage a plant collector to travel to northwestern China to collect plants and seeds for the Arnold Arboretum. Ernest Wilson, whom Sargent had sent to China in 1907, had made it clear that he would not extend his two-year contract.4 In 1906, Sargent had also agreed William Purdom: The Forgotten Arnold Plant Hunter Francois Gordon GORDON, F. 2021. WILLIAM PURDOM: THE FORGOTTEN ARNOLD PLANT HUNTER. ARNOLDIA, 78(4): 24-37 \u222b with the United States Department of Agriculture that Wilson would work in partnership with Frank Meyer, the department's collector in China. Meyer, whose main interest was in plants of agricultural value, would also collect ornamentals in northern China, and Wilson would collect useful plants for the department in the southern zone. But Sargent was bitterly disappointed by how few ornamental specimens Meyer sent from Shanxi Province and was furious when these specimens were discovered to include several previously unknown species of larch (Larix), spruce (Picea), and pine (Pinus) from which Meyer, who had not recognized them as novelties, had not collected seed.5 Wilson, by contrast, was spectacularly successful, sending back thousands of herbarium specimens and large quantities of plant material, in the process enhancing the reputation of the Arboretum. Sargent, a man of strong opinions and personal self-confidence verging on arrogance, refused to accept Meyer's explanation that the north of China was \"an utterly barren region\"6 when it came to new ornamental woody plants and wanted to send a collector there to prove the contrary. Sargent also wanted this collector to harvest the botanical riches he was convinced were to be found in the high mountains of Shaanxi and Gansu Provinces in northwest- 26 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 Frank Meyer photographed larches (Larix gmelinii var. principis-rupprechtii) near Wutaishan, in Shanxi Province, in February 1908. Charles Sprague Sargent, suspecting these and other conifers in the region to be unique, wanted Purdom to revisit the site. ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES cized (in Britain) record as a trade union activist\u2014 about which both Prain and Veitch appear to have maintained a discreet silence vis-\u00e0-vis Sargent\u2014meant that most potential employers saw him as a troublemaker, a label which would have made it very difficult for him to find employment in Britain. The first few weeks of 1909 passed in a blur, as Harry Veitch organized detailed briefings for Purdom on China. Purdom's instructors included Sir Robert Hart, recently retired after forty-eight years in China as inspector general of China's Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and Augustine Henry, the distinguished dendrologist who had spent nineteen years in China working for the Customs Service. The Kew-based photographer E. J. Wallis gave Purdom lessons in using a sophisticated glassplate camera.9 Purdom sailed on the Oceanic from Southampton to New York on February 3 and reached Boston four days later. Sargent immediately formed a favorable impression of Purdom,10 and he spent Purdom's second day in Boston writing an eight-page memorandum of guidance about where, when, and what to collect in China. Sargent told Purdom that, on arrival in China, he should seek out Ernest Wilson in either Shanghai or Yichang (in western Hubei Province) 11 before proceeding to Beijing. From there, he was to continue 120 miles north to Chengde (then often known as Jehol) and still farther north to the old imperial hunting ground at Weichang. In a characteristic display of wishful thinking, Sargent asserted that since Weichang \"has never been covered by a botanist, it is not impossible that you will find many interesting and possibly entirely new plants.\" Purdom was to leave Weichang in August so as to be in the Wutai mountain range, 180 miles southwest of Beijing in Shanxi Province, in mid-September, in time for the seed-drop of the conifers: obviously, Sargent especially desired seed from the new spruce, larch, and pine of which Meyer had sent herbarium specimens. Once the seeds had been collected, which Sargent thought \"ought not to take very long,\" he hoped that Purdom would return, via Beijing, to Weichang\u2014a round William Purdom 27 \u222b ern China. Sargent believed that, because the plants from that region endure harsh winters in their home range, they would be better able to stand the New England and north European winters than those from farther south. (The logic is seductive, and such plants will indeed withstand bitterly cold winters, but they are very vulnerable to late spring frosts, having evolved in a climate where spring is a brief prelude to a hot summer, a short transition from extreme cold to baking heat.) Sargent asked Isaac Bayley Balfour, the regius keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, for advice in identifying a collector, and Balfour recommended George Forrest,7 who had, in the spring of 1907, returned from a very successful three-year plant-hunting expedition in Yunnan Province and whom Balfour knew wanted to return to China.8 Sargent suggested to his old friend Harry Veitch, whose family firm, James Veitch & Son, dominated the British horticultural trade, that they jointly engage Forrest and share the harvest he would send back from China. Harry Veitch was agreeable, but although Forrest came to London in September to meet Sargent and Veitch, he refused their offer. Forrest was not impressed with the salary offered by Sargent and was reluctant to collect outside Yunnan, where he believed, quite correctly, that much more remained to be discovered. Nor would he agree to travel to China in early 1909 because he wanted to be at home for the birth of his first child in April. Sargent had to return to Boston in October, leaving Veitch to find a collector. After two months during which Veitch failed to propose a candidate, Sargent wrote to him in early December reminding him of their agreement to send a collector in early 1909. After consulting Prain and the director of the Kew Arboretum, William Bean, Veitch offered Purdom the post at a salary of two hundred pounds a year plus expenses of four hundred pounds a year. Purdom asked for time to think about it before agreeing on January 7, 1909. Truth to tell, Purdom had little alternative but to accept Sargent and Veitch's offer; his contract at Kew had expired, and he knew that his well-publiBaoding Wutaishan Beijing Chengde (Jehol) Dolon Nor Zhuizishan Mudanshan Yan'an Luoyang Jon\u00ea (Honan) Minxian Lanzhou Taibaishan Xi'an Lotani Gubeikou Shanghai SHAANXI SHANXI HENAN SHANDONG INNER MONGOLIA OUTER MONGOLIA SICHUAN HUBEI ANHUI JIANGSU ZHEJIANG GANSU ZHILI WEICHANG QILIAN MOUNTAINS QIN MOUNTAINS SHENYANG A M D O KOKO NOR 100 miles 200 kilometers 28 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 Purdom spent his fi rst collecting season, in 1909, north and west of Beijing. His second year centered on Shaanxi Province. In the third year, he collected in Gansu Province and the Tibetan region of Amdo. trip of around six hundred miles\u2014to gather seeds and herbarium specimens there. The year 1910 was to be spent in Shaanxi Province, where Purdom was to seek \"the wild tree peony\" (Paeonia suffruticosa) before exploring the mountain range near Xi'an, the ancient former capital. This region is around fi ve hundred miles southwest of Beijing. Finally, the third and last year, 1911, was to be spent in Gansu Province, in the high mountains on the border with Tibet, over one thousand miles from Beijing. All this was spelled out by Sargent with admirable clarity, and he was equally clear about the principal object of the expedition, which was \"to investigate botanically unexplored territory [and] to increase the knowledge of the woody and other plants of the [Chinese] Empire.\" In pursuit of this last goal, Sargent expected Purdom to dry six sets of herbarium specimens for all woody plants, including specimens of the same species that might occur in different regions so as to show the extent of any variation. He also wanted Purdom to photograph \"as many trees as possible,\" including their fl owers and bark, and \"if time permits [\u2026] views of villages and other striking and interesting objects, as the world knows little of the appearance of those parts of China you are about to visit.\" These goals were not quite the same as those articulated by Harry Veitch, who had told Purdom \"the object of your mission [is] to collect seeds and plants of trees and shrubs, also any plants likely to have a commercial value, such as lilies,\" but there was sufficient overlap that Purdom felt he could satisfy both his sponsors. ARNOLD ARBORETUM AND GIS COMMUNITY 1911 SEASON 1910 SEASON 1909 SEASON William Purdom 29 Purdom must also have welcomed Sargent's brief acknowledgment that it might be impracticable to complete the ambitious itinerary he had sketched out in three collecting seasons and that Purdom might need, in the light of local advice or experience, to change it. Sargent had his legal adviser draw up a contract, which he and Purdom signed. This stipulated that \"all seeds of herbaceous, alpines and bulbous plants and all bulbs and other roots except those of woody plants\" collected by Purdom would be the property of the firm of James Veitch & Sons and would be sent directly to them from China. Collections of woody plants would be divided equally between Veitch and the Arnold Arboretum. Photographs and herbarium specimens would belong to the Arboretum. The Arboretum would pay his salary and expenses in January and July, after which Veitch would reimburse one-half of the total sum involved. Purdom spent a fortnight in Boston, mostly being taught how to prepare herbarium specimens. This involves pressing specimens of plants in blotting paper (also known as drying paper), including, as appropriate, the leaves, stems, flowers, fruit, and seeds. It is a long and laborious process, not least because of the need to change the absorbent paper every couple of days until the plants are thoroughly dried out. These specimens are subsequently mounted on cardstock with a note of the name of the plant, if known, the date and site of collection, and any details recorded by the collector that may be lost as a result of pressing and drying, such as color or scent. After his training in Boston, Purdom traveled by train to Vancouver, from where he sailed for China on the Empress of Japan. He arrived in Shanghai on March 16, 1909. Ernest Wilson had repeatedly made it clear that he would hold Sargent to their two-year contract and was not interested in extending it. Nonetheless, when Sargent wrote to him that he and Harry Veitch had engaged Purdom and hoped that Wilson would brief him before returning to London, Wilson expressed disappointment at being \"passed over.\" But he promised that he would do anything he could to help \"your new man,\"12 and his briefing of Purdom in Shanghai seems to have been reasonably cordial. What is, however, clear from Purdom's full account of his briefing from Wilson13 is that Wilson did not suggest to Purdom that it would be to his advantage to engage any of the eight trained Chinese collectors who had supported Wilson over the last three years. Their contract with Wilson would end as soon as they had finished packing the harvest of the last season's collecting for shipment to Sargent. If Purdom had hired some or all of them, he would have benefitted from their experience and expertise in, for example, preparing herbarium specimens rather than having to train collectors himself, starting from scratch. The men themselves would surely have welcomed the continuation of their employment. Wilson's reticence is all the more noteworthy when one recalls that when Wilson started on his first collecting expedition to China in 1899, he was briefed by Augustine Henry (who was leaving the country) and immediately thereafter hired Henry's entire team, who had been trained over the previous decade.14 But Purdom lacked the experience to suggest he might do the same thing, and Wilson, despite his promise to Sargent that he would do all he could to help Purdom, did not propose it. One wonders whether Wilson kept silent because he anticipated that he might return to China within the three-year period for which Purdom was contracted to collect for Sargent and Veitch. In fact, in June 1910, Wilson did return and promptly reconstituted his team of helpers. Obviously, this would have been impossible if the men had been in the field with Purdom. A less charitable alternative explanation is that Wilson was not especially keen to provide Purdom with assistants who might help Purdom challenge Wilson's burgeoning reputation as the greatest of the Western plant hunters active in China.15 Certainly, in later years, Wilson quite deliberately burnished his reputation, including by rewriting some of the history of his first two expeditions.16 Immediately on his arrival in Beijing, Purdom applied himself to learning Mandarin Chinese, a language that he mastered remark- \u222b Clockwise from top: In the spring of 1909, Purdom traveled north of Beijing and crossed the Great Wall at the gateway town of Gubeikou. He continued northward by river and spent the summer in the imperial hunting grounds of Weichang. Although the region was predominately treeless, Purdom documented pines (Pinus tabuliformis) among the scattered forests. That fall, he returned to Beijing and headed west to Wutaishan, where he photographed a collection of Khingan fir (Abies nephrolepis) near his tent. The year 1910 was spent primarily in Shaanxi Province. He sent the Arnold Arboretum few photographs that year, but one showed the landscape of Mudanshan, where there was no sign of the wild tree peony. ALL PHOTOS ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES Clockwise from top: In 1911, Purdom collected primarily in Gansu Province and Amdo, an adjacent region of Tibet, where he photographed a temple perched above the Tao River at Jon\u00ea. Purdom took a considerable number of portraits of families and individuals in the region. He also documented the dramatic mountains near Jon\u00ea, which he labeled as the Peling Mountains. Before returning to England, Purdom collected seedlings of the Chinese horsechestnut (Aesculus chinensis) at a temple in Beijing's Western Hills. ALL PHOTOS ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES 32 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 ably quickly. Unusually for a Westerner in China at this time, Purdom consistently treated local administrators and farmers in the areas where he collected as his social equals, among whom he sought to make friends. Partly as a result, he was allowed into areas of China foreign travelers were actively discouraged from visiting, not least for their own safety. Purdom spent the 1909 collecting season in northern China and Mongolia, including in Wutaishan. Sargent had specifically tasked Purdom with collecting seeds from spruce and larches found there, which were not in cultivation in the West, but the wet summer of 1909 meant that the trees did not set seed. Although Purdom sent cuttings and seedlings, Sargent complained that they had been poorly packed and that, as a result, many of them had died on the six-week journey to Boston.17 He was only partly mollified by seeds that were germinating in the Arboretum's greenhouses. In fact, Purdom had dispatched thirty parcels of seeds and bulbs from more than three hundred unique collections to Boston and London that year. These included rhododendrons and primulas, a fine blue anemone, several peonies, and three species of clematis, one of which, the downy clematis (Clematis macropetala), has particularly graceful deep blue bell-shaped flowers. It first flowered in Veitch's Coombe Wood nursery in 1912 and remains very popular today. For Sargent, there were several poplars (Populus), elms (Ulmus), larch, and herbarium specimens of a new form of bird cherry (later named Prunus padus var. pubescens forma purdomii), which is a small tree with copious white racemes, bright red berries, and fine foliage. In April 1910, after overwintering in Beijing, Purdom traveled to western China. Sargent had asked him to investigate Moutan-shan (or Mudanshan, which translates to \"peony mountain\") near the ancient city of Xi'an, where he hoped Purdom would find the original wild peony. When Purdom arrived, however, he found that the plants had long ago been harvested for traditional medicines and the mountain was stripped bare. Purdom took several photos of the mountain to leave Sargent in no possible doubt that there were no peonies (and few other plants) there. Purdom had better luck near Yan'an, where he found a wild population of the tree peony. He ultimately collected over five hundred seeds of this dark red peony, which was raised in both Boston and Coombe Wood. (Sargent would later write of this as a \"first-rate achievement.\"18) On Taibaishan, in southern Shaanxi, he found a fine rhododendron with dark pink buds shading into white flowers, subsequently named Rhododendron purdomii. He also found another wild population of the tree peony, but with no seed. The next year, Purdom continued westward to Gansu Province and the Amdo region of Tibet. He found, in a monastery garden, a lovely winter-flowering viburnum (Viburnum farreri, then known as V. fragrans). He sent seeds to Veitch, who grew them on and subsequently sold his stock to Gerald Loder, the owner of Wakehurst Place in Sussex, where, in 1920, they flowered for the first time in Britain. Purdom also sent seed of an edible honeysuckle, Lonicera caerula, whose curious cylindrical fruit is today sold in the West as \"honeyberry.\" He ended the season in Minxian, in Gansu Province, where he had no choice but to wait for order to be restored following the anarchic violence that followed the Xinhai Revolution in October. Fortunately, Purdom had more or less completed the season's collecting, which included several fine primulas and asters, and in December, he was able to persuade the Minxian authorities to provide (for a fee) an armed escort to enable him to return, via Honan, to Beijing. When Purdom told the political staff at the British Legation about the attempted ambush near Shenchow, they were horrified to hear that he had killed three of the attackers, whom they strongly suspected (or they may have had confidential information confirming it as a fact) had been off-duty government soldiers.19 They urged Purdom not to repeat the story to anyone else lest he (and, by association, Britain) should be seen as taking up arms against the Chinese government. This advice suited Purdom, a very private man who throughout his life avoided personal publicity. Furthermore, Purdom was angling for a job with the Chinese Republican William Purdom 33 Purdom and two assistants make their camp on or near Mudanshan, in May 1910. His herbarium presses are arranged in the foreground, with his lever-action rifle resting against the central press. government and may well have believed that to publicize the shooting wouldn't help his prospects. He did give Sargent and Harry Veitch very brief accounts of the incident,20 but it was not reported in either the Chinese or English press, nor did he ever allude to it in later life. Both sponsors of the expedition were disappointed by Purdom's harvest. Harry Veitch recognized that \"if the plants were not there, then he [Purdom] could not send them,\" but Sargent was reluctant to accept that while his decision to send Purdom to the botanical terra incognita of northwestern China had been a perfectly reasonable throw of the dice, the gamble had failed. That would have meant recognizing that Sargent had got it wrong, and he chose instead to blame Purdom for not trying hard enough.21 Sargent also rebuffed Purdom's request to return home from Beijing via San Francisco and New York in order to enable him to visit Boston to explain why the results of the expedition had not matched Sargent's over-ambitious hopes.22 And the statistics that Sargent reported in his 1910-11 Annual Report to the President of Harvard University tended (at least) to leave readers with the impression that Purdom's harvest over the 1910 season had been less than one-quarter of Wilson's, whereas, in fact, he had sent the Arboretum and Veitch germplasm from almost \u222b \u00a9 BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD 34 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 exactly half the number of different plants collected by Wilson in the same season.23 Sargent's harsh judgment of Purdom's competence as a collector may well have been influenced by his comparing Purdom's collections with those of Ernest Wilson, sent from Sichuan Province. Such a comparison would prima facie not be to Purdom's advantage: the two men were not competing on a level playing field. The climate of Sichuan is subtropical, shading into tropical, and the annual monsoon delivers plentiful rainfall. Gansu, Shanxi, and Shaanxi Provinces, where Sargent had dispatched Purdom, share a temperate climate, with bitterly cold winters and little rainfall. Unsurprisingly, the flora of Gansu and its immediate neighbors is much sparser than the vegetation of Sichuan where Wilson principally collected. The Hengduan Mountains in western Sichuan illustrate the extreme biodiversity of the region where Wilson was collecting. The mountains are far enough south that during the last ice age they escaped being scraped bare by glaciers. The substantial variation in altitude created a range of habitats, from river valleys to alpine meadows and peaks, and a huge range of plants flourished there while those further north were wiped out by the ice. In consequence, the Hengduan massif is a biodiversity hotspot, a veritable plantsman's paradise in which it is estimated there are over 8,500 species of plants, 15 percent of them endemic (found only in that confined geographical area). They include over one in four of the world's species of rhododendrons (224 species), primulas (113 species), and mountain ash (Sorbus, 36 species)\u2014the list goes on and on.24 In contrast, plant biodiversity where Purdom was collecting was much lower. In the Qilian Mountains of Gansu, researchers have tabulated around 1,044 species of plants, and in southeastern Gansu, the number is around 2,458 species.25 Neither Wilson nor Purdom ever claimed to have done more than explore part of the provinces in which they hunted for plants, but the bottom line is that Wilson was collecting in a region where there was approximately three and a half to eight times the number of plant species than in the area to which Purdom had been sent by Sargent and Veitch. This made it almost inevitable that Wilson would send back to Boston specimens and seeds of more species than Purdom. In 1910 and early 1911, the only season for which it is possible to make a direct comparison, Purdom sent back to Harry Veitch germplasm associated with 374 unique collections numbers, while Wilson sent back 744 collections, 271 of them collected by his assistants after he had broken his leg.26 Sargent's negativity towards Purdom may also have been influenced by his feeling a measure of responsibility towards Wilson in respect of the avalanche that had nearly caused him to lose a leg and that left him with a severe limp.27 Wilson hadn't really wanted to go on the expedition, but Sargent had effectively forced him to, and it seems quite possible that he subconsciously vented a feeling of guilt about what had befallen Wilson on Purdom. Furthermore, the extent to which Wilson's work in China captured the imagination of the United States media and public meant that Wilson found a ready market for the articles and books that Sargent encouraged him to write about his expeditions. Wilson stressed his links with the Arboretum in the publications, and his star status, in turn, added luster to the fundraising efforts in which Sargent was constantly engaged to support the Arboretum and its activities. In short, it suited both men very well for Wilson to be front and center of the public stage, and there is nothing to suggest that either of them was concerned that the accomplishments of other collectors, including Meyer and Purdom, were overshadowed as a result. The final blow to any hopes Purdom entertained that this expedition might allow him to forge a reputation among the horticultural cognoscenti that would help him to secure a good job in Britain or the United States fell on his return to England. Harry Veitch had decided to close the firm, which had dominated the English nursery trade for decades, and sell the stock at auction, causing Purdom's collections to be dispersed and brought to market without his name being associated with them (Viburnum farreri, mentioned above, is a particularly egregious example). Purdom (left) returned to China in 1914 and spent two years collecting with the British botanist Reginald Farrer. Purdom used a clockwork self-timer to photograph himself with Farrer (right) and Zhang Bing Hua, the viceroy of Koko Nor (present-day Qinghai Province). This is the only known photograph of Purdom and Farrer together. \u00a9 BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD 36 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 All things considered, if we factor in Purdom's fundamental modesty and aversion to publicity, it's easy to see why he never captured the public imagination in the way that, say, Wilson or Forrest did. In 1912, Purdom began corresponding with officials in Beijing about a possible post in a yet-to-be-formed Chinese Forest Service, which would enable him to pursue an objective to which he was personally and strongly committed, namely the reforestation of China after decades of extensive and largely uncontrolled logging. There were long bureaucratic delays in setting up the service, and in 1913, when the alpine plant expert and plant hunter Reginald Farrer invited Purdom to join him on an expedition to northwestern China and Amdo, he accepted.28 He and Farrer botanized successfully in 1914 and 1915, collecting inter alios some fine poppies, alpines, primulas, and an elegant butterflybush (Buddleia alternifolia). Although Farrer would go on to write two of the best travel books of the era about the expedition, 29 the devastating effect on European gardening and horticulture of the First World War and the complete collapse in demand for new plants brought an abrupt end to their plant hunting at the close of 1915. In the spring of 1916, the Chinese government at last formally created a Chinese Forest Service, and Purdom was appointed as a senior forestry adviser to the Chinese government. Purdom must have been deeply happy at last to have achieved a senior management position in which he could make his mark. He began working with Han Ngen (Han An), the secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, to train Chinese foresters, develop tree nurseries, and plant trees where they would do the most good. By 1919, after three years of backbreaking effort, over one thousand tree nurseries had been established in China, containing one hundred million young trees. In the same, year twenty to thirty million trees were planted on over one hundred thousand acres of otherwise unproductive land.30 Many of these were timber trees new to China, mostly from North America, which Purdom knew would do well in different Chinese regions and climatic zones. He organized the importation of many millions of seeds and cuttings, making him the only Western plant hunter to have imported into China vastly more plant material than he ever collected there. It appears that eventually Purdom and Sargent were reconciled: in 1920 and early 1921, Purdom is known to have sent plant material to the Arnold Arboretum. Frustratingly, however, there is no surviving correspondence from this time in the Arnold Arboretum files, and Sargent's personal papers are lost. Purdom died suddenly in Beijing in November 1921 at the age of forty-one, due to an infection contracted following a minor surgery. He was buried in the English cemetery in Beijing, but fifty-four of his Chinese friends and colleagues clubbed together to commission a large and elegant memorial stele in the Forest Service plantation at Xinyang, which they renamed the Purdom Forest Park. Remarkably, the stele and the park were both left alone during the violently anti-foreigner Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and they are both carefully preserved to this day. The epitaph is too long to quote in full, but a hundred years later the sorrow felt by Purdom's friends who subscribed to the stele is still very clear. Perhaps what would have most pleased Purdom is their description of him as \"a true and loyal friend of the Chinese people who won the admiration and respect of his colleagues, worked tirelessly for the reforestation of China and who, had he lived, would certainly have trained the next generation of Chinese foresters.\" Will Purdom was a fine and honorable man, who rose from a position of very limited personal agency and overcame formidable obstacles to leave the world a better place for his passage. Not only does he deserve to be remembered in his own right, but his life has a good deal to teach us about our place in this interconnected world. His concerns about protecting local ecosystems are a reminder that these ideas were current well over a hundred years ago. Finally, we should, in justice, remember him when we plant his introductions in our gardens: among them, \"his\" viburnum, butterflybush, or bird cherry. \u222b William Purdom 37 Endnotes 1 Purdom letter to Harry Veitch, 23 March 1912 (copied by Veitch to Charles S. Sargent, 10 April 1912), Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library, Harvard University (AA archive). 2 Anon. 1921. William Purdom. Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 3(1): 55-56. 3 David Prain letter to Harry Veitch, 31 December 1908, Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, archives. 4 Ernest H. Wilson letters to Sargent, 21 November 1908 and 9 March 1909; also Sargent letter to Veitch, 26 April 1909, AA archive. 5 Sargent letter to Wilson, 8 July 1908, AA archive. Sargent also expressed his disappointment to David Fairchild, Meyer's superior at the Department of Agriculture. 6 Frank Meyer letter to Wilson, 7 May 1907, AA archive. 7 Bayley Balfour letter to George Forrest, 26 August 1908, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh archive. 8 George Forrest (1873-1932) made a total of seven expeditions to China, in the course of which he collected over thirty thousand different plants and herbarium specimens, nearly all of them from Yunnan Province in southwestern China. 9 Purdom was an apt pupil, and the Arnold Arboretum archive has a large collection of his photographs, which are an important resource for our understanding of remote areas of China in the first decades of the last century. 10 Sargent letter to Veitch, 16 February 1909; and to Prain, 25 February 1909, AA archive. 11 Sargent letter to Purdom, 8 February 1909, AA archive. 12 Wilson letter to Sargent, 9 March 1909, AA archive. 13 Purdom letter to Sargent, 26 March 1909, AA archive. 14 For a full account and a photo of the team, see: O'Brian, S. A. 2011. In the footsteps of Augustine Henry (p. 68 et seq.). Garden Art Press. 15 Wilson's biographer, Roy W. Briggs, suggests that Wilson was concerned that his replacement by Purdom might be seen as an adverse reflection on the quality of his own work in China. 16 See, for instance: Holway, T. History or romance? Garden History, 46(1): 3-27. 17 Sargent letter to Purdom, 3 May 1910, AA archive. 18 Sargent letter to Veitch, 13 June 1912, AA Archive. 19 On March 10, 1912, the political department of the legation sent a telegram about the ambush to the Foreign Office in London, but unfortunately it has been \"weeded\" from the file in the Public Record Office. The legation also asked the representative of the London Times in Beijing, Ernest Morrison, not to report the incident, and Morrison complied. 20 In addition to the letter that Purdom sent to Harry Veitch cited above, see: Thomas, W. B. 1913, July 10. Creator of 2,000 new plants. Daily Mail, p. 3. 21 Frank N. Meyer letter to David Fairchild, 15 October 1912, USDA compilation of Fairchild correspondence held at the University of California, Davis, Vol. 3, pp. 1600-1601. 22 Meyer letter to Fairchild, 21 December 1912, USDA compilation, Vol. 3, pp. 1619-1621. 23 For my full accounting of this, see: Gordon, F. 2021 Will Purdom: Agitator, plant-hunter, forester (pp. 111- 116). Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh. 24 See: Kelley, S. 2001. Plant hunting of the rooftop of the world. Arnoldia, 61(2): 2-13. These figures are likely to have changed slightly in the intervening twenty years as new species have been identified and others have been reclassified. By way of comparison, the British Isles presently (2021) have 1,443 species from 308 genera, only 1.2 percent of them endemic. 25 Wang, J, Che, K., and Yan, W. 1996. Analysis of the biodiversity in Qilian Mountains. Journal of Gansu Forestry Science and Technology; also, Lu, W-Z. and Ren, J-W. 2005. Plant biodiversity and its conservation in Maijishan Scenic Regions of Gansu. Journal of Northwestern Forestry University, 20(4): 44-47. 26 Plant collecting is emphatically not a \"numbers game,\" and it would be foolish to use these figures to attempt to compare the relative efficiency of the two men. But Purdom clearly did a good job in a poor collecting area. Again, for my accounting of these numbers in the biography, see pp. 111-116. 27 For a full account of the story surrounding Wilson's accident, see: Dosmann, M. 2020. A lily from the valley, Arnoldia 77(3): 14-25. 28 Purdom letter to Reginald J. Farrer, 9 September 1913, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh archive. 29 See Farrer's books On the Eaves of the World (1917) and The Rainbow Bridge (1921). Both books are dedicated to \"Bill\", i.e. Will Purdom. 30 Reisner, J. H. 1921. Progress of forestry in China 1919- 1920. Journal of Forestry, 19(4): 396. The map in this article was inspired by the map on page 72 of Will Purdom: Agitator, Plant-Hunter, Forester and was created using Esri, Airbus DS, USGS, NGA, NASA, CGIAR, N Robinson, NCEAS, NLS, OS, NMA, Geodatastyrelsen, Rijkswaterstaat, Garmin, GSA, Geoland, FEMA, Intermap and the GIS user community. Purdom Plants at the Arnold Arboretum As of this writing, visitors at the Arnold Arboretum can find twenty-five trees and shrubs that arrived directly from Purdom (as seed) or Veitch (as plants) from Purdom's first expedition to China. Another twenty-six plants represent other Purdom lineages, including Forsythia that originated from Purdom's collections with Reginald Farrer. To map them in the landscape, visit https:\/\/ arboretum.harvard.edu\/explorer\/. Use the advanced search and input \"Purdom\" in the collector field. Francois Gordon retired from the British Foreign Office in 2009 after thirty years mostly spent in Africa. Today, he lives and gardens with his wife Elaine in Kent. His first book, Will Purdom: Agitator, Plant-Hunter, Forester, was published by the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh in 2021. It can be purchased on Amazon."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"George Ware and the Thornhill Elm: A Vision of Trees for the Future","article_sequence":6,"start_page":38,"end_page":47,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25734","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25e816e.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Shearer, Kim","article_content":"In 1987, a plant pathologist in Montana ended an incomplete experiment by cutting down fourteen young American elm trees (Ulmus americana). At the time, Dutch elm disease (Ophiostoma ulmi, DED) was taking hold in parts of Montana. The only management practices then available in Montana were tree removal or pesticide sprays to stop the movement of the vectors, elm bark beetles. The pathologist, Gary Strobel, had been hoping to develop an unconventional method of disease management\u2014vaccinate the tree with a genetically engineered bacterium (Pseudomonas syringae) to fight the fungal disease. In lab trials, Strobel and his colleague Donald Myers had demonstrated that Pseudomonas syringae produced natural antibiotics that suppressed the spread of DED through vascular tissue. Still, Strobel needed permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to proceed with a field experiment that involved a genetically engineered organism. The bureaucratic machinations promised to delay the field experiments for another year, so Strobel moved forward with his experiments and injected fourteen trees before receiving formal approval. This moment captured national headlines focusing attention on the debate over genetically engineered organisms and drawing unwelcome attention to Montana State University, where Strobel was a researcher. Rather than put his colleagues at risk of losing federal funding due to his decisions, Strobel volunteered to destroy his field experiment. As an unanticipated result, however, the news also generated a newfound interest in tree breeding work occurring in a Chicago suburb. At the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, George Ware had been busy developing DEDresistant elms the conventional way, through targeted breeding efforts using disease-resistant germplasm. In a 1987 New York Times article titled \"Fighting Elm Disease the Natural Way,\" Ware is quoted as saying, \"Dr. Strobel was trying to help one kind of elm quickly. We're looking more toward diversity over the long run.\" This quote highlights the nature of Ware's Elm Improvement Program and the efforts that he went through in developing the next DEDresistant elms. George Ware arrived at the Morton Arboretum in 1968, a mere two years after Marion Trufant Hall was hired as director and charged to lead the arboretum in an initiative to expand our research capacity. Ware was enlisted as the research director and the in-house ecologist and dendrologist. In 1972, four years into his tenure, Ware began noticing a peculiar tree in the arboretum collections: a stately elm growing outside the former study of Joy Morton, the arboretum's namesake and founder. At the time, much of the landscape in and around Chicago had been devastated by Dutch elm disease\u2014as was the case across the United States. The graceful American elm had been widely planted in the Chicago area, along streets and in parks. The prevalence of this species, which was also a ubiquitous forest tree, would ultimately be its undoing, enabling the rapid spread of both the vector and the disease by air and by root-to-root transmission. The first detection of Dutch elm disease in the United States was recorded in 1929 by Curtis May, a plant pathologist for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). May received samples collected in Ohio by plant pathologist Paul Tilford. The trees in Ohio were dying and a cause for concern. Later, in 1933, a USDA inspection would discover the source of the introduced disease: shipments of imported burl logs harboring the European elm bark bee- Facing page: In 1972, George Ware observed an elm at the Morton Arboretum that displayed exceptional form and resistance to Dutch elm disease. The tree would become Ware's first commercial tree introduction: the Accolade elm (Ulmus davidiana 'Morton' Accolade\u2122). PHOTO: STERLING MORTON LIBRARY SHEARER, K. 2021. GEORGE WARE AND THE THORNHILL ELM: A VISION OF TREES FOR THE FUTURE. ARNOLDIA, 78(4): 38-47 \u222b George Ware and the Thornhill Elm: A Vision of Trees for the Future Kim Shearer tle (Scolytus scolytus). The larvae of elm bark beetles, including our native species (Hylurgopinus rufipes), feed on the vascular tissue of infected trees, picking up spores with their bodies. When they mature and emerge from the tree, they can move to uninfected trees, introducing fungal spores. Newspapers across the country began raising the alarm about the rapid loss of trees as the disease continued to spread in the East and Midwest. By 1970, the Chicago region was reported to have lost more than fifty thousand trees and was projected to lose another fifty thousand within two years. It was amidst this devastation, in 1972, that Ware noticed the tree growing outside of Joy Morton's study window at the Thornhill Estate. It was an elm (Morton accession 2352-24*1) with gracefully arching branches, healthy and green foliage, and no symptoms of the disease. The original elm, fondly referred to by Morton Arboretum staff as the Thornhill Elm, was accessioned into the collections in 1924, shortly after Joy Morton founded the arboretum on his estate in 1922. With guidance from Charles Sprague Sargent, the director of the Arnold Arboretum, Morton established a 735- acre arboretum that included an herbarium, library, and nurseries, along with staff to manage it all by the time of his death. The most integral component of the arboretum\u2014the living collections\u2014included many accessions of plants initially sourced from the Arnold. In the initial establishment of the Morton collections, Sargent provided access to seed, clonal propagation material, and plants. One such packet of seed was labeled Ulmus crassifolia (the cedar elm), and records indicated that the seed had been wild-collected in Brownwood, Texas, by botanist Ernest Jesse Palmer. It was accessioned into the arboretum collections, and seeds were germinated and grown in the nursery. Eventually, a sapling was planted outside the bay window of Morton's study. As the years passed, the tree witnessed Morton's family and guests enjoying summer afternoons by the pool. The sloping vista beneath the elm was crowned by hawthorns for which the estate was named. There were staff picnics for Morton Salt Tree breeding is a slow, steady process, requiring years to grow and evaluate each generation of hybrids. Over the decades, Ware's Elm Improvement Program would produce some of the most popular disease-resistant elms for the North American landscape. STERLING MORTON LIBRARY \u222b George Ware 41 Company and the Morton Arboretum in the coming decades. The tree overlooks the Morton family cemetery and bore witness to family funerals, but it also provided shade to guests at weddings and garden soirees. Eventually, when the crumbling mansion was demolished long after Morton had died, the tree stood guard over Morton's study, which was preserved as part of a new facility for educating the public about plants and the rest of the natural world. In 1972, Ware looked at this tree and recognized that it was, in fact, not Ulmus crassifolia. The leaves were too large, the bark not quite right, and the form much too refined. As a dendrologist who had been a faculty member at Northwestern State College in Louisiana, Ware was familiar with U. crassifolia, which is native to that region. In fact, one of the first deposits Ware made into the arboretum collections in 1968 was a packet of cedar elm seed (Morton accession 385-68) that he had collected from the wild in Seguin, Texas. After further investigation (and even a visit to Arnold), Ware confirmed that the Thornhill Elm was U. davidiana, a species native to eastern Asia. Noting the native origin of the species and the lack of symptoms in the tree, Ware saw the possibility that the Dutch elm disease pathogen had Asiatic origins itself. Perhaps the presence of Ophiostoma ulmi in the natural habitat of U. davidiana had led to coevolution of the species such that the David elm had adapted a natural biochemical defense mechanism to combat the disease. In this tree, Ware saw great potential. The Thornhill Elm inspired the development of the first breeding program at the Morton Arboretum, the Elm Improvement Program. As a trained ecologist and dendrologist, Ware understood the necessity for genetic diversity within a population. He was soon on the search for more parent material to include in his germplasm collection. By 1980, Ware had clones of the Thornhill Elm propagated and under evaluation. That same year, he published two articles in the Journal of Arboriculture focusing on the qualities necessary for trees to survive in human-built landscapes and the attributes of Asian elm species that made them ideal candidates for such an environment. These publications were an effort to raise awareness within a community of tree experts about the possibilities that were held within the genetic resources of Asian elms. While American elms were being felled across the eastern United States, Ware was proposing a new solution to a decades-old problem: Let's plant Asian elms, he suggested, given that these species are adapted to both the constructed environment and the Ware recognized the value of Asian elm species as urban trees in North America. This list outlines species Ware recommended for evaluation and breeding in the Journal of Arboriculture and Landscape Plant News. Distribution and descriptions have been adapted from his papers. Species Geographic distribution Ware Description Selections available in US nursery trade? Ulmus davidiana (syn. include U. japonica, U. wilsoniana, U. propinqua) China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Siberia Variation in habit; tolerant of hostile conditions Yes; many introductions made in the past couple of decades U. glaucescens Gansu Province (China), northern China Small tree; small leaves, fine texture; yellow to orange fall color; tolerant of urban conditions based on its distribution No U. laciniata Humid areas of northern China, Korea, Siberia, and Japan Small to medium tree; potential drought hardiness; lobed leaves; Zelkova-like branching No U. macrocarpa China, Mongolia, Korea, and Siberia Strong wood; shrub to mediumsized tree; adapted to humid and arid regions; tolerant of \"hostile\" conditions No U. parvifolia China, Korea, Japan Tolerant of drought, pollution, poor soils; attractive lace bark; glossy leaves Yes; many introductions made in the past couple of decades devastating disease. Clones of the Thornhill Elm are now widely available in the commercial nursery trade under the name Ulmus davidiana 'Morton' Accolade\u2122. When developing any plant breeding program, a breeder must first start with objectives and further refine them by identifying specific desirable traits. Ware's primary objective was to develop elm trees with Dutch elm disease resistance. Second to that, he aimed to develop trees that were not preferred by the elm bark beetles or elm flea weevils (Orchestes alni). Beyond pest and disease resistance, Ware would focus on species adapted to environments of the extremes: temperature, drought, flood, high winds, blizzard, and \"hostile\" soils. He defined hostile soils as those with high pH, poor aeration, and minimal organic matter. He noted that these are all common conditions of the Midwest and Great Plains, and coincidentally, these are the same conditions faced by trees in developed landscapes regardless of the region. Ware went on to list and describe Asian elm species that should be considered for breeding programs. Meanwhile, Ware began the process of hybridizing elms that were available within the Morton collections. He collected branches covered in rounded floral buds and brought them into his lab. He placed the cut stems in vessels containing water and positioned them upon white sheets of paper spaced out along lab benches. As the forced stems began to flower, yellow piles of pollen would accumulate on the paper, signaling the pollen was ready to be collected and stored. Ware then used a ladder to take this pollen into the canopy of a female parent tree, where he secured a bag over a flowering stem. Making an opening in the bag, he dispersed pollen inside and mimicked the movement of the wind to ensure the pollen made contact with the receptive stigma. Once the bag was securely shut, he climbed down from his ladder and waited. This process led to the development of several new hybrid elms, including Ulmus 'Morton Glossy' Triumph\u2122. This selection is one of the most popular of Ware's elm introductions due to its low maintenance requirements in both commercial nursery production and municipal tree management. While a breeder can develop the best possible plant selection, the plants would not get very far out of the breeding program without help from the nursery industry. Ware was acutely aware of this. While his initial collaborations were with arborists, foresters, and botanists, he would go on to develop strong working relationships with the nursery industry, specifically Keith Warren, the former manager of new plant development for J. Frank Schmidt & Son, based in Boring, Oregon. The two first discussed the possibility of evaluating Ware's elm selections after a Metropolitan Tree Improvement Alliance conference, hosted at Thornhill in June of 1990. This meeting would lead to a collaboration between the Morton and J. Frank Schmidt that continues today, enabling hybrid elm selections to be propagated on greater scales and evaluated in field research. The first grafting of Ware's elm hybrids at J. Frank Schmidt occurred in 1994\u2014just twenty-two years after Ware recognized the tree's potential and seventy years after being received as seed labeled Ulmus crassifolia. The Oregon Department of Agriculture helped the collaborators set up a screened isolation and quarantine area at the commercial nursery, ensuring that DED would not be introduced into the Oregon landscape due to the nursery trade. By 1995, additional propagation material was distributed for in vitro propagation evaluation by Microplant Nurseries, a tissue culture lab based in Gervais, Oregon, managed by Gayle Suttle. At that time, there were not yet any cultivars of U. davidiana available through the commercial industry. Ware also recognized that for elm breeding efforts to be effective, additional genetic material needed to be collected from the wild. When he began his research, he found that few elms of wild provenance were available in the collections of North American public gardens, potentially creating a genetic bottleneck for any North American elm breeding program. The total number of elm species is somewhere within the range of twenty to forty, depending on taxonomic classification, and the center for Facing page: To develop new elm hybrids, including Ulmus 'Morton Glossy' Triumph\u2122, Ware carefully crossed select trees using pollination bags, secured high within the tree canopy. PHOTO: JIM NACHEL, STERLING MORTON LIBRARY 42 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 \u222b this diversity is unmistakably in eastern Asia. The Flora of China indicates that more than half of all elm species are native to the region. Ware and his colleagues ultimately visited China five times and the Soviet Union three times, developing relationships with forestry researchers willing to collect seeds in the wild and ship them to Ware. Today, the Morton's elm collection contains 329 accessioned individuals representing thirty-three species and thirty-four cultivars, a dramatic increase from 1968, when Ware arrived. At that time, the elm collection included fifty-one trees, which represented nine species and ten cultivars. Of the newer individuals accessioned into the Morton collections, eighty-one came directly as plants from Ware's breeding and research program. Ware also actively distributed seed and plants throughout the United States. He coordinated a seedling distribution program through which he distributed one thousand seedlings to Midwestern nurseries, aiming to popularize the Asian elm species. Municipal foresters and park managers regularly arrived at the Morton Arboretum's service gate searching for elm seedlings he had promised. As the current manager of the program that Ware initiated, I still receive notes from recipients of such gifts who recount fond memories of Ware and his generosity. Today, the seedling trees that he distributed can be found from Oregon to New York and Illinois to Louisiana. Several of Ware's elms were even planted in the late 1980s on the course of the Winged Foot Golf Club, the prestigious host of multiple US Opens in Mamaroneck, New York. This planting was a direct result of a 1987 New York Times interview of Ware following the Strobel controversy. By 1990, Ware had several elm selections in the pipeline and a greatly expanded collection of germplasm. He then began the process of developing a new breeding population. Working with large, wind-pollinated, late-winterflowering trees presents unique challenges to a breeder. The flowers are insignificant and often located more than six feet above the ground. (I can attest to the complications of these factors as a breeder working with elms today.) To sim- This table outlines five of Ware's most well-known elm cultivars. Note that Ulmus japonica and U. wilsoniana are taxonomic varieties that make up the U. davidiana species complex, but they are listed here as the original species for the sake of simplicity. Information found in this table is adapted from the Chicagoland Grows' Plant Release Bulletin (no. 44). 44 Arnoldia 78\/4 \u2022 May 2021 Cultivar and trade name Parentage\/ origin Traits USDA Hardiness Zones Dimensions (feet) Ulmus 'Morton' Accolade\u2122 Chance seedling U. japonica x U. wilsoniana Vase-shaped habit and vigorous grower; foliage fine-textured, dark green, and glossy with yellow fall color; DED and elm yellows resistance; resistant to elm leaf beetle 5 - 8 20 year 30' H, 15' W Mature 50 - 60' H 30 - 40' W Ulmus 'Morton Plainsman' Vanguard\u2122 Chance seedling U. japonica x U. pumila Relatively upright branching and rounded habit in youth; requires corrective pruning to avoid included bark; dark green foliage with yellow fall color; DED and elm yellows resistant; susceptible to elm leaf beetle, Japanese beetle, and leafminer 5 - 7 Mature 45 - 50' H 40 - 50' W Ulmus 'Morton Glossy' Triumph\u2122 Controlled cross U. Accolade\u2122 x U. Vanguard\u2122 Grower favorite due to ease of training; lustrous dark green foliage with yellow fall color; upright oval form that ages to vase shape; strong branching; excellent DED resistance; moderate pest resistance 4 - 9 Mature 50 - 60' H 40 - 50' W Ulmus 'Morton Stalwart' Commendation\u2122 Controlled cross U. Accolade\u2122 x (U. pumila x U. carpinifolia) Symmetrical arching branches, upright oval habit; large, dark green leaves with yellow fall color; rapid growth and broad adaptability; excellent DED resistance; moderate susceptibility to elm leaf beetle, Japanese beetle, and gypsy moth (4)5 - 9 Mature 50 - 60' H 40 - 50' W Ulmus 'Morton Red Tip' Danada Charm\u2122 Chance seedling U. japonica Rounded habit in youth maturing to large and elegant vase-shape; fast grower; glossy green foliage with redpigmented new growth; yellow fall color; excellent resistance to DED and elm yellows; moderate susceptibility to Japanese beetle and elm leaf beetle (4)5 - 9 Mature 60 - 70' H 50 - 60' W plify the hybridization process, Ware developed an isolation block of sorts in a local cemetery. He knew the cemetery would not be paved and that the trees would be left alone until they declined from old age. While Ware retired in 1995, he continued to develop his vision of trees for the future as a research associate of Morton Arboretum until 2009. The selection criteria that Ware developed for this population include tolerance to DED and elm yellows (a phytoplasma disease, Candidatus Phytoplasma ulmi, which causes leaves to suddenly wilt in late summer), pest resistance, cold hardiness, vigor, and red fall color. Red foliage is not commonly seen in elms. Typically, the fall color is a muddy yellow. Ware, however, had noticed an intriguing trait in a group of Asian elm seedlings: red pigmentation in emerging leaves. He understood that if the seedlings could produce red pigmentation (anthocyanins) in leaves during the spring, they should be able to use the same biochemical pathway to produce anthocyanins in the fall. This unexpected discovery led to red fall color becoming a new breeding objective. I was hired as the tree and shrub breeder for the Morton Arboretum in 2016. When I arrived here, I was certainly not an elm expert. I had spent my graduate school years working primarily with shrubs and herbaceous perennials. It took some time to unearth the details of the Elm Improvement Program, but today, I can say that we are continuing to make progress with Ware's legacy project. The program is now part of the Daniel P. Haerther New Plant Development Program, named in honor of a generous benefactor of the arboretum who was one of many that Ware inspired to appreciate the development of trees for the urban landscape. Ware consulted about elms on Haerther's estate, and in the process, the two would develop a relationship centered on a love of trees. Currently, we have sixty-one seedling selections from the breeding population that Ware left behind for the next generation. These were all selected for fall colors ranging from oranges to reds and purples. The breeding population includes the Ulmus davidiana complex, a variable group that was historically treated as three STERLING MORTON LIBRARY Ware (center) embarked on plant-collecting expeditions to acquire new elm germplasm from populations in China and the Soviet Union. His collaborators on this 1990 expedition to Shaanxi Province, China, included (from left) Ross Clark, Peter van der Linden, Kris Bachtell, and William Hess. \u222b separate species (U. japonica, U. wilsoniana, and U. propinqua). The population also includes three other Asian species (U. macrocarpa, U. parvifolia, U. pumila), an Asian hybrid (U. 'Sapporo Autumn Gold'), and the European field elm (U. minor). Our primary focus has been on the U. davidiana complex. We have selected a tree that will serve as the seed parent. It has an attractive form and relatively petite stature, along with somewhat glossy and predation-free foliage in the summer. We also continue to expand the program, particularly with work on the lacebark elm (Ulmus parvifolia). In 1996, Ware published two short articles in Landscape Plant News regarding this Asian species. He had participated in a USDAsponsored research exchange trip to China led by Eugene Smalley from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ware and four American colleagues joined Smalley in the fi eld to collect seed and determine the natural range of U. parvifolia. They were also very much focused on building relationships with Chinese researchers. Ware considered this elm species to be an especially promising selection for built environments of the South due to its broad adaptability to heat, fl ooding and drought, hostile soils, and both humid and arid conditions. However, he also noted that it would not perform well in northern states due to limited cold hardiness. Today, lacebark elms have demonstrated some hardiness with proper site selection. At the Morton Arboretum, seventeen individuals of this species (along with three cultivars and three unnamed hybrids) have survived multiple polar vortexes. I have also witnessed the lacebark elm growing and thriving from North Carolina to New York City and Las Vegas to New Orleans. This widespread adaptability, however, is accompanied by legitimate concerns about weediness. Even though the lacebark elm has not been widely planted in the Midwest, it is already listed as a weed of concern in Wisconsin. Colleagues at public gardens in other regions have expressed similar apprehensions about the species. This concern has led us to develop a new elm improvement project at the Morton Arboretum focused on developing selections with reduced fertility. Breeders have long used methods of mutation breeding to develop seedless plants. The most commonly known examples include the seedless watermelon and banana. These were developed through a traditional breeding method referred to as interploidy hybridization. Ploidy is the number of complete sets of chromosomes found in the cells of an organism. Humans typically carry two sets of chromosomes (diploid)\u2014 STERLING MORTON LIBRARY A young Accolade elm represents the success of Ware's vision for tree breeding and introduction. This commercial introduction is now one of more than twenty-six cultivars of Asian elms available in North America. one set inherited from our mother, the other from our father. A plant, however, can carry many more sets of chromosomes within its cells. Having three sets of chromosomes (triploid) often causes issues in reproduction due to the odd number of chromosomes that cannot segregate evenly during meiosis. To develop a triploid, a breeder must hybridize a diploid and a tetraploid (four sets of chromosomes). Tetraploids can be developed through the application of chemical mutagens known as mitotic spindle fiber inhibitors. (One such chemical is colchicine, a toxic compound found in the autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale.) We currently have several tetraploid lacebark elms, but now we must wait for them to mature. Once these trees have reached maturity, we will hybridize them with diploids in our collections that are reasonably cold hardy. Meanwhile, from the Ulmus crassifolia seed that Ware deposited in the Morton Arboretum collections in 1968, we have selected a tree with a remarkably symmetrical and pyramidal form that has survived severe winters and flooding events unscathed. We are building numbers of rooted cuttings to grow in evaluation blocks, inoculate with DED, and distribute to partners for evaluation around the country. Additionally, both this species and the lacebark elm are fallflowering species. Considering they are windpollinated and not self-compatible, we have begun collecting open-pollinated seed from our cedar elm selection and an adjacent lacebark elm, and we plan to evaluate the resulting seedlings. According to a paper published by USDA researcher Frank Santamour in 1973, not only are the two species compatible, but the lacebark elm confers increased DED resistance to its hybrid progeny. As Ware noted in his 1987 New York Times interview, the Morton Arboretum's effort to develop new trees for the American landscape has been focused on traditional breeding efforts. These slow and steady methods have required several decades, spanning multiple careers. Yet, the value in Ware's approach to breeding and outreach is evident in today's nursery catalogs and landscape. Once there were monocultures of American elm planted across the country in the built landscapes of cities and suburbs, but today the monocultures have been replaced with DED-resistant Asian elms. This diversity includes more than thirteen cultivars of elms from the Ulmus davidiana complex, in addition to at least thirteen cultivars of U. parvifolia. Many more selections of various species are still in the pipeline from academic and commercial breeding programs around the country. Through tenacity and vision, George Ware managed to inspire the nursery industry to adopt a new crop and introduce an unfamiliar Asian elm species to the North American landscape. The work has resulted in further diversification of our tree palette. It all began with the original Thornhill Elm, distributed to the Morton Arboretum by the Arnold Arboretum almost a century ago. Now, this very selection graces the landscape of the city of Boston, having come full circle in its journey from seed to cultivated tree. References Chicagoland Grows. 2017. The Morton Arboretum Elms. Plant Release Bulletin (no. 44). http:\/\/ www.chicagolandgrows.org\/downloads\/ MortonArboretumElms.pdf King, S. S. 1971, September 7. Dutch elm disease spreads westward. New York Times, 45. Malcolm, A. H. 1987, November 1. Fighting elm disease the natural way. New York Times, 9. Myers, D. F. and G. A. Strobel. 1983. Pseudomonas syringae as a microbial antagonist of Ceratocystis ulmi in the apoplast of American elm. Transactions of the British Mycological Society, 80(3): 389-394. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/ S0007-1536(83)80034-5 Santamour, F. S., Jr. 1973. Resistance to Dutch elm disease in Chinese elm hybrids. Plant Disease Report 57(12): 997-999. Schneider, K. 1987, September 4. Tearful scientist halts gene test. New York Times, A1, A11. Ware, G. H. 1980a. Little-known Asian elms: Urban tree possibilities. Journal of Arboriculture, 6: 197-199. Ware, G. H. 1980b. In search of new kinds of elms. Journal of Arboriculture, 6: 233-237. Ware, G. H. 1996a. Notes on elms observed on a trip to China. Landscape Plant News, 7(10): 4-6. Ware, G. H. 1996b. New elms for urban landscapes. Landscape Plant News, 7(10): 6-8. Kim Shearer is the tree and shrub breeder at the Morton Arboretum, where she is also manager of the Daniel P. Haerther Charitable Trust New Plant Development Program and woody plant liaison for Chicagoland Grows. George Ware 47 \u222b"},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"A Temperate Cousin: <i>Leitneria floridana</i>","article_sequence":7,"start_page":48,"end_page":49,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25735","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25e8526.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Enzenbacher, Tiffany","article_content":"\"Stop! We're here!\" directed Kea Woodruff, who was navigating from the passenger seat of our rented vehicle. Woodruff was then the Arnold Arboretum's plant growth facilities manager. We were on day three of a 2018 plant-collecting expedition to Arkansas and Oklahoma\u2014part of the Arboretum's Campaign for the Living Collections\u2014and we were driving up Highway 62 in northeastern Arkansas, approaching the Missouri border. Months prior, we reached out for guidance on our Ozark-specific taxa list to the Arkansas National Heritage Commission. They provided an account of a particular population of corkwood (Leitneria floridana), a rare shrub sparsely endemic to the southeastern United States. We dropped a Google pin on the approximate location of their 2003 description and hoped that no habitat loss occurred between then and October 2018. I steered onto the shoulder, and we began scouring the nearby flora as traffic whizzed by. After what seemed like only a moment, Woodruff pointed to a promising-looking stand. \"Wait,\" she inquired, \"isn't that it?\" Corkwood is a striking plant, and we were able to confirm it in short order. It is monotypic (the only species in its genus) and is in a mostly tropical family, Simaroubaceae. The most well-known and recognizable temperate member is the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), a noxious urban weed. The noninvasive, but just as conspicuous, corkwood typically grows five to ten feet tall\u2014although it can reach up to twenty feet. It is adorned with elliptic olive-green leaves that are glossy, leathery, and crowded toward branch tips. The common name derives from the buoyancy of the wood. It is one of the lightest woods known and has been used to float fishing nets. The bark is a deep reddish-brown with lenticels. Corkwood is content to sucker and form thickets, particularly in its ideal environment: forested swamps and flooded soils. The Arboretum's inaugural corkwood plants (accession 5336) arrived from botanist Benjamin Franklin Bush, who sent plants in 1894, just two years after he had first documented the species in southeastern Missouri. (The species had been named, in 1860, by Alvan Wentworth Chapman, based on populations in the estuary of Florida's Apalachicola River.) The plants prospered along Meadow Road, in a location affectionately known as \"Leitneria swamp,\" where water accumulates and persists throughout most of the year. Eventually, this accession became indistinguishable from other corkwoods that were planted around 1970, and the mixed planting was given a new accession number (244-97). Plants from Taylor County, Florida, were later added to the location (accessions 29-96 and 30-96). The species is near threatened in the wild and remains in several Florida and Texas counties abutting the Gulf, and a few inland ones in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Missouri. Woodruff and I were determined not to let several feet of muck act as a deterrent. I repurposed two herbarium voucher bags as waders and bounded in. As we had anticipated, we found no fruit. The olive-sized brown drupes are borne in clusters of two to four near branch tips, below the foliage. Corkwood is dioecious, having separate male and female plants. Flowers are axillary catkins approximately one-anda- half inches long. This colony could have been a single sex, or perhaps voracious critters beat us to the fruit. Plan B consisted of combing for small suckers. We dug three, which we bagged and labeled as puzzled drivers drove past. From there, we continued to the nearest FedEx location, where we were grateful for the kindness of strangers. After we explained that we hailed from Boston and were in the midst of an expedition, the store clerks were keen to facilitate packaging in the tallest boxes they had available. The plants arrived the next day at the Dana Greenhouse, where they were potted and catalogued (accession 278-2018). In April 2020, the three individuals were planted in the seep on Bussey Hill\u2014this time a location distinct from any others. I hope these plants will colonize the seep over the next decade, just as the original collection has done to the Leitneria swamp. Tiffany Enzenbacher is the manager of plant production at the Arnold Arboretum. A Temperate Cousin: Leitneria floridana Tiffany Enzenbacher"},{"arnoldia_cover":true,"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25698","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d270ab6e.jpg","title":"2021-78-4","volume":78,"issue_number":4,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Building a Comprehensive Plant Collection","article_sequence":1,"start_page":2,"end_page":4,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25720","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24e816c.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Carstens, Jeffrey D.","article_content":"Building a germplasm collection can take years or, more realistically, even multiple careers to assemble. The United States National Plant Germplasm System has nineteen stations around the country, and the goal is to acquire, conserve, evaluate, and distribute genetically diverse plant material. As a genebank curator at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, Iowa, I'm responsible for managing collections of woody plants like ashes (Fraxinus) and chokeberries (Aronia), and also herbaceous plants. The collections arise from plant exploration by staff members (I typically make at least five collection trips per year), through exchange with other genebanks or public gardens, or by specific arrangements between a curator and an independent collector. The latter became more important than ever in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic restrictions prevented normal travel. One of our most notable collections from this unusual season occurred in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee. The story, however, began in June of 2018, when I sent an email to Roger McCoy, the director of the Tennessee Division of Natural Areas, looking for contacts in eastern Tennessee who might be able and willing to collect native Monarda species. Monarda, or the bee balms, is a group of herbaceous plants native to North America and Mexico and is represented by approximately eighteen species. Our Monarda germplasm collection in Ames currently includes fourteen species, represented by 164 accessions. In the last couple of years, we've acquired interesting samples, including three species that were first described by botanists within the past decade: M. luteola, found in northeastern Texas and southwestern Arkansas; M. austroappalachiana, endemic to the Southern Appalachians; and M. brevis, a dwarf, earlyflowering species found in West Virginia and historically in Virginia. McCoy connected me with Marty Silver, a park ranger at Warriors' Path State Park, who graciously volunteered to help. Silver stated he had \"limited botanical skills\" and was simply an \"interested amateur botanist spending spare time in the field in various wild places in Tennessee.\" To ensure initial success, we selected Monarda didyma as the target from eastern Tennessee, since we had no holdings of the species from the region. The species also displays very conspicuous red flowers from July through August and is somewhat ubiquitous in the target area. This would make the plants relatively easy to locate. By the end of August 2018, Silver had documented several flowering patches of M. didyma, and that fall, he returned and successfully collected seed (accession Ames 34356). Despite living approximately an hour away from the sampling site, Silver conducted this travel and exploration on a volunteer basis. As Silver and I communicated after the 2018 collection, he drew my attention to a very thorough floristic survey of the nearby Rocky Fork Tract, written by Foster Levy and Elaine Walker, published in 2016. Silver connected me with Levy, who brought our attention to several Monarda specimens from the area that were labeled M. x media, a taxon that was missing within our germplasm collection. We designated this hybrid as our next target. Monarda x media is of potential interest for development as an ornamental landscape plant. Moreover, when I reviewed the published literature and herbarium specimens, I found a curious backstory for the taxon, suggesting that welldocumented wild collections could also support taxonomic research. The taxon was described over two hundred years ago, in 1809, by the German botanist Carl Ludwig Willdenow, who published the name without the multiplication symbol. The symbol is used to indicate plants of hybrid origin, although it is not required in Building a Comprehensive Plant Collection Jeffrey D. Carstens Facing page: Collaboration is key for developing a plant germplasm collection. A recent seed collection of Monarda x media in northeastern Tennessee is a case in point. PLANT PHOTOS BY MARTY SILVER; SEEDS BY ASHLEY SONNER, USDA ARS NCRPIS Monarda 3 4 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 a taxonomic name nor does authorship change in the event a name is later recognized as a hybrid. While Willdenow's description does not suggest that he recognized this taxon as a hybrid, he nonetheless noted an affinity to M. fistulosa, commonly known as wild bergamot. By 1901, Merritt Fernald, a botanist at Harvard, described observing numerous intermediate forms of M. media, making separation from M. fistulosa difficult. Currently, Monarda x media is recognized as a variable group of plants with intermediate characteristics of M. didyma and either M. fistulosa or M. clinopodia or both. These numerous intermediate forms may stem from the various hybrid combinations, and thus, the name M. x media should ultimately be assigned to a specific combination (for instance, M. didyma crossed with M. clinopodia), with new names given to each of the others. Surprisingly, Willdenow did not designate a type herbarium specimen, which could make it more difficult to determine which combination should, in fact, retain the original name. To correctly sample true-to-type specimens of Monarda x media in nature, Silver would need to mark populations in bloom, since M. clinopodia\u2014a white-flowered species\u2014and M. didyma are often found nearby; sometimes they are even intermixed with M. x media. This raises an interesting question about whether M. x media plants are stable in nature or whether they require the parents to constantly resupply them. Despite subsequent discussion about conducting reconnaissance and sampling for M. x media in 2019, Silver had other projects that left no time to acquire samples. The following year, as implications of the coronavirus pandemic were becoming clear, I followed up by asking about the possibility of sampling a Monarda x media population. Silver quickly replied, \"I am much more out and about in the field (outside and distanced) these days. If pointed in the right direction, I'll be glad to try and find populations within my limited taxonomic skills.\" While the pandemic quickly resulted in travel cancellations and restrictions (out of state, not to mention out of the country) across many agencies, Silver saw being in the field as an opportunity to be completely distanced while regaining a sense of normalcy. Using Levy's herbarium vouchers, we identified a total of three potential sites, but since the specimens were described from a broad geographic area, their relocation was going to be challenging. A few weeks later, Silver reported finding Monarda x media while on a hike on his day off. His hike to get to these populations was three and a half miles (one way) with an elevation climb of over two thousand feet. He took notes, GPS coordinates, and photos. Making the hike once again in the fall, Silver relocated the five previously flagged flowering patches, but one patch had been completely destroyed and another patch was nearly decimated due to human disturbance. He collected seeds from the available patches and then shipped them to Iowa. I assigned them an accession number (Ames 35579) and deposited them into the repository's freezer, which maintains the seeds at 0\u00b0F (-18\u00b0C). This collection will be periodically monitored for viability, and when germination falls below a critical level, it will be regenerated using controlled pollination techniques ensuring the preservation of the genetic profile for the future. Since Silver sampled each clonal patch separately along with appropriate plant descriptions, the collections will be important resources for future research (including ecogeographic and phylogenetic studies). The collections might also be useful for selecting superior genotypes for the nursery industry. Having one collection of this taxon is, of course, only a start\u2014additional samples are desired. Yet Silver's collections demonstrate the critical importance of local assistance while assembling a comprehensive germplasm collection, especially given the amount of time and effort required to acquire even a single collection. In the end, I'll never forget Silver humbly labeling himself as an \"amateur botanist with limited taxonomic skills,\" as his Monarda x media collection is one of the most exciting, well-documented samples of Monarda that I've accessioned in my nearly twenty-year career. Jeffrey D. Carstens is the curator for woody and herbaceous plants at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"A Conservation SOS: <i>Polygonum hickmanii</i>","article_sequence":2,"start_page":5,"end_page":6,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25721","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24e856f.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Forbes, Holly","article_content":"Plants with less-than-showy flowers tend to get overlooked, even by some of the sharpest botanists. When a plant is only a few centimeters tall and flowers later in the season than its more eye-catching neighbors, it can be even easier to miss. The Scotts Valley polygonum (Polygonum hickmanii) is a case in point. This tiny species was first described in 1995 and was already very rare. It occurs in a limited urban area in Scotts Valley, near Santa Cruz, California, where it is under pressure from development. Only 2,100 plants were observed in 1997, and in 2003, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. As the curator of the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley, I work with the national Center for Plant Conservation and a coalition called California Plant Rescue. Each year we make an ambitious plan for conservation fieldwork in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, and for 2020, we planned a packed calendar. Most of our fieldwork was derailed by the restrictions put in place to limit the spread of COVID-19, especially given the timing of the restrictions. Annuals and herbaceous perennials on California's Central Coast tend to have a short spring cycle of growth and seed set. By the time permission was given to be in the field for just day trips, seeds had already set and been dispersed for many species. Scotts Valley polygonum, in contrast, is an annual wildflower that typically starts to germinate in December, flower from May to August, and set seeds in August. The species is now known to occur on less than an acre of A Conservation SOS: Polygonum hickmanii Holly Forbes DAVID GREENBERGER In recent years, the endangered Scotts Valley polygonum (above) has been observed in only one wild population. FORBES, H. 2021. A CONSERVATION SOS: POLYGONUM HICKMANII. ARNOLDIA, 78(3): 5-6 6 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 private land adjacent to a new housing development. The development company established a conservation easement to protect Scotts Valley polygonum and another endangered species, Scotts Valley spineflower (Chorizanthe robusta var. hartwegii). Both species are in the buckwheat family (Polygonaceae). In 2015, no Scotts Valley polygonum were found at this site, and it wasn't until 2020 that the number of plants went above four hundred, less than 25 percent of the population observed in 1997. In the past, Scotts Valley polygonum has been documented at two nearby locations, but no specimens have been observed there in recent years. One of these locations is a special ecological preserve adjacent to Scotts Valley High School, where the polygonum has not been observed since 2015. The site is fenced and managed to support the species, but we have limited hope it will reappear on its own. When my colleagues and I could finally return to the field, pandemic protocols required all participants to travel solo in vehicles and to maintain at least a six-foot distance from one another when working at the sites. I was fortunate to work with two other botanists, Kathy Lyons and Jaymee Marty, at the easement site on August 7. We declared ourselves free of COVID-19 symptoms and signed liability waivers for the landowner. The plants occupied an area of less than forty square feet, scattered across an undulating grassland. We worked for hours on hands and knees making a modest seed collection from the less than five hundred plants\u2014all that is left in the world. As we collected the tiny seeds from the plants (removing only a small percentage of the seed set), we remarked on how it almost felt normal to be in the field again, despite the pandemic. Travel restrictions had resulted in a huge reduction in the number of cars on the road, which meant that, as a side benefit, travel between Berkeley and Scotts Valley flowed along at the speed limit, instead of crawling through typical Silicon Valley gridlock. Travel each way took one hour instead of the usual three. A few weeks after our work, the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire in Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties blackened over eighty-six thousand acres, starting on August 16 and continuing through September 22. The evacuation zone included the two historic polygonum sites. The only extant site, from which the seeds had been collected, was on the margin of the evacuation zone, just across a four-lane highway. It could have easily been different. The fire burned so hot in places that any seeds present in the soil were cooked. During the fire we anxiously checked the maps. It was a great relief to learn that the polygonum sites did not burn. Our purpose for collecting seeds was twofold: first, to create a conservation seed bank as a backup in case the population is lost for any reason, and second, to produce more seeds by growing plants in a nursery environment. This amplification of seed numbers may make it possible both to reestablish the plants at their historic sites and to augment the numbers of plants within the conservation easement. In November, propagator Susan Malisch at the University of California Botanical Garden sowed one-third of the polygonum seeds from our seedbank. As of late January 2021, over 85 percent germination has been observed. Each seed was sown individually to minimize root disturbance when the plants are moved into larger containers. The plants aren't likely to grow larger than six inches tall and perhaps two inches across\u2014giants compared to the plants in habitat, where they are crowded together and typically grow about one and a half inches tall. We look forward to a successful crop of Scotts Valley polygonum in 2021. If all goes as planned, we will have thousands of seeds to use in saving this species from extinction. Wildfires and other threats still pose an incredible risk to the species, but with a robust conservation seedbank and the knowledge of how to grow the plants to reproductive size, we can safeguard its future. Botanists are paying close attention, and Scotts Valley polygonum is no longer overlooked. Next November, we plan to work with the federal Recovery Implementation Team\u2014 a team established by the Fish and Wildlife Service\u2014to place seeds back into the habitat. Holly Forbes is the curator of the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. Support for the Scotts Valley polygonum project is provided by the Ventura Office of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"An Unusual Autumn at the Dana Greenhouses","article_sequence":3,"start_page":7,"end_page":9,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25722","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24e8927.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Enzenbacher, Tiffany","article_content":"October was quiet. The headhouse at the Dana Greenhouses was still, except for the dim hum of the radio, a necessity for an almost empty building. In previous years, the same location would have been marked with a cacophony of sounds, the door thrown ajar as Arnold Arboretum plant collectors eagerly arrived to unpack their hard-earned seeds and plants. Sieves and colanders would have rattled against the center worktable as plant production staff removed fruit pulp from each seed, and everyone would be talking about new and exciting acquisitions. Seed cataloging and cleaning is a departmental undertaking, sometimes lasting the entirety of fall and into early winter. This annual activity has occurred at an invigorated level since 2015, when the Arboretum launched the Campaign for the Living Collections, a strategic ten-year initiative to increase the biodiversity and conservation holdings of our living collections by adding nearly four hundred wild-collected taxa that were not already growing in our landscape. As part of the campaign, staff organized and executed as many as five expeditions annually, traveling to locations in northern Idaho, central China, the country of Georgia, and elsewhere. I have participated in two of those expeditions myself: one to the Ozarks and another to northern Illinois and Wisconsin. It was rewarding to engage in the full process, from planning An Unusual Autumn at the Dana Greenhouses Tiffany Enzenbacher The pandemic changed fall and winter routines at the Dana Greenhouses, providing an unplanned reprieve from processing new, wild-collected plant material. Chris Copeland (above) prepares grafts of a plum (Prunus alleghaniensis), one of hundreds of clonal propagations that are completed annually. ENZENBACHER, T. 2021. AN UNUSUAL AUTUMN AT THE DANA GREENHOUSES. ARNOLDIA, 78(3): 7-9 TIFFANY ENZENBACHER 8 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 expedition logistics and obtaining permits to harvesting in the field and then processing seed back at the Dana Greenhouses. The collection that stands out most from my two experiences was of the endangered seaside alder (Alnus maritima ssp. oklahomensis). I collaborated with Kea Woodruff, then the Arboretum's plant growth facilities manager, to collect seed from two plants growing along the Blue River in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. We were guided by local experts. This subspecies of the seaside alder has only been documented in three other locations in the wild, all near the Blue River. (The two other subspecies also have extremely restricted ranges\u2014one occurs in a single location in northwestern Georgia, the other com- When new plant material arrives at the Dana Greenhouses, staff begin a detailed process of record keeping. New innovations have streamlined the process. Sean Halloran (above) readies softwood cuttings and will note rooting observations using a newly developed mobile application in spring. prises scattered populations on the Delmarva Peninsula of Delaware and Maryland.) For me, this collection brought home the purpose of the campaign and the urgency of preserving threatened taxa. In the fall of 2020, however, those collections ceased due to the pandemic. Planned expeditions to China, Japan, and South Korea were postponed. In the headhouse of the Dana Greenhouses, the difference was striking. Only two or three members of the plant production department worked on-site on any given weekday, in an effort to de-densify our workspace and to allow staff to care for children who were completing schoolwork from home. This revised schedule continues into the new year. Other TIFFANY ENZENBACHER Dana Greenhouses 9 nonessential staff are not permitted inside the building. Now, our team hears only the quiet sounds of greenhouse doors opening as we check the facilities, monitor plants for water, and scout for insect pests and diseases. We hear the clatter of containers being placed on potting benches as we prepare to transplant seedlings and the swish of cutting media components being mixed as we get ready for winter hardwood cutting season. We occasionally share the same workspace, but only brief, work-related interactions can take place. Our team meetings are now virtual. The production cycle for plants already in the greenhouses and nurseries has not significantly slowed this year, although the headhouse tables are bare: no collection sheets from the expeditions strewn about, no bags of fermenting berries or cones to go through. During this altered time, as we have continued with usual greenhouse and nursery tasks, the plant production department has had the opportunity to refocus our direction on other activities. We have made enormous strides to integrate our workflows into the Landscape Management System, a new digital tool developed at the Arboretum, which combines horticulture and curation efforts through mobile applications and an internal website. One component of this system, PropManager, will eventually replace the use of handwritten propagation cards, which are used to record treatments and results for propagation attempts, including for seeds that return from expeditions. Currently, when seeds arrive, staff record propagation methods and experiments on these cards. While some seeds can be sown immediately, others must undergo periods of cold or warmth. Others require treatments to weaken the seedcoat: sandpaper or an acidic solution. Data from propagation cards are then entered into BG-BASE, the Arboretum's plant records database. Then, as germination, transplanting, and other events occur, the cards are updated, corresponding data are input into BGBASE, and the cards are refiled into a binder. PropManager will allow us to create a digital \"card\" on a mobile device and record events in real time. We observed how inefficient the physical card system was when Sean Halloran, our plant propagator, had to transport boxes of binders to and from his home as he toggled between remote and on-site work this spring. Our team has also completed work that will help us to map, track, and communicate about plants in our nurseries using additional Landscape Management System tools. Chris Copeland, our greenhouse horticulturist, worked with members of the Landscape Management System team to acquire and upload locations of over 250 nursery plants. Specimens are now visible on a dynamic map, and we can easily picture spatial patterns and adjust maintenance of the next generation of Arboretum plants. Likewise, when horticulture staff inherit a tree after it has been transplanted into the landscape, they can use this new set of tools to determine noteworthy events that transpired during the tree's early life. We are also working with Mike O'Neal, the director of BG-BASE, to analyze information about our repropagation attempts. Each year we duplicate hundreds of historic Arboretum plants through vegetative propagation\u2014a process whereby resulting progeny are genetically identical to the original. Halloran and O'Neal are in the process of creating BG-BASE summary reports. The result will help determine whether the repropagation of a specimen in the landscape is complete. Instead of Halloran spending weeks at his desk writing code and manually sleuthing through BG-BASE tables, he will be able to run a quick query to have access to all the data needed. The scene at the Dana Greenhouse is certainly different than it was in autumn 2019. That year, we processed over 150 seedlots and mailed surplus material to over a dozen collaborating institutions. Yet the unplanned reprieve from receiving campaign material has allowed our plant production team to collaborate on projects that would have otherwise progressed incrementally over multiple years. We are now better equipped than ever and prepared for the onslaught of new seed collected by Arboretum explorers who are eager to be back out in the field. Tiffany Enzenbacher is manager of plant production at the Arnold Arboretum."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"A Brief History of Juglandaceae","article_sequence":4,"start_page":10,"end_page":17,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25723","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24e896b.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Frei, Jonas","article_content":"When I first encountered butternuts on the ground of the arboretum here in Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland, I was puzzled. The tree these nuts fell from must have died or been felled years ago, so I only had the seeds for identification. This North American species, Juglans cinerea, is rarely seen in European cultivation outside specialized tree collections, and I didn't recognize the ridged, oblong nuts. When I took a few home, they were not easy to identify within books on common park trees. After additional research, however, the butternut aroused my fascination and left me with questions about the whole walnut family (Juglandaceae). I had long been familiar with this group of plants, but the more I read about them, the more I realized that, in fact, I knew so little. Like the butternut, many other members of the walnut family were absent in books that I had at home: hickories (Carya), wingnuts (Pterocarya), and platycarya (Platycarya). As I encountered each new species, new questions arose. After several years of intensive study, my pursuit evolved into a book project, Die Walnuss, which was published (in a German edition) in late 2019. My work with this unique plant family went far beyond scientific analysis; it also involved an artistic exploration of the unique variety of forms of this plant family. I wanted to make the knowledge hidden in scientific papers accessible through a language of drawings and photographs. These different approaches\u2014science and art\u2014offered new ways of observing and understanding the world of walnuts. I live in a region with no native species of this widespread plant family. Here, you can occasionally find the North American eastern black walnut (Juglans nigra) planted as an ornamental tree in parks. The English walnut (Juglans regia) was most likely introduced by the Romans into the northern parts of Europe and can often be found growing as lone specimens on farms. But the number of these solitary trees has declined in the region since the industrialization of agriculture half a century ago. Walnut farms and orchards are relatively new in the Germanspeaking part of Europe, and walnuts bought in grocery stores here mostly originate from France (P\u00e9rigord and Grenoble), the United States (California), or Chile. Members of Juglandaceae, however, were once among the most common trees of alluvial forests in Central Europe. Fossils allow us to look back on a plant family whose greatest diversity and distribution preceded the ice ages in the Paleogene and Neogene. Many species disappeared only a few hundred thousand years ago. I became fascinated by this history. The fossil record reveals a long, slow story of evolution and shifting ranges, and it provides a counterpoint to the story of the family's rapid globalization in recent centuries. Not far from Strasbourg, in the Rhine Valley of France, researchers and fossil collectors have discovered fossilized butternuts, described under the name of Juglans bergomensis. These fossils correspond so closely to the North American butternut that it is hard to find visual differences. The nuts must have fallen into the shallow water and sandy substrate of the Rhine five million years ago, but they still have almost the weight and feel of fresh nuts due to carbonization. In fact, this species had a wide distribution: its fossils have been reported in Italy, the Netherlands, and wider parts of eastern Europe and Russia. Similar fossils dating to the Neogene have been found in Japan and in the southern United States. Fossilized hickory nuts are also present in the Rhine sediments, including those of a widespread fossil taxon called Carya globosa, which is similar in appearance to the water hickory (Carya aquatica). Although all the European hickory species went extinct millions of years ago, A Brief History of Juglandaceae Jonas Frei FREI, J. 2021. A BRIEF HISTORY OF JUGLANDACEAE. ARNOLDIA, 78(3): 10-17 Facing page: The walnut family is best known for nut-bearing species like the English walnut (Juglans regia), pictured here in the Thur Valley of Switzerland, but the family also includes notable wind-dispersed species. ALL IMAGES BY THE AUTHOR the nuts look as fresh as if they were only a few years old. Walnut family species with large, animaldispersed fruits are only part of the story. Wingnuts (Pterocarya)\u2014a genus that is now known for six extant species\u2014were once dominant trees here in Central Europe along rivers and in mountain slope forests. These are ancestors of the species we now call the Caucasian wingnut (P. fraxinifolia), which today runs wild in parks and gardens in Central Europe, its root sprouts forming dense stands. Some horticulturists have argued that we should cease planting this species in our gardens, given these invasive tendencies, but based on the fossil record, we could also view the wingnut as a returnee from another era. After all, wingnut leaf fossils in the Stuttgart region were found in sediments of the Holstein interglacial and date back only 325,000 years. The few remaining populations of this once widely distributed species are increasingly threatened in their last refuges in the Caucasus. Wheel wingnuts (Cyclocarya) and platycarya\u2014both unusual wind-dispersed genera now found only in East Asia\u2014are also represented in the fossil records in Europe. The reason the walnut family went extinct in Europe while some species meanwhile survived in North America and East Asia is related to the geographical shape of the continents. Here in Europe, the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea form a barrier for the north-south migration of plant species. In cold periods, trees could survive only in the southernmost corners of Europe; therefore, while in America plant species could migrate according to climate conditions, many European species died out with every cooling and warming. The fossil record indicates that wingnuts survived this back and forth the longest of all Juglandaceae, but in the end, they vanished irretrievably, just like the European magnolias (Magnolia), kiwis (Actinidia), and sweetgum (Liquidambar). Other genera of woody plants, including maples (Acer) and ashes (Fraxinus), are now represented in Europe with only a few species but had much greater diversity before the Pleistocene ice ages that started about two and a half million years ago. The diversity of these genera in Europe was similar to their modern-day representation in North America and Asia. The fossils reveal more than former distributions and long-extinct species\u2014the record also documents how the walnut family evolved from an entirely wind-dispersed family to one with the charismatic nut-bearing species that we know today. Some of the oldest fossils of Juglandaceae fruits originate from the United States. Fruits of a wheel wingnut named Cyclocarya brownii have been found in different sites from the Paleocene, occurring shortly after the K-T boundary, the geologic marker that separated the Cretaceous and Paleogene a good sixty-five million years ago. This event of mass extinction was both the end of the era of dinosaurs and ammonites and the beginning of a new chapter for the walnut family. Cyclocarya looks very typical for early members of the family, especially since its fruits are spread by the wind and not by birds or mam- Fossils document the former abundance of the walnut family in Central Europe, where no members of the family naturally occur today. Hickory (Carya) fossils, shown above, were collected from sediments in the Rhine Valley, close to Strasbourg, France, and are around five million years old. The author's illustrations show both the diversity and beauty of the walnut family: (a) English walnut, Juglans regia; (b) little walnut, J. microcarpa; (c) Japanese wingnut, Pterocarya rhoifolia; (d) Japanese heartnut, J. ailantifolia var. cordiformis; (e) black walnut, J. nigra; (f) butternut, J. cinerea; (g) Arizona walnut, J. major; (h) Platycarya strobilacea; (i) Ma walnut, J. hopeiensis; (j) Manchurian walnut, J. mandshurica; (k) nutmeg hickory, Carya myristiciformis; (l) buart hybrid, J. x bixbyi; (m) Chinese butternut, J. cathayensis; (n) bitternut, C. cordiformis; and (o) Chinese wingnut, Pterocarya stenoptera. mals. Back in Paleocene, some fifty million years ago, mammals only started to specialize in the new ecological niches that became available after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Many other winged walnut species emerged. Some went extinct, but the descendants of others are now populating the tropics of the New and Old World: Oreomunnea in Central and South America, and Engelhardia in Southeast Asia and northern India. It was only with the diversification of mammals, especially squirrels, that some walnut species developed fruits that could be spread by animals. Squirrels and other rodents drove the evolution of Juglandaceae in two different genera: walnuts (Juglans) and hickories (Carya), which evolved within separate lineages. Birds, especially the crow family, likely played a part in the distribution from the beginning as well. Because animals never find all the nuts they stash in their winter storage places, they contributed to the spread of these groups, and evidently, they were quite efficient. Walnuts and hickories spread through North America, Asia, and Europe, populating much of the Northern Hemisphere. In the case of the walnuts, this process must have taken place during the span of about ten million years. The oldest known fossil record of the genus, a species named Juglans clarnensis, was discovered in North America and dates back forty-four million years, while the oldest European specimen of J. bergomensis is around thirty-three million years old. Later, humans helped with the worldwide spread of two major species: the English walnut and the pecan (Carya illinoinensis). Whereas squirrels and crows spread walnuts and hickories on three continents over several million years, humans extended the range of cultivation into all other suitable climatic regions within a few decades. The English walnut (a species of Eurasian origin) and pecan (from the southeastern United States) are now cultivated well outside their native range, including in parts of South America, northern and southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. So, the tasty kernels of the walnut became the main reason for this widespread distribution\u2014a process started by squirrels many millions of years before the fossil records prove the evolution of humans. Today, in Central Europe, almost forty species and hybrids of Juglandaceae are cultivated. During my research, I traveled to many parks and arboreta, looking for insight into the diversity of this family. I was driven not only by my scientific interest in Juglandaceae but also by my enthusiasm for the aesthetics of their habits, leaves, and fruits. The readers of my book should be able to make their own journey of discovery through the walnut family, on the tracks I have uncovered with my research. Often, after days of traveling, I would find out that a tree I wanted to visit had been cut down or that a rare species was simply confused with an ordinary, oft-planted one. I created a collection of seeds of all the cultivated species and a leaf herbarium. The collection soon included hundreds of fruits and nuts from different locations in Europe, which made it possible to distinguish between the species and hybrids. Later, the collection became the basis for the illustrations of all species in the individual portraits of the book. These trips through Europe searching for the different species of the walnut family also brought to light the stories of other humans\u2014 botanists and horticulturists\u2014who moved the walnut family all over the world. While I could find many species within a day or two of searching, many researchers spent years traveling through the natural habitats in North America and Asia a few centuries ago. In the time of Carl Linnaeus, only three walnut species were known to European researchers. Besides the English walnut, Linnaeus included the North American butternut and the eastern black walnut in his Species Plantarum, published in 1753. The hickories\u2014especially the Asian species\u2014were documented much later. The genus name Carya was proposed by the English botanist and plant collector Thomas Nuttall, who used the name, in 1818, in his work The Genera of North American Plants. He had borrowed this name from ancient Greek, where karya was a word for walnut. The valid botanical name for a genus or species should always be the one from the first official description, and in this case, Nuttall's proposal wrongly became the namesake of the genus. Ten years earlier, the hickories were described under the name Hicoria by the American polymath Constantine Rafinesque. These circumstances led various scientists to urge for reinstating the earlier name, but the change was never implemented. It would have been a respectful act, not only to honor the scientific rules but also because the Greek word karya refers to the English walnut whereas Hicoria is derived from the Algonquin word for a well-known hickory dish: pocohiquara. That name reveals an obvious fact: these trees have a cultural importance that far predates their scientific documentation. Philipp Franz von Siebold was one of the first Europeans to collect plants in Japan. One of his great collections was Platycarya strobila- The large kernels of walnuts and hickories have inspired animals to disperse the species widely: (a) English walnut (cultivar), Juglans regia; (b) water hickory, Carya aquatica; (c) shellbark, C. laciniosa; (d) Chinese hickory, C. catha- yensis; (e) bitternut, C. cordiformis; (f, g, h) English walnut (cultivars); (i) butternut, J. cinerea; (j) black walnut, J. nigra; (k) Japanese walnut, J. ailantifolia; (l) Japanese heartnut, J. ailantifolia var. cordiformis; and (m) pecan, C. illinoinensis. cea, which was described in 1843. Some botanists initially thought it was a conifer due to its cone-like fruiting structures. In 1844, the famous English plant collector Robert Fortune also found Platycarya in China. Assuming that it was a new, not-yet-described species, he sent herbarium material and seeds to the Royal Horticultural Society in London. John Lindley, the secretary of the society, named the plant after its finder, Fortunaea chinensis, and called the species the most important new find of Fortune. Later, it became known that Siebold had described the species one year earlier, so today the name Fortunaea is only used as a synonym. These scientific explorations\u2014and those of other botanists\u2014made it possible to describe, collect, and, of course, cultivate many of the species as ornamentals and orchard trees. But this era of Siebold and Fortune was not simply a time of great scientific discovery; it was also a time of European colonization, in which the gathering of knowledge on expeditions was often combined with ideological, cultural, and religious imperialism. This movement of plants around the world coincided with violations of ethical standards by European maritime powers and a merciless approach to other cultures. The relatively slow but efficient distribution of Juglandaceae by squirrels and mice seems innocent in comparison. When the walnut family is viewed in the broad sweep of its evolutionary history, the speed of its recent spread is clearly unprecedented. As beautiful as it is to see the worldwide diversity of Juglandaceae close together in many parks today, the globalization of the family has also produced novel threats. As humans moved the walnut family around the world, fungi and pathogens often migrated with the species. In the United States, a fungal disease known as the butternut canker (Sirococcus clavigignenti-juglandacearum) has brought the butternut to the brink of disappearance. The fungus, which was once native to Asian walnut species, causes little damage to its original hosts, but it is often fatal to the North American butternut. The thousand cankers disease, meanwhile, is the result of the unfortunate encounter of a fungus (Geosmithia morbida) and a beetle (Pityophthorus juglandis) that formed in the western United States due to the proximity of the eastern black walnuts, cultivated in parks, and natural populations of the Arizona walnut (Juglans major). And the walnut fruit fly (Rhagoletis completa), which once lived inconspicuously on the black walnut species of North America, today spreads quickly in walnut orchards of Europe. Meanwhile, the close planting of related Juglandaceae species leads to the formation of hybrid offspring. This has led to major changes in natural environments, especially in the case of the butternut populations in North America. Many of the butternut trees that can resist the butternut canker also carry the genetic material of Japanese walnuts (Juglans ailantifolia). Resistant hybrids have greater fitness, as they survive and have more offspring, which could be a blessing for the American butternut stocks that survive the strong fungal infestation. On the other hand, conservation of the \"real\" butternut becomes more complicated. This scenario reveals the cascade of unintended but profound environmental consequences of human actions, which cannot be easily resolved. Of course, the walnut family experienced various climatic changes over the past fifty million years and therefore changed its distribution again and again. It is assumed that many of the species we know today are the result of hybridization between different populations that collided after a long separation due to climatic fluctuations and subsequent spread by squirrels and ravens. Genetic studies suggest that the English walnut originated from the hybridization of the black walnuts (section Rhysocaryon) and Asian butternuts (section Cardiocaryon). Also, the American butternut is said to carry some black walnut genes in addition to the genetic material of similar Asian species from the Cardiocaryon section. Given this history, one could say that many walnuts, as a lineage, will adapt to human-made influences, although it is unlikely all of the walnut species we know today will survive the pressure. Recently, in a second-hand bookstore, I found a small booklet titled Die Quaianlagen von Z\u00fcrich, from 1889. The author, botanist Carl Joseph Schr\u00f6ter, planned the tree collection at the arboretum where I first encountered the butternuts that started my interest in this exceptional plant family. He states that a butternut tree was planted in 1887 at exactly the spot where I found the nuts pressed into the soil. Now I know that these nuts, almost like modern-day fossils, are the remains of a nowrare species. The tree was planted long before butternut canker was imported to the United States, and before hybridization with imported species changed its natural populations rapidly. If we did not have our own hands in all the processes that threaten species like the butternut, we could analyze the consequences from a scientific perspective and see with great fascination how some species emerge from this immense pressure and how others disappear, just like during the whole history of this family. But we also have a responsibility towards biodiversity, towards those species that exist now and that enriched the global ecosystem long before the arrival of humans. Today, as the pace of ecological change and movement continues to accelerate, we have to recognize that the story of the walnut family is now entwined with our own. Jonas D. Frei is a landscape architect, documentary filmmaker, illustrator, and author from Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland. The author's book Die Walnuss\u2014currently available in a German-language edition\u2014features drawings, photographs, and descriptions of the walnut family."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Discovering the Majestic <i>Mai Hing Sam</i> of Laos","article_sequence":5,"start_page":18,"end_page":27,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25724","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25ea36e.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Coffman, Gretchen C.","article_content":"Facing page: The author was the first researcher to document the critically endangered Asian swamp cypress, Glyptostro- bus pensilis, growing in Laos. This old-growth specimen, photographed in 2015, is locally known as the \"mother tree.\" PHOTO BY DAVID MCGUIRE In early April 2007, less than three weeks after submitting my dissertation and receiving my doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles, I got on a plane headed for Laos. It took four flights and more than twenty hours of flying time to get to the capital city of Vientiane. From there, I was bound for the Annamite Mountains: an eight-hour drive from Vientiane, then onward by truck, hand tractor (tok tok), and boat. The remote Annamite Mountains run 680 miles (1,100 kilometers) along the border between Vietnam and Laos, reaching into northern Cambodia. This range divides the Mekong River Basin to the west from Vietnam's narrow coastal plain to the east. The mountains are home to exceptional biodiversity. After the Vietnam War ended, Laos closed to Westerners, but in the early 1990s, the borders began to open. Biologists began to document fascinating endemic wildlife, some new to science, including the enigmatic saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), a critically endangered bovine that, due to its rarity, has been dubbed the Asian unicorn. Perhaps the most miraculous discovery was that of the endangered Laos rock rat (Laonastes aenigmamus), a rodent identified as a surviving member of a family (Diatomyidae) previously thought to have gone extinct about eleven million years ago.1 Plant biodiversity in this mountain range is exceptionally rich as well, and many new species have been documented.2 When I initially arrived in the foothills, I could not have imagined that I would become part of one of these discoveries: the first biologist to collect samples of the majestic Asian swamp cypress (Glyptostrobus pensilis) growing in the country. This critically endangered species\u2014locally known as mai hing sam\u2014is currently documented in only two other heavily degraded populations, both in Vietnam. The mai hing sam in Laos are the only old-growth specimens in the world, and in recent years, the stands have been increasingly threatened by agricultural development and poaching for the luxury timber market. The protection of the few hundred remaining individuals in Laos has become my mission. Arriving in Laos My journey to the Annamite Mountains had begun four months earlier, when a member of my doctoral committee, Phil Rundel, emailed me with a proposal to work on a project in an especially remote part of Laos. I was immediately intrigued by the biodiversity, and the thought of getting away from my computer days after finishing my dissertation was alluring. Yet, I was hesitant. The opportunity involved working as a restoration ecologist on a World Bank hydropower project. As a wetland and riparian ecologist by training, I had always focused my research and professional work on protecting rivers and streams, not damming them. Rundel encouraged me to research both points of view\u2014pro- and anti-hydropower dam. On my breaks from dissertation writing that winter, I read articles and websites from advocates and opponents (including, among the latter, International Rivers and other nongovernmental organizations). I also corresponded with wildlife biologists who would be working on the project. The work was part of mitigation actions for the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project and supported the development of a national park in the reservoir's headwaters. At more than 1,300 square miles (3,500 square kilometers), this protected area is one of the largest remaining contiguous areas of forests on the Indochinese Peninsula.3 Ultimately, I made a pragmatic decision: there was no stopping the dam, but I could work for the wildlife by helping to develop a conservation plan. I would work closely with 20 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 The Annamite Mountains\u2014known for complex topography, geography, and climate\u2014harbor some of the most-contiguous moist forests in Indochina. James Maxwell, a renowned botanist from Chiang Mai University in Thailand, along with a team of wildlife biologists from a multitude of disciplines. Our mission was to assess wetland habitat on the Nakai Plateau\u2014located high within the Annamite Mountains\u2014before it was flooded by the reservoir. We would document the wetland vegetation and develop a wildlife management plan that included the restoration of habitat within an area known as the Nakai- Nam Theun National Protected Area. Little did I know I would be acting as field coordinator once I arrived, a task that I was comfortable with from fifteen years of managing restoration projects in the United States but not nearly as easy in this new landscape and culture. The Discovery The Annamite Mountains contain some of the last relatively intact moist forests in Indochina, unique due to the region's complex geology and climate, and relatively inaccessible due to the steep topography. Initially, working with Maxwell proved extremely difficult. He could not understand why I had been hired on this project, since all my botanical experience was in the United States. He was standoffish and focused on collecting rare wildflowers he encountered. As we settled into the work, however, we bonded. He proved to be an exceptional mentor and friend, and in the years to come, I would stay with Maxwell and his wife in Thailand on multiple occasions. Our standard workdays were reminiscent of my first fieldwork experiences in the hot, humid wetlands of coastal Georgia, where I had grown up. When we arrived in Laos, it was the height of the dry season and unbearably hot in the late afternoons. We started at sunrise to avoid the heat, first eating a bowl of pho, a noodle soup loaded with fragrant mint, crunchy cabbage, long beans, and assorted leathery forest leaves. In the field, we lugged our plant presses everywhere, as everything we collected ASSOCIATION ANOULAK Glyptostrobus 21 The author located Glyptostrobus pensilis within the Nakai-Nam Theun National Park. The discovery was made while assessing wetland habitat and developing a wildlife management plan for the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project. ARNOLD ARBORETUM, ESRI, GARMIN, AND GIS COMMUNITY went immediately into the press. The afternoons were sticky and oppressive in the open wetlands. We ended around four o'clock when we couldn't take the heat anymore, giving us time to process our plant specimen and clean up our notes. At that point, the plants went directly from the presses into rice sacks with alcohol for preservation. We surveyed all the herbaceous wetlands across the Nakai Plateau. These wetlands intermingled with rice paddies and were often used as grazing pasture. We began our collections in large, easy to access wetlands on the south side of the Nam Theun River. To guide us, we used paper topographic maps. We then made our way to more forested wetlands and riparian forests, northwest towards the dam site and onward to an area that was nicknamed Thousand Islands because of how the landscape fl ooded during the monsoon rains. From there we continued east, across the river, near the foothills of the Annamite Mountains. The fi rst potential wildlife habitat restoration site we visited was northeast of Thousand Islands, near the Nam Xot tributary to the Nam Theun River. Our colleague Pierre Dubeau, a geospatial scientist who had sited these potential restoration areas, exuberantly walked downstream through the forested wetland toward an area with large wetland grasses (Neyraudia reynaudiana). Maxwell and I followed Dubeau and wildlife biologist Rob Timmins, who was carrying an umbrella in the sprinkling warm afternoon rain. We agreed that this would be a great open location, ideal for wildlife habitat restoration. As we trudged back among a mucky mess of the forested wetland swamp, I stumbled over something and fell to my hands in the soggy soils. I slowly got up, shook off the fall, and investigated what I tripped over. It looked like a pneumatophore\u2014the cypress knees I knew from my childhood in coastal Georgia, where bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) are a dominant feature of the swamps. SOUTH CHINA SEA Mekong River VIETNAM THAILAND LAOS Route 13 A N N A M I T E M O U N TA I N S Nakai-Nam Useun National Park Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area kongngngngngngn R 25 miles 50 kilometers Nam Useun Reservoir Protected Areas Glyptostrobus 23 Facing page: Forests in the Annamite Mountains are rapidly disappearing due to forestry, agriculture, and hydropower development, along with other causes. Philip Thomas (right) stands beside Glyptostrobus pensilis within a rice paddy. PHOTO BY DAVID MCGUIRE I looked up to find the tree it might be attached to, and sure enough, an enormous conifer towered above me. I looked up at this red-barked giant and saw something wonderfully strange and familiar. It looked like a cross between the bald cypresses that I knew from Georgia and the coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) from California, both members of the cypress family (Cupressaceae). I found several other knees as I walked up to inspect the tree. This, I proclaimed to Maxwell, must be a very special tree! Maxwell, however, like many other tropical botanists, was not as interested in conifers as much as the epiphytes that might grow on them. He thought nothing of it. Meanwhile, I collected the samples of small cones, foliage, and bark of this tree, which I sent to conifer expert Philip Thomas at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, for identification. Documenting the Mai Hing Sam Conifers are dominant or codominant parts of primary- and secondary-growth evergreen forests throughout the Annamite Mountains. In Vietnam, for instance, the mountains host a particularly rich assemblage of thirty-three conifer species, of which the cypress family (Cupressaceae) has seven.4 When I asked people in the neighboring Lao communities about the enormous tree that I had encountered, they provided a name: mai hing sam. Mai means \"tree,\" hing is a modifier for the kind of tree, and sam means \"swamp,\" or what ecologists would describe as a forested wetland. As it turned out, the mai hing sam was, indeed, special. When Philip Thomas replied to my email, he identified the species as Glyptostrobus pensilis (known as the Asian swamp cypress), which the International Union for Conservation of Nature has classified as critically endangered.5 In 2007, the scientific community was aware of only 250 individuals of this species in the wild in Vietnam, where most were spindly, unhealthy young trees, growing in two small stands in the middle of coffee and corn plantations. Other stands in China were presumably planted.6 Due to its rot-resistant wood, Glyptostrobus pensilis is highly sought after in the luxury timber market and is used for a variety of structural and boat-building uses by local communities. It is threatened (like so many endangered species) by illegal logging. As I learned more about the two populations in Vietnam, I realized how remarkable the mai hing sam in Laos really were. The trees in Vietnam grew very close together and, like those in China, appeared like they could have been planted. Boardwalks had been built within the stands to get around. Dams located beneath each of the stands were used for agricultural irrigation and raised the water levels for the trees significantly. In contrast, the trees that we observed in Laos were erect and widely spaced, as expected for a wild population. The crowns of the mai hing sam in Laos were only found in the top third of the trees, with no limbs below for us to climb to the seed-bearing cones. In the Vietnam population, perennial and annual branchlets were numerous along the main bole, appearing to be epicormic growth. This form suggests that the trees in Vietnam were responding to stress from inundation. Also, some of the trees in Vietnam were cut down years ago and had resprouted.7 I immediately told my colleagues about the mai hing sam discovery so that we could develop a strategy to describe and protect this stand. I also informed the Nam Theun 2 Power Company (NTPC) of the discovery and asked to spend time describing the tree and its ecology and to have a surveyor document their elevation relative to the proposed reservoir footprint. I was not allowed time to document this stand properly, however, and I was only able to record the number and size of the trees and basic soil characteristics. There were approximately one hundred trees in the stand, and many were three feet in diameter at breast height. We only had very rough elevation information from our GPS units, but it was clear that the trees\u2014along with many others that we were unable to document\u2014would likely be within the reservoir footprint. In desperation to protect these rare trees, I contacted the Nam Theun 2 Panel of Experts, an audit group that was in charge of assessing 24 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the dam, during their visit to the Nakai Plateau in August 2007. One of the members, the American conservation biologist Lee Talbot, joined me on a tour of this newly discovered mai hing sam stand. Nothing seemed to come of the visit, however, and unfortunately, I didn't find anything about the trees in the panel's next report.8 I proposed to my contacts at NTPC to collect as many seeds as possible and try to propagate and grow more trees. NTPC thought it was a great idea and gave us the go-ahead. Developing a Restoration Protocol At the time, mai hing sam had never been successfully propagated from wild-collected seed. As a result, several critical facts about restoration protocol were unknown to scientists: What time of the year do the seeds mature in the mountains of Laos? How long is their seed viable? Do they produce seeds every year? Did we need to treat the seeds before sowing them? Under what conditions would they propagate and survive? What we did know was that all conifer seeds are wind dispersed, so we hypothesized that their dispersal is probably connected to the windy part of the year, which occurs toward the end of the monsoon season. Our first challenge was logistical: how would we collect seeds from cones high in the canopies, sometimes one hundred or more feet high. Maxwell\u2014who, by this point, had returned to Thailand where he lived\u2014often hired local tree climbers to make collections. But this method requires low branches or woody vines growing up the trunk, as the climbers do not use any specialized equipment. We put our heads together and came up with an unusual plan. We placed large tarps under the trees and hired boys with slingshots to shoot rocks up into the canopies of the trees so that the seeds would fall onto the tarps. We tried this method, and miraculously it worked. We got thousands of cones and hundreds of thousands of minute winged seeds. The next challenge was to clean and propagate the seeds. This process was not managed by a conifer expert like Philip Thomas, as I had hoped. Rather, NTPC hired a commercial contractor to propagate the seeds in a local nursery. The contractor had no familiarity with this sensitive species, and only twelve seedlings germinated. Of those, only four grew to maturity. In restoration and horticultural propagation, this rate is not considered successful, but it was a start. In 2008, NTPC planted the four trees at the confluence of two small streams behind the house occupied by the director of the Watershed Management and Protection Authority. This area was somewhat protected and easy to monitor, although soil characteristics were not similar to the natural conditions of the peat swamps in which the trees naturally grew. In 2015, when I first observed these trees, they were about six feet in height, and on my last expedition, in January 2020, they had reached over sixteen feet. The key to the survival of these four trees, I believe, was sustained high soil moisture during their establishment period and protection using sturdy exclusion fencing to fend off the cattle and water buffalo that munch on the succulent foliage. Threats to Wetland Habitat and Endangered Species After my contract was completed in 2009, I returned to California, where I became an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco. I vowed to go back to look for more mai hing sam in the Nakai-Nam Theun National Protected Area. Southeast Asia is experiencing rapid habitat loss, biodiversity declines, and risk of species extinction primarily due to unsustainable harvesting of forest resources and conversion for agriculture. Lack of enforcement and pressure to develop rice paddies has led to the decline of wetland habitat and continued poaching in the protected areas.9 Nearly every species of softshell turtle, terrapin, or tortoise is threatened with extinction. Populations of exceptionally rare species, such as the saola, are too low and fragmented to be viable.10 Considering these threats, I knew that we needed to mount a concerted effort to document and conserve mai hing sam in the region. Phil Rundel, who had first encouraged me to participate in the project in Laos, recommended that I apply for National Geographic funding. I spent two years getting collaborators on board Glyptostrobus 25 In 2015, the author partnered with other researchers and local collaborators to locate more than six hundred previously undocumented Glyptostrobus in the Nakai-Nam Theun National Park. The author (at right) measures tree height using a clinometer, and a tree climber ascends to the upper canopy. and finding out from contacts if there were any other trees in the national protected area. Maxwell and I corresponded regularly during this period. Likewise, Philip Thomas was a huge source of support and encouragement. Finally, in the spring of 2014, my collaborators and I received funding, and we went on to get permits and work on the expedition plan that summer. With the help of National Geographic funding, we were able to document more than six hundred other mai hing sam between ten and thirty miles from the original stand. These plants occurred in the newly renamed Nakai- Nam Theun National Park, an area that has been under the management of the Watershed Management and Protection Authority since 2005. The trees in the oldest stand are more than three feet in diameter at chest level and five hundred to more than one thousand years old. Many of them are over six feet in diameter, and the largest is over ten feet. (We recorded 11.2 feet\u20143.4 meters\u2014but it's difficult to get the measuring tape behind all the woody vines and strangler figs on the trunk.) The neighboring communities call the largest tree the \"mother tree.\" It is more than 138 feet (42 meters) in height. We believe it could be two thousand years old, but it is not the tallest tree: that claim goes to one we documented at 184 feet (56 meters) tall. While these trees are protected in the park, illegal activities still occur. Sometime between September 2015 and February 2016, two hundred mai hing sam were logged, leaving the PHOTOS BY DAVID MCGUIRE 26 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 GRETCHEN C. COFFMAN total known population at approximately four hundred individual trees. This event was deeply upsetting, especially because, as I later learned, the individuals responsible were aware of the conservation importance. The Laos government took the event seriously and not only arrested the local Lao poachers but aggressively pursued the company in Vietnam that had hired them. Fortunately, the neighboring communities protected the mother tree from the poachers. Another factor that might have contributed to its protection is that the oldest trees are often hollow at the base, much like coast redwoods in California. The younger trees have solid trunks that are more desirable to poachers. This event shifted our project's goals and objectives to focus on community-based restoration program and to identify and protect other unknown stands in the region. Each November, between 2017 and 2020, we collected seeds from the remaining stands. In the first two years, we propagated two thousand seedlings; however, many of these did not survive. We have learned a lot about propagation from these trials, and our team is actively developing improved propagation and planting techniques to restore stands of the mai hing sam in strategic areas of the watershed. We are excited to collaborate with colleagues in Vietnam and China to restore populations there as well. The urgency is clear: after the poaching occurred, the government intervened before the logs were removed from the forest. Some of the fallen trees were more than a thousand years old, and now those trunks remain as warnings on the forest floor. With these threats in mind, our work continues, sustained by the promise of the small seedlings. Endnotes: 1 To learn more about recently documented mammal species in the Annamite Mountains: Dawson, M. R., Marivaux, L., Li, C., Beard, K. C., and Metais, G. 2006. Laonastes and the \"lazarus effect\" in recent mammals. Science, 311(5766): 1456-1458. doi:10.1126\/ science.1124187; MacKinnon, J. 2000. New mammals in the 21st century? Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 87(1): 63-66. doi:10.2307\/2666208 2 Recent botanical discoveries in the Annamite Mountains include many new orchid species. Also, Brendan Buckley, from Columbia University, documented remarkable old-growth specimens of another cypress family species, Fokienia hodginsii, growing in Vietnam's Bidoup Nui Ba National Park. The oldest specimens he found are more than twelve hundred years old, and the tree-ring data have supported Brendan's research on long-term climate change in the region, including primary evidence for the fall of the Angkor civilization. Sano, M., Buckley, B. M. and Sweda, T. 2009. Tree-ring based hydroclimate reconstruction over northern Vietnam from Fokienia hodginsii: eighteenth century mega-drought and tropical Pacific influence. Climate Dynamics, 33: 331-340. doi.org\/10.1007\/s00382-008-0454-y 3 Robichaud, W. G., Marsh, C. W., Southammakoth, S., and Khounthikoummane, S. 2001. Review of the National Protected Area System of Lao PDR. Vientiane, Lao PDR: Lao-Swedish Forestry Programme, Department of Forestry and IUCN; Scudder, T. 2020. A retrospective analysis of Laos's Nam Theun The author (right) plants a Glyptostrobus seedling on National Tree Planting Day in May 2019. More than one hundred Laos government officials participated in the event, including Axay Vongkhamsao, head of the environmental division at NTPC (left); Khamthone Vongphachanh (center); and Thong Eth Phayvanh (second from right), the deputy general director of the Department of Forestry and director of the Watershed Management and Protection Authority. 7 It is interesting to note that pneumatophores of the trees in Vietnam measure about 2 feet (0.6 meters) tall on average, similar to those in Laos; however, the pneumatophores were more abundant in Laos, sometimes numbering dozens per tree and usually much shorter. 8 McDowell, D., Scudder, T., and Talbot, L. M. 2007. Twelfth Report of the International Environmental and Social Panel of Experts for the Nam Theun 2 Hydro Project. Vientiane: Lao People's Democratic Republic. 9 For more on the environmental threats in Southeast Asia: Hughes, A. C. 2017. Mapping priorities for conservation in Southeast Asia. Biological Conservation, 209: 395-405. doi:10.1016\/j. biocon.2017.03.007; Sodhi, N., Posa, M., Lee, T., Bickford, D., Koh, L., and Brook, B. 2010. The state and conservation of Southeast Asian biodiversity. Biodiversity and Conservation, 19(2): 317-328. doi:10.1007\/s10531-009-9607-5; Nooren, H., and Claridge, G. 2001. Wildlife trade in Laos: The end of the game. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN-The World Conservation Union; Appanah, S., Shono, K., and Durst, P. B. 2015. Restoration of forests and degraded lands in Southeast Asia. Unasylva, 66(245): 52-62. 10 For more on conservation of the saola: Tilker, A., Long, B., Gray, T. N. E., Robichaud, W., Van Ngoc, T., Vu Linh, N., Holland, J., Shurter, S., Comizzoli, P., Thomas, P., Ratajszczak, R. and Burton, J. 2017. Saving the saola from extinction. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 357(6357): 1248. doi:10.1126\/science.aap9591 The map in this article was created using Esri, USGS, USFS, NGA, NASA, CGIAR, N Robinson, NCEAS, NLS, OS, NMA, Geodatastyrelsen, Rijkswaterstaat, GSA, Geoland, FEMA, lntermap and the GIS user community. Gretchen C. Coffman is a wetland restoration ecologist and a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore. She teaches wetland restoration ecology, biogeography, applied ecology, and research methods in physical geography. From 2010 to 2019, she taught field ecology courses in the Environmental Science Department, the Masters of Science in Environmental Management program, and the Environmental Studies program at the University of San Francisco. Dedication I dedicate this manuscript to the late James Maxwell (1945-2015). He was an intrepid botanist, fervent collector, a character like no other, exemplar taxonomy mentor, and trusted friend. Glyptostrobus 27 GRETCHEN C. COFFMAN James Maxwell in 2007 2 Dam. International Journal of Water Resources Development, 36(2-3): 351-370. doi:10.1080\/079006 27.2019.1677456 4 Of the thirty-three conifer species documented in the Annamite Mountains in Vietnam, thirteen are members of the pine family (Pinaceae). The cypress and yellowwood families (Cupressaceae and Podocarpaceae, respectively) include seven species each. The yew family (Taxaceae) has five species, and the plum yews (Cephalotaxaceae) have one. In particular, the Da Lat Plateau in central Vietnam has sixteen species of conifers, representing the highest conifer diversity in Indochina. Ninety percent of these, however, are nationally threatened. Loc, P. K., The, P. V., Long, P. K., Regalado, J., Averyanov, L. V., and Maslin, B. 2017. Native conifers of Vietnam\u2014A review. Pakistan Journal of Botany, 49(5): 2037-2068. 5 While Glyptostrobus has few extant populations, the genus has existed for more than one hundred million years, dating back to at least the middle Cretaceous, and was once quite abundant. Fossils of the genus can be found across all of Asia and North America and as far north as Axel Heiberg Island in the Arctic. See: Greenwood, D. R., and Basinger, J. F. 1994. The paleoecology of high-latitude Eocene swamp forests from Axel Heiberg Island, Canadian High Arctic. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 81(1): 83-97. doi:10.1016\/0034-6667(94)90128-7; Vickulin, S. V., Ma, Q. W., Zhilin, S. G., and Li, C. S. 2003. On cuticular compressions of Glyptostrobus europaeus (Taxodiaceae) from Kaydagul Formation (Lower Miocene) of the Central Kazakhstan. Acta Botanica Sinica, 45(6): 673-680; Jahren, A. H. 2007. The Arctic forest of the middle Eocene. Annual Review Earth Planetary Science, 35: 509-540. 6 To read more about the stands in Vietnam and China, see: Averyanov, L., Phan, K., Nguyen, T., Nguyen, S., Nguyen, T., and Pham, T. 2009. Preliminary observation of native Glyptostrobus pensilis (Taxodiaceae) stands in Vietnam. Taiwania, 54(3): 191-212. doi:10.6165\/ tai.2009.54(3).191; Tang, C. Q., Yang, Y., Momohara, A., Wang, H.-C., Luu, H. T., Li, S., Song, K., Qian, S., LePage, B., Dong, Y.-F., Han, P.-B., Ohsawa, M., Le, B. T., Tran, H. D., Dang, M. T., Peng, M.-C., and Wang, C.-Y. 2019. Forest characteristics and population structure of Glyptostrobus pensilis, a globally endangered relict species of southeastern China. Plant Diversity, 41(4): 237-249. doi.org\/10.1016\/j.pld.2019.06.007; Wu, X., Ruhsam, M., Wen, Y., Thomas, P. I., Worth, J. R., Lin, X., Wang, M., Li, X., Chen, L., Lamxay, V. Le Canh, N., and Coffman, G. C. 2020. The last primary forests of the Tertiary relict Glyptostrobus pensilis contain the highest genetic diversity. Forestry: An International Journal of Forest Research, 93(3): 359- 375. doi:10.1093\/forestry\/cpz063; Li, F. G., and Xia, N. H. 2004. The geographical distribution and cause of threat to Glyptostrobus pensilis (Taxodiaceae). Journal of Tropical and Subtropical Botany, 12(1): 13-20."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Backyard Climate Solutions","article_sequence":6,"start_page":28,"end_page":37,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25725","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25ea726.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Faison, Edward K.","article_content":"Carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere stand today at 415 parts per million, which is significantly higher than concentrations have reached for at least the past eight hundred thousand years. Throughout this time, levels oscillated between 180 and 280 parts per million, until the mid-nineteenth century, when they began an inexorable rise. By the end of the century, if business as usual continues, carbon dioxide levels could be higher than at any time in the past fifty million years.1 Like many other concerned citizens, I have wondered what one person can possibly do to help stem the rise of carbon dioxide levels, warming temperatures, and accompanying species extinctions that characterize our Earth in the twenty-first century. Carbon is a twopart problem: we must simultaneously reduce combustion emissions and increase the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As an individual, I can take action to reduce emissions (use more efficient LED bulbs, drive a more efficient car less often, use airplanes sparingly), but what about the other side of the equation? I have increasingly come to recognize that, as a landowner, the way I steward the vegetation on my property can make a difference to both sides of this problem. I live in a small, residential neighborhood in an otherwise rural part of Connecticut. My property comprises a one-and-a-half-acre lot, about two-thirds wooded. The other third includes a yard (where the kids can kick a soccer ball), the house, and a gravel driveway that can accommodate several cars. Plants on my property, like those growing anywhere else, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and store it as carbon molecules in wood, roots, and leaves\u2014a process known as carbon sequestration. Yet it's surprising to learn just how much carbon dioxide is removed by the Earth's natural vegetation: about 30 percent Backyard Climate Solutions Edward K. Faison of all carbon emitted each year globally. With changes in the way we manage vegetation, this percentage could increase dramatically.2 Trees are key. An acre of temperate grassland and an acre of temperate forest store a similar amount of carbon in the soil, but a forest stores as much as seventeen to twenty times more carbon in the vegetation than does a grassland.3 Compare an acre of forest to an acre of lawn, and the carbon storage disparity is far greater. When we replace natural forest with fields, lawn, and other less-natural land covers (like roads, parking lots, and buildings), not only do we release huge amounts of carbon once stored in the trees into the atmosphere but we also sequester significantly less carbon going forward. The Carbon in My Trees I became curious about the role of my property in sequestering carbon and how much of a difference simple management decisions could make towards this end. How much carbon is stored in the trees on my property? To answer this question, I measured the diameter of every tree at least five inches in diameter at breast height and then used carbon estimation (\"allometric\") equations devised by the United States Forest Service and researchers from Harvard Forest to estimate the total biomass in the trees.4 Plant tissue contains about 45 to 50 percent carbon, so dividing total biomass in half is a good approximation of the carbon storage in the plants.5 The results: 226 trees storing 84.3 tons of carbon total, including a forty-inch-diameter black oak (Quercus velutina) and a red oak (Quercus rubra) of nearly the same dimension. These big oaks comprise less than 1 percent of the trees on my lot but store a remarkable 13 percent of the carbon. The big oaks are not idle reservoirs of carbon either. A healthy red oak forty inches in diameter may add two-tenths of an inch to its trunk FAISON, E. K. 2021. BACKYARD CLIMATE SOLUTIONS. ARNOLDIA, 78(3): 28-37 30 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 diameter each year\u2014an imperceptible increase to even an observant naturalist\u2014but a layer of carbon equal to adding an entire six-inchdiameter tree.6 The amount of carbon stored in the trees across my property is over 50 percent higher than in an average acre and a half of forest in Connecticut.7 The elevated levels can be attributed to the relatively high density of large trees in my woods, for which I have the past owners to thank. In addition to the two large oaks, seven other trees exceed twenty-seven inches in trunk diameter. A typical acre and a half of forest in Connecticut currently contains only one or two trees of this size.8 Ironically, the forest edge associated with residential properties appears to contribute to large tree growth. Trees within one hundred feet of a forest edge (which many of mine are) grow faster and thus are often larger\u2014and store more carbon\u2014than those in a forest interior because of reduced competition for light and greater leaf area.9 Hence, smaller residential properties can be surprisingly important contributors to carbon sequestration. Natural Climate Solutions As a property owner, I have many different options for how to manage the vegetation growing on my lot to increase the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to reduce emissions. These practices are collectively referred to as natural climate solutions.10 By choosing not to convert the forest on my property into lawn or field (a practice known as avoided conversion), I refrain from emitting the carbon stored in those trees into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide: 310 tons of it. (Carbon dioxide emissions can be calculated by multiplying organic carbon\u2014in this case, 84.3 tons\u2014by 3.67). Three-hundred-ten tons of carbon dioxide is equivalent to the annual emissions of sixty-one cars.11 These are not insignificant numbers, and when multiplied across hundreds of thousands of small properties, the potential for avoided emissions is notable. When retaining a forest, I have a range of management decisions that will affect the amount of carbon stored in my woods. At one extreme, I could remove all the adult trees and regenerate a young forest. At the other extreme, I could remove an occasional tree for firewood, a practice that falls within the category of reduced impact forest management, or, by practicing wildlands management, I could remove no trees at all. Not surprisingly, the latter scenarios result in a significantly greater amount of carbon storage in my woods than the former scenario. In fact, any tree removal on a property like mine reduces carbon storage below the potential maximum for that site (although it is also true that if I leave all my trees standing, which I mostly do, and obtain my firewood from another source, I transfer that carbon loss to another property). Hence, reduced impact forest management\u2014retaining more trees, particularly large ones, for more time\u2014can make an important difference in the amount of carbon that is retained in a forest.12 Decisions about tree retention in residential areas often involve mitigating risk to power lines. A few years ago, for instance, the power company asked for my permission to cut three healthy trees on the edge of my previous property: a red oak, white oak (Quercus alba), and pignut hickory (Carya glabra), all with trunk diameters of more than thirty inches. Removing three trees would not have resulted in any forest conversion on my property\u2014indeed, there are young, small trees growing underneath these big ones\u2014but the carbon stored on my property would have been reduced by about eight tons, equivalent to the annual emissions of almost six cars. A large tree thirty inches in diameter also removes about seventy times the quantity of pollutants (including carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter) as a tree three inches in diameter.13 I decided that the trees were a relatively low risk to the powerlines and would provide more benefits if I allowed them to continue to grow and sequester carbon. Wildlands management, the decision not to cut or mow any trees, has obvious limitations near houses, but it can be applied to more removed areas. In the relatively small number of wilderness areas and strict nature preserves in the northeastern United States, the trees store a disproportionately large amount of carbon Backyard 31 relative to the region's total forest area.14 Wildlands also have the potential to sequester much additional carbon. Because of a lengthy land-use history of forest clearance and intensive logging, northeastern forests are, on average, only about 20 to 30 percent of their maximum potential age (80 to 100 years versus 350 to 400 years) and store only about half their potential carbon. An eighty-year-old forest today can, in most cases\u2014 barring a major disturbance such as a windstorm or insect infestation\u2014continue to accumulate carbon for at least the next two hundred years in live and dead trees and in the soil.15 Individual trees sequester more carbon the larger they grow: A forty-inch-diameter red oak (left) adds about two-tenths of an inch to its trunk diameter every year, but this new layer of biomass stores approximately the same amount of carbon as an entire sixinch- diameter tree elsewhere in the author's backyard forest. Another management option I have is reforestation: allowing an existing field to return to forest. I have begun reforestation on a small section of lawn along the edge of my property. Over the next fifteen years, this patch of regrowing forest may store as much as twenty-five times the aboveground carbon as the grassy lawn it replaced.16 Hence, reforestation has tremendous potential to sequester additional carbon on little-used pastures, agricultural fields, vacant lots, municipal fields, and small lawns on residential properties.17 There is a good reason for this potential: a site in which the trees have 32 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 been removed\u2014either recently or long ago\u2014is in a deep carbon debt because the land stores a fraction of the carbon it once stored as a forest. Energy Use Trees, of course, also have other climate-related implications for my property. Trees standing within sixty feet of my house reduce home energy expenditure and carbon emissions by cooling the house in summer and insulating it from cold winds in winter. Not surprisingly, large trees provide significantly greater energy reductions than do small trees. A thirty-inchdiameter red maple located on the west side of a house would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by almost seven-fold compared to a two-inchdiameter red maple that is similarly placed.18 One caveat is that trees, especially conifers, located on the south side of a house increase winter fuel use by blocking solar radiation; but the drawbacks are generally offset by the substantial year-round benefits of trees located on the other three sides of a house. For example, if a thirty-inch white pine was growing on the south side of my house, it would increase winter fuel use slightly, while still providing some summer cooling, resulting in an estimated 10 pounds of additional carbon dioxide emitted annually. But the same tree on the north side of the house would reduce winter fuel use\u2014and provide greater summer cooling\u2014 resulting in the reduced emissions of an estimated 335 pounds of carbon dioxide annually.19 Trees, therefore, play an important role not only in sequestering and storing carbon but also in reducing household carbon emissions. Habitat and Biodiversity Natural climate solutions can also provide important forest habitat. Trees, as they age and grow larger, provide nesting and denning sites for a host of birds and mammals.20 They create deadwood that provides food for insects and develop large crowns that supply an abundant seed source. Even scattered trees with trunks at least sixteen-to-twenty inches in diameter in an urban setting can have outsized effects on bird diversity and abundance\u2014a role that has caused researchers to describe large urban trees as \"biodiversity hotspots.\"21 Reforestation of fields and lawns can provide additional young forest habitat (when the trees are fifteen years of age or younger), an ephemeral and uncommon habitat in the northeastern United States. Several species of birds (like chestnut-sided warbler, prairie warbler, indigo bunting, and brown thrasher) and the rare New England cottontail prefer dense, low woody vegetation found in young forests, shrublands, and disturbed open woods and are generally not found in closed forests.22 Depending on how many trees are retained or regrown on a property, and where the property is located, a small parcel may serve as a green oasis in an otherwise developed environment, or as an uncommon vegetation structure in a landscape of mostly mature forest or field, or as an extension of a larger forested patch. My property best exemplifies the last scenario, as it abuts one hundred acres of contiguous forest. I frequently see and hear wood thrushes, veeries, barred owls, and pileated woodpeckers on my property. These species generally prefer mature forests or are associated with larger trees, and the wood thrush is listed as globally \"near threatened\" by the International Union of Conservation of Nature.23 Such species would almost certainly avoid my property if I converted my woods into lawn. Given that North America has lost almost 30 percent of its total bird population in the past fifty years, the natural climate solutions presented here applied across a multitude of small properties could make a real difference in stemming these population declines.24 Management for Natural Climate Solutions In general, the less I manage my property, the more climate benefits it will provide. Some tending, however, is important to allow trees to continue growing to their full potential. Lianas like the non-native oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), which thrive in the edge habitats characteristic of residential properties, are best cut and removed when they are growing up trees and over shrubs. Bittersweet will reduce the growth rate (and carbon uptake) and eventually kill trees by intercepting much of the sunlight in the canopy and by strangling the Backyard 33 trunk.25 The native poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) and grape (Vitis spp.) are generally more benign than bittersweet, but they function similarly and can proliferate in edge habitats, so I generally cut these vines at the base of my trees to give the trees every advantage to remain healthy and sequester the most carbon. With less management, tree branches inevitably grow close to my house and into my driveway and need to be trimmed periodically. After trimming, I deposit the branches in a brush pile or scatter them into the woods rather than chipping them or carting them away. Brush piles serve as cover and den habitat for a variety of small animal species such as red-backed salamanders, red-spotted newts, wood frogs, wrens, whitethroated sparrows, juncos, and box turtles.26 Trees will also die over time from insects, pathogens, and other causes and can be a hazard if houses, cars, or recreational spaces are in the fall zone. Common sense dictates that these should be cut down. But if dead trees are not a hazard, they provide considerable benefits if left standing and are not an indication that the forest is \"unhealthy\" and needs to be fixed. Though no longer sequestering additional carbon, standing dead trees continue to store existing carbon, often for decades, as the carbon is released slowly via decomposition.27 Dead trees also provide habitat for cavity-nesting birds and mammals and serve as an abundant source of insect food for woodpeckers and other barkgleaning birds like nuthatches. On my property, a standing dead elm tree (Ulmus americana) Regrowing forests can quickly store far more carbon in the vegetation than lawn grass\u2014as much as twenty-five times more in only fifteen years\u2014while also providing superior habitat. With this in mind, the author has begun a small reforestation project in an area previously maintained as lawn. Backyard 35 is used each year by a pair of yellow-bellied sapsuckers as a nest site. When I need to remove a dead tree that poses a hazard, I move it into the woods after cutting it. Similarly, when large branches and trees fall during storms, I move them off the driveway and lawn and into the woods and use some for firewood. I also resist cleaning up downed branches and trees in the woods. Downed logs serve as habitat for a host of animals, replenish nutrients and carbon to the soil, act as germination sites for new tree seedlings, and store large amounts of carbon, often for decades.28 Reforestation also requires little to no management. Tree growth is the default process in the Northeast, and the vegetation will naturally self-organize into a forest over time if a landowner simply stops mowing a lawn or field. The cessation of mowing will also add to the carbon benefits of reforestation by eliminating a significant source of emissions.29 A tall grass layer will inhibit tree growth because of competition and shading, and therefore shrubs, even thorny invasives like multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora), will generally facilitate tree seedling growth by reducing the grass layer and protecting the seedlings from deer browsing.30 In most cases, tree seedlings will eventually grow above the shrubs and reduce shade-intolerant shrub species; however, in some instances, a dense shrub layer can suppress further tree growth beneath it.31 In such cases, selectively removing some shrubs can be beneficial. Planting trees can supplement and speed up natural reforestation, but it can be expensive and labor-intensive, and is ultimately unnecessary unless a homeowner is interested in an immediate screen planting or a particular species that does not grow nearby. The Final Look Ultimately, implementing natural climate solutions is an exercise in restraint and may challenge a homeowner's sense of aesthetics. Indeed, given the choice, many homeowners prefer a relatively open, tidy property, with a few trees, long views, and unobstructed sunsets. But a property stewarded for natural climate solutions can offer a beauty not found in more open landscapes. On my property, I appreciate the delicate beams of light that pass through the foliage and columnar tree trunks in the early or later parts of a summer day; the brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges that envelop the property each autumn; and multitudes of snowor ice-covered branches on a winter day. For six months of the year, when the leaves have fallen from the deciduous trees, the views lengthen and sunsets emerge. Even during the growing season, I enjoy surprisingly long views because most of the foliage on the large deciduous trees is above rather than below the sightlines. In the small area where I have begun reforestation, sightlines are reduced and the brushy patch of tall grass, young trees, and shrubs look unkempt compared to my neighbors' adjacent, close-cropped lawn. Yet this management decision comes with other aesthetic rewards: insects busily foraging on the tall goldenrods that bloom in late summer and the flash of goldfinches and white-throated sparrows drawn to the seed source in this brushy new habitat. In the end, there is a natural beauty that accompanies the climate and biodiversity benefits of leaving more vegetation intact. Faced with runaway carbon dioxide levels and a rapidly warming climate, property owners can leverage the carbon-absorbing power of trees by keeping them standing and growing and by allowing an existing field to revert to forest by not mowing. In this way, we can play an important role in the solution by doing less and letting nature do more. Endnotes: 1 Current carbon dioxide levels are posted on https:\/\/ www.co2.earth\/. The long history of carbon dioxide levels on earth are discussed in Lindsey, R. 2020. Climate change: Atmospheric carbon dioxide. NOAA Climate.gov. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.climate. gov\/news-features\/understanding-climate\/climatechange- atmospheric-carbon-dioxide; and in Kolbert, E. 2014. The sixth extinction: An unnatural history. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 2 Harris, N. L. 2020. Young forests capture carbon quicker than previously thought. World Resources Institute. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.wri.org\/blog\/2020\/09\/ carbon-sequestration-natural-forest-regrowth 3 Adams, J. M., Faure, H. F. D. L., Faure-Denard, L., McGlade, J. M., and Woodward, F. I. 1990. Increases in terrestrial carbon storage from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present. Nature, 348(6303): 711-714. Facing page: Trees continue storing carbon long after they have fallen. Therefore, retaining logs and branches on the forest floor provides additional climate benefits and also adds new habitat types. 36 Arnoldia 78\/3 \u2022 February 2021 4 Harvard Forest. 2013. Schoolyard LTER database: Tree biomass equations. Retrieved from https:\/\/ harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu\/sites\/harvardforest.fas. harvard.edu\/files\/Tree%20Biomass%20Equations%20 2013.pdf 5 Schlesinger, W. H. 1997. Biogeochemistry: An analysis of global change. San Diego: Academic Press. 6 Stephenson, N. L., Das, A. J., Condit, R., Russo, S. E., Baker, P. J., Beckman, N. G., \u2026 and Zavala, M. A. 2014. Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size. Nature, 507(7490): 90-93. 7 Data on average carbon storage in Connecticut forests was calculated using the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis Program EVALIDATOR tool. Retrieved from http:\/\/apps.fs.usda.gov\/Evalidator\/ evalidator.jsp 8 Data on large tree density in Connecticut forests was calculated using the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis Program EVALIDATOR tool. 9 Reinmann, A. B., Smith, I. A., Thompson, J. R., and Hutyra, L. R. 2020. Urbanization and fragmentation mediate temperate forest carbon cycle response to climate. Environmental Research Letters, 15(11): 114036. 10 Fargione, J. E., Bassett, S., Boucher, T., Bridgham, S. D., Conant, R. T., Cook-Patton, S. C., \u2026 and Gu, H. 2018. Natural climate solutions for the United States. Science Advances, 4(11): eaat1869; Foster, D., Aber, J., Cogbill, C., Hart, C., Colburn, E., D'Amato, A., \u2026 and Thompson, J. 2010. Wildlands and woodlands: A vision for the New England landscape. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Moomaw, W. R., Masino, S. A., and Faison, E. K. 2019. Intact forests in the United States: Proforestation mitigates climate change and serves the greatest good. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 2: 27. 11 The emission of the entire 84.3 tons of carbon (310 tons of carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere assumes that all cut trees would be chipped and burned and none would be used for wood products. If the trees were used for wood products, approximately 20-25 percent of the tree carbon would be stored in wood. See: Nunery, J. S., and Keeton, W. S. 2010. Forest carbon storage in the northeastern United States: Net effects of harvesting frequency, post-harvest retention, and wood products. Forest Ecology and Management, 259(8): 1363-1375; United States Environmental Protection Agency. 2019. Greenhouse gases equivalencies calculator - Calculations and references. Retrieved from https:\/\/ www.epa.gov\/energy\/greenhouse-gases-equivalenciescalculator- calculations-and-references 12 Three key sources were used for this paragraph: Catanzaro, P., and D'Amato, A. 2019. Forest carbon: An essential natural solution for climate change. Amherst: University of Massachusetts; Fargione, et al. Natural climate solutions for the United States; Nunery and Keeton. Forest carbon storage in the northeastern United States. 13 Nowak, D. J. 2000, April. Tree species selection, design, and management to improve air quality. In 2000 ASLA annual meeting proceedings (pp. 23-27). Washington, DC: American Society of Landscape Architects. 14 Lu, X., Kicklighter, D. W., Melillo, J. M., Yang, P., Rosenzweig, B., V\u00f6r\u00f6smarty, C. J., \u2026 and Stewart, R. J. 2013. A contemporary carbon balance for the northeast region of the United States. Environmental science and technology, 47(23): 13230-13238. 15 Information on age and carbon storage of old growth forests in the northeastern United States was drawn from: Keeton, W. S., Whitman, A. A., McGee, G. C., and Goodale, C. L. 2011. Late-successional biomass development in northern hardwood-conifer forests of the northeastern United States. Forest Science, 57(6): 489-505; McGarvey, J. C., Thompson, J. R., Epstein, H. E., and Shugart Jr., H. H. 2015. Carbon storage in old-growth forests of the Mid-Atlantic: Toward better understanding the eastern forest carbon sink. Ecology, 96(2): 311-317. The average age of the region's forests was calculated using the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis Program EVALIDATOR tool. Retrieved from http:\/\/apps.fs.usda.gov\/Evalidator\/ evalidator.jsp 16 See appendix B in: Smith, J. E., Heath, L. S., Skog, K. E., and Birdsey, R. A. 2006. Methods for calculating forest ecosystem and harvested carbon with standard estimates for forest types of the United States. General Technical Report NE-343. Newtown Square, PA: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northeastern Research Station. 17 Cook-Patton, S. C., Leavitt, S. M., Gibbs, D., Harris, N. L., Lister, K., Anderson-Teixeira, K. J., \u2026 and Griscom, H. P. 2020. Mapping carbon accumulation potential from global natural forest regrowth. Nature, 585(7826): 545-550. 18 Energy savings from trees near houses was estimated using i-Tree tools. Retrieved from https:\/\/www. itreetools.org\/tools 19 Estimated using i-Tree tools. 20 Ranius, T., Niklasson, M., and Berg, N. 2009. Development of tree hollows in pedunculate oak (Quercus robur). Forest Ecology and Management, 257(1): 303-310. 21 Stagoll, K., Lindenmayer, D. B., Knight, E., Fischer, J., and Manning, A. D. 2012. Large trees are keystone structures in urban parks. Conservation Letters, 5(2): 115-122. 23 BirdLife International. 2017. Hylocichla mustelina (amended version of 2016 assessment). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2017: e.T22708670A111170926. https:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.2305\/ IUCN.UK.2017-1.RLTS.T22708670A111170926.en. Downloaded on 13 January 2020. Backyard 37 The author standing in his backyard forest. 24 Rosenberg, K. V., Dokter, A. M., Blancher, P. J., Sauer, J. R., Smith, A. C., Smith, P. A., \u2026 and Marra, P. P. 2019. Decline of the North American avifauna. Science, 366(6461): 120-124; DeGraaf, R. M., Yamasaki, M., Leak, W. B., and Lester, A. M. 2006. Technical guide to forest wildlife habitat management in New England. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. 25 Webster, C. R., Jenkins, M. A., and Jose, S. (2006). Woody invaders and the challenges they pose to forest ecosystems in the eastern United States. Journal of Forestry, 104(7): 366-374. 26 DeGraaf, et al. Technical guide to forest wildlife habitat management in New England. 27 Krebs, J., Pontius, J., and Schaberg, P. G. 2017. Modeling the impacts of hemlock woolly adelgid infestation and presalvage harvesting on carbon stocks in northern hemlock forests. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 47(6): 727-734. 28 McGarvey, et al. Carbon storage in old-growth forests of the Mid-Atlantic; DeGraaf, et al. Technical guide to forest wildlife habitat management in New England. 29 Jo, H. K., and McPherson, G. E. 1995. Carbon storage and flux in urban residential greenspace. Journal of Environmental Management, 45(2): 109-133. 30 Holl, K. D. 2002. Effect of shrubs on tree seedling establishment in an abandoned tropical pasture. Journal of Ecology, 90: 179-187; Meiners, S. J., and Martinkovic, M. J. 2002. Survival of and herbivore damage to a cohort of Quercus rubra planted across a forest\u2014old-field edge. The American Midland Naturalist, 147(2): 247-255. 31 Banasiak, S. E., and Meiners, S. J. 2009. Long term dynamics of Rosa multiflora in a successional system. Biological Invasions, 11(2): 215-224; Niering, W. A., Dreyer, G. D., Egler, F. E., and Anderson Jr, J. P. 1986. Stability of Viburnum lentago shrub community after 30 Years. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 113(1): 23-27. Edward K. Faison is senior ecologist at Highstead in Redding, Connecticut. His work focuses on deer and moose interactions with forests, long-term forest change, and natural climate solutions."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"A New Look at Boston Common Trees","article_sequence":7,"start_page":38,"end_page":41,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25726","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25ea76a.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Allen, Kelsey; Oswald, W. Wyatt","article_content":"Technology changes how we see the world: think of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's microscope or Jacques Cousteau diving with a video camera and bringing the movements of ocean life to the silver screen. For the past decade, a digital camera mounted on the roof of a ten-story building has taken photos of the Boston Common every thirty minutes. The camera is a simple consumer model, but the resulting set of photographs, numbering well over two hundred thousand, compresses time in a way that turns everyday changes within the tree canopy into meaningful patterns and trends. Within this set of images, forty seasons can be viewed as a flipbook. If you visit the Boston Common in April, you will see light-green leaves unfolding on elms (Ulmus) and the warm glow of red maples (Acer rubrum) bursting into flower, yet only in an image set like this could you determine how these hour-by-hour moments in the life of a tree correspond to seasons past. Ten years can be viewed simultaneously. Seasonal shifts can be visualized in a way that surpasses our on-the-ground experience. Moreover, thanks to image-analysis software, data can be extracted from the photographs, allowing researchers to quantify the \"greenness\" of the canopy as it changes through the growing season and from year to year. We know that global climate change is impacting plant phenology. Already, for instance, researchers have described discernable differences between flowering times for herbarium specimens that were collected one hundred years ago and those that have been collected in recent years. So far, however, the photographs of the Boston Common have shown relatively consistent leaf-out times in the spring, with the exception of 2012. The sequence of photos from that year shows the details of the springtime green-up, when anomalously warm temperatures in March triggered leaves to emerge two to four weeks earlier than other years. The elms turn green first, but not because of leaf emergence; in fact, we are seeing the maturation of samaras, the elms' winged fruits. Leaf out of the elms, along with the Common's red maples, lindens (Tilia), oaks (Quercus), and scholar trees (Styphnolobium japonicum), follows over the next few weeks. As trees on the Boston Common respond to climate change in the future, ongoing photography may reveal that years like this become less anomalous. At the other end of the growing season, the deciduous trees of the Boston Common start to prepare for winter by breaking down their photosynthetic machinery during the second half of October. The timing of those changes has not varied much over the last ten years. In the set of photos from 2018, for instance, we can see the visual transformation of the landscape that occurs each fall, with the faded greens of early autumn giving way to patches of gorgeous color, including yellow elms and reddish-brown oaks. Then, by the last week of November, the leaves have all fallen, exposing the scaffolding of branches that held them aloft all summer long. And at the tips of those branches are buds, poised to burst open in spring and start this cycle anew. Further reading Oswald, W. W. and Richardson, A. D. 2015. Tracking the seasonal rhythms of Boston Common trees. Arnoldia, 73: 36-39. Primack, D., Imbres, C., Primack, R. B., Miller-Rushing, A. J., and Del Tredici, P. 2004. Herbarium specimens demonstrate earlier flowering times in response to warming in Boston. American Journal of Botany, 91: 1260-1264. Richardson, A. D. 2019. Tracking seasonal rhythms of plants in diverse ecosystems with digital camera imagery. New Phytologist, 222: 1742-1750. Kelsey Allen is a student at Emerson College, studying literature and environmental science. W. Wyatt Oswald is a professor in the Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. He is a research associate at Harvard Forest. Boston Common Trees 41 JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER ALL PHOTOS BY W. WYATT OSWALD Each column shows the Boston Common during the first week of the month\u2014revealing differences year over year."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Case of the Anthropocene","article_sequence":8,"start_page":42,"end_page":43,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25727","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25eab6d.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Damery, Jonathan","article_content":"On December 18, 1994, three cave explorers squeezed into an opening of a cliff overlooking the Ard\u00e8che River in southern France. At the back, a whisper of cool air prompted them to prize stones from a narrow passage and worm forward headfirst. After ten feet, they encountered a thirty-foot drop into a large chamber. Beneath them, as it turned out, the cave walls were covered with paintings. Some appeared almost fresh. First, the explorers found a mammoth drawn in red pigment, then woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions, and compositions made entirely of human handprints. Researchers would later determine that a landslide sealed the main entrance to the cave, now known as Chauvet Cave, twenty-eight thousand years ago, safeguarding hundreds of paintings and wall engravings. Eighteen thousand years later, glaciers had retreated from much of Europe, and many of the animals depicted in Chauvet Cave had gone extinct. Humans in Mesopotamia were domesticating wheat and barley. Fast forward another nine thousand years to the completion of the first recorded circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. Eventually, in the summer of 1833, an English sailing ship departed London, bound for Australia. On the upper deck, the captain diligently monitored two sealed glass cases planted with ferns, grasses, and mosses. About six months later, the ship arrived in Sydney with all but three of the plants still alive. The case was opened only once; moisture cycled naturally inside the enclosure. On the return trip, the cases were packed with ferns that survived air temperatures fluctuating between twenty and more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, the cases were so effective that stowaway seeds germinated in the soil. A shipment of plants between the antipodes might seem like a minor historical footnote, but in a new book, The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World, historian Luke Keogh describes the shipment as a profound inflection point in the history of the Earth. Keogh first became interested in these enclosed glass cases while curating an exhibit at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The exhibit opened in 2014 and focused on the Anthropocene, a term for our current geologic era that acknowledges the enormity of humancaused environmental change. Millions of years from now, our present moment will appear in the geologic record as an abrupt transition char- Case of the Anthropocene Jonathan Damery Luke Keogh. The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World. The University of Chicago Press and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2020. BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY\/FROM US BUREAU OF ENTOMOLOGY (1913) BULLETIN NO. 120 DAMERY, J. 2021. CASE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE. ARNOLDIA, 78(3): 42-43 Wardian cases moved plants around the world, along with insects and other organisms. Book Review 43 acterized by rapid climate change, sea-level rise, and mass extinction\u2014an imprint far more permanent than the markings at Chauvet Cave. The unprecedented biotic exchange ushered in by the experimental plant shipments between London and Sydney is a piece of this story. The experiments had been orchestrated by an affable English physician named Nathanial Ward and the nurseryman George Loddiges. Previously, it had been exceptionally difficult to ship live plants over such long distances. In addition to the general perils of sea travel (salt spray, tempestuous weather, foraging rodents), fresh water was a scarce resource and could seldom be spared for plants. In a backyard experiment, Ward discovered that plants could be sustained within an enclosed glass container for long periods without supplemental water. When such cases were used aboard ships, they solved many of the persistent problems associated with long-distance plant transport. In a follow- up experiment in 1834, Ward sent six cases to Egypt and Syria, and when the plants were received, scarcely a leaf was reported missing. Keogh follows the Wardian case as it became a commonplace tool, not only for moving botanical curiosities but also for transporting crops (including tea, Camellia sinensis, and rubber, Hevea brasiliensis) that supported the endeavors of Western empire-building. Also, because Wardian cases contained soil, the plants invariably arrived with insects and pathogens in tow. \"To move plants was to move ecosystems,\" Keogh writes. Some of these newcomers proved devasting, including coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix), which erupted in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1869 and subsequently decimated plantations in many coffee-growing regions around the world. Altogether, this global churning\u2014which continues in a post-Wardian world\u2014accumulates to dramatic effect. Keogh, for instance, cites a study suggesting that approximately nine out of ten invertebrate pests in the United Kingdom arrived on live plants. Certainly, the Wardian case was just one innovation within the broader scope of the Anthropocene. The case gained traction at a moment of enormous industrialization and fossil fuel use. While the first Wardian cases were transported on sailing ships, steam power soon predominated. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would mount. Moreover, industrial agriculture favors monocultures, which are especially susceptible to pests and pathogens (like coffee rust) that spread rapidly in the Wardian era. In a curious twist, Keogh recounts how, in the early twentieth century, entomologists used Wardian cases to intentionally transport insects to control invasive plants and other pests that had been imported in earlier shipments. By the 1920s, plant quarantines and import restrictions slowed the use of Wardian cases, but it was the airplane that finally rendered them obsolete. Now live plants can be moved without soil, wrapped in plastic, and mailed directly to inspection sites before being admitted into a country, assuming importers follow the rules. Yet pests and pathogens continue to spread. The emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) was first identified in the United States in 2002 and likely arrived burrowed within wood shipping materials. The Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis) arrived in a similar fashion before 1996. In this light, the Wardian case was only one contributor to this dramatic biotic exchange. Not only has the admixture continued to the present but humans began moving plants long before Nathaniel Ward arrived on the scene. Ward's main innovation, Keogh stresses, was the enclosed system. Also, not insignificantly, Ward was a charismatic individual who used his social connections to promote the case. For Ward, awaiting news on his inaugural shipment to Australia, the long-term implications of his cases would have been impossible to imagine. Thinking about consequences two hundred years in the future is almost beyond the realm of comprehension\u2014almost as unlikely as the painters at Chauvet Cave imagining researchers studying their work more than thirty thousand years later. Yet the concept of the Anthropocene asks us to think even further ahead. In 1833, the captain of the ship to Australia penned a congratulatory letter to Ward: \"Your experiment for the preservation of plants alive \u2026 has fully succeeded.\" The case of the Anthropocene challenges us to reconsider the meaning of our own small successes. Jonathan Damery is the editor of Arnoldia."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Planting Edo: <i>Pinus thunbergii</i>","article_sequence":9,"start_page":44,"end_page":45,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25728","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d25eaf25.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Saunders, Rachel","article_content":"In February 2020, we opened our largest ever exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, never anticipating that, a month later, the doors of the museums would close due to the pandemic. Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection features 120 paintings arranged as an immersive, in-person experience. At the onset of the closure, when I rushed about my office gathering books and papers, I expected to be away for only a few weeks, but as our exile from the galleries continued, we adapted to virtual close-looking through an online exhibition and Zoom events. What I hadn't realized was how significantly this new form of looking would alter my own vision of Edo painting. One work that I came to see differently was Old Pine by the eighteenth-century painter Ito\u02c9 Jakuchu\u02c9 . It is by no means a fresh observation that artists of the Edo period (1618-1868) were extremely interested in the natural world. Jakuchu\u02c9 is celebrated today for the magical hyper-realism of his polychrome paintings of flowering plants, aquatic animals, and especially chickens, which he is said to have kept so that he could observe the complexity of their feathers daily. Old Pine, by contrast, is executed in gestural monochrome ink. The painting is modestly sized, but the radical proximity from which the tree is painted\u2014so close that it cannot be contained within the picture plane\u2014makes an encounter with it feel as overwhelming as standing beneath an enormous conifer. Pines have a long history in East Asian art and are among the primary subjects of ink painting. In the vocabulary of this spare, highly intellectualized mode of painting, pines represent resilience, longevity, and the integrity of the upright scholar-gentleman. Identification of a painted tree as \"a pine\" is all that is sufficient to trigger these associations, since ink painting valorizes capturing the essence of a thing over mere verisimilitude. Jakuchu\u02c9 had clearly captured an individual arboreal essence, but it was not until a botanist's eye was turned upon it that the true level of Jakuchu\u02c9 's observation emerged. With Zoom, the distance between the painted plants in the galleries and their living counterparts at the Arnold Arboretum melted away. This enabled a new privilege of simultaneously looking at living and painted plants with the Arboretum's Michael Dosmann and Ned Friedman. Our conversations led to a series of public virtual events. With this botanical view, the eccentrically angled branches, plated bark, and textured twigs of Jakuchu\u02c9 's \"pine\" resolve almost immediately into features of a \"black pine,\" or Pinus thunbergii (kuromatsu in Japan). When we view the painting, a major limb\u2014 covered, dragon-like, in scaled bark\u2014thrusts up from the bottom left-hand corner, only to disappear beyond the right-hand border. It curves back into the frame at the top right, from where an angular branch, brushed in several switchback strokes, descends. This dramatically contorted form echoes the Japanese black pines growing at the Arnold Arboretum (see accession 11371), and so, too, does the orientation of the painted needles: spiky lateral marks from a wide brush that flare from axial twigs. But the precision of Jakuchu\u02c9 's observation is evident beyond these most prominent elements. A variety of lichen-like dots peppers the branches, the largest pressed from the side of an inked brush, and the smaller nubby marks from its tip. What I had read as an anomalous abundance of mosslike texture strokes, Ned's eye revealed as the closely observed characteristic texture of black pine twigs, formed by the unusual persistence of bracts, which can remain for up to two years after their sets of paired needles fall. In an inscription brushed in 1755, Jakuchu\u02c9 wrote: \"Flowers, birds, grasses, and insects each have their own innate spirit. Only after one has actually determined the true nature of this spirit through observation should painting begin.\" Old Pine shows just how thoroughly Jakuchu\u02c9 took this dictate, not only in his obsessively observed and painstakingly detailed polychrome paintings but also, we can now see, in the spare and immediate genre of ink painting. Rachel Saunders is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Curator of Asian Art at Harvard Art Museums. Planting Edo: Pinus thunbergii Rachel Saunders"},{"arnoldia_cover":true,"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25697","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d270a76a.jpg","title":"2021-78-3","volume":78,"issue_number":3,"year":2021,"series":null,"season":null},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Pandemic Digitization","article_sequence":1,"start_page":2,"end_page":4,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25714","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24eaf6e.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":2,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Brach, Anthony R.","article_content":"Listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, I began my day transcribing data from herbariumspecimen labels. The melodies and the early morning light mixed, and I entered the zone, my fingers typing rhythmically with the music. Staff at the Harvard University Herbaria transitioned to working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic on March 16. In the early weeks of this new routine, I was transcribing detailed data from specimens collected in Wyoming\u2014locations like Devils Tower and Yellowstone\u2014but instead of handling the physical specimens, I was working from images on my screen. This current work has been very different from the normal day-to-day curatorial activities at the Herbaria. Researchers, who we would normally be assisting, have been unable to visit the collections. Our team, likewise, was initially unable to be on-site for routine activities like processing incoming and outgoing shipments of loans, gifts, and exchanges. We could not mount new specimens or file them into the collection; nor could we update specimens with new taxonomic determinations. We have even discouraged other institutions from sending materials given potential shipping and handling delays. Before this began, however, our team was busy with a long-term effort to share images and data from our collections online, and this meant we could use the same images to continue digitization projects remotely as well. Over the past 170 years, the Herbaria have amassed more than five million specimens, making our collections one of the largest in the world. Given the scale, specimens have been digitized on a project-by-project basis. About one-quarter of our total holdings have been digitized to date. I like to think of imaging and transcription of specimen labels as \"publishing\" unfinished symphonies composed by botanists. Without digitization, their collections are often hidden in the Herbaria, requiring either in-person visits or potentially risky shipments of specimen loans. Among the Wyoming specimens, for instance, I enjoyed databasing those collected by Reed Rollins, a Harvard professor and longtime director of the Gray Herbarium. Many of his extensive collections of the mustard family (Brassicaceae) were redetermined by his student Ihsan Al-Shehbaz, who followed Rollins as the world's foremost taxonomist of this family. Now digitized, their collaborative work has become available for study by a new generation of researchers. Before the pandemic, our curatorial team was in the middle of three collaborative digitization projects funded by the National Science Foundation and coordinated through the Thematic Collection Network. One focuses on the Southern Rockies. The second focuses on the vascular flora of the South Central United States, particularly Texas and Oklahoma. The third is called Endless Forms (or Plants on Edge) and focuses on fifteen families of rare and endangered plants with unique morphological adaptations, including orchids (Orchidaceae), cacti (Cactaceae), and sedums (Crassulaceae). Combined, these projects include about 470,000 specimens. Our director of collections Michaela Schmull and the director of informatics Jonathan Kennedy have orchestrated our curatorial team's digitization efforts so that, rather than pulling collections piecemeal by individual states (states are filed alphabetically for each species), all vascular plants from the United States and Canada were added to the queue. This expansion (another 1.6 million specimens) is part of the Herbaria's effort to digitize the entire collection. When the closures began, I had been photographing Lupinus in the legume family (Fabaceae), and recently, I had photographed specimens of a few other families with great diversity in the Rockies, including the mustards (Brassicaceae) and saxifrages (Saxifragaceae). Now, working from our homes as a team, the thirteen of us curatorial assistants had the opportunity to loop back and record detailed Pandemic Digitization Anthony R. Brach \u222b data from specimens we had already photographed. This data entry allows the specimens to be searchable using details like the collector's name and collection date. Our team completed transcription from available images from project-related states (about 66,670 specimens) after the first couple of months of the pandemic. This could have taken three times longer if not for our work-from-home efforts. Next, we moved onto other states and provinces not part of the projects. For this second phase, I selected New York. I was born in Rochester, and when I was just a kid, I carried Peterson's Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-Central North America on hikes with my dad, who was an avid, knowledgeable amateur botanist. He took my brothers and me to regional parks and to the Adirondack Mountains. In my college years, I explored the Hudson River Valley and Long Island Sound, and my graduate research on the ecology of forest-understory herbs and ferns brought me back to the Adirondacks. Transcribing specimen labels for this familiar flora allowed me, in some sense, to revisit these ecosystems. Because many labels were from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, only a fraction were typed, while many were handwritten and of various degrees of legibility. Since the beginning of the pandemic, our team has been communicating via Slack, a chatting tool that we have used for asking questions and helping one another decipher illegible handwriting on labels. I was amused by two handwritten labels for collections from Irondequoit Bay (Rochester area) and Taughannock Falls (north of Ithaca). If not for my familiarity with these places, I do not know if I could have deciphered them. We also have a very large collection of specimens from New York that were collected by Asa Gray, the first director of the Gray Herbarium, whose handwriting has always been challenging to read. I was fascinated to see specimens collected more than one hundred years ago near my hometown and from other familiar places. In 1889, collector John Dunbar told Charles During the pandemic, curatorial staff at the Harvard University Herbaria have been recording collection data from previously photographed herbarium specimens. Often the intrigue is in the details. THE HERBARIUM OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM AND THE GRAY HERBARIUM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY 4 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 Sprague Sargent, the director of the Arnold Arboretum, about many hawthorns (Crataegus) near Rochester that did not match any described species. Dunbar and others\u2014including his coworkers Calvin C. Laney, Henry T. Brown, and Berhard H. Slavin (all from the Rochester Parks Department)\u2014collected hundreds of specimens for Sargent. Beyond the familiar locations, some specimens included details that made these places come alive with activity. I came across a 1905 label, for instance, which noted that small boys filled their pockets with fruits from a scarlet hawthorn (Crataegus pedicellata). Others documented landscapes that were changing like the tempo of Grieg's \"In the Hall of the Mountain King\" (made popular in Fantasia). A dramatic 1907 label for another hawthorn (C. brainerdii), for instance, marked history: \"Prof. Sargent you will notice that I have changed this No. as I told you my No. 2415 was blown up by the Barge Canal work,\" a physician-botanist named Joseph V. Haberer wrote. Strikingly, the label recorded an instance of the widening of the Erie Canal, between 1905 and 1918, for use by large barges. When I encounter multiple specimens from the same collector, I often look up the person's backstory. Collections by botanists who happened to be medical doctors often catch my attention, especially since one of my sons serves as a doctor of osteopathic medicine and his brothers study pharmacy and medicine. In addition to Haberer (and Asa Gray, who trained as a physician), other medical doctors who collected specimens in New York included Henry P. Sartwell, George Thurber, Peter D. Knieskern, George G. Kennedy, and Edwin H. Eames. Their collections, too, have now been digitized for continued studies. Starting on June 15, our team transitioned to a hybrid work model, which allowed for limited entries into the Herbaria for a set number of hours, one day per week. This required strict adherence to the university's guidelines, safety protocols, and weekly coronavirus testing. It was a relief to be back but strange returning to a near-empty place, devoid of researchers. With this on-site day each week, I aimed to take \u222b care of essential services for the collections, in coordination with others during their allotted times at the Herbaria. I processed incoming shipments (after freezing to prevent potential insect problems), checked insect traps (each of the curatorial staff has an area to monitor), and photographed specimens as requested by botanists for their remote studies. I attached barcodes to a new set of two hundred herbarium sheets of Lupinus and photographed them for digitization from home. I finally reached Lupinus texensis, the brightly colored, bluebonnet of Texas. The university has encouraged staff to continue working from home, so transcription will continue to keep everyone busy. During our remote work so far, from mid-March until mid- September, our team has digitized 135,333 specimens, bringing the total number of digitized North American specimens in the Herbaria to nearly one million. These data and images can be found using the search interface on the Harvard University Herbaria website. Our team also learned how to use the Geo-Locate Project's collaborative georeferencing tool to add mapping coordinates whenever possible, starting with localities in the Southern Rockies. Throughout the pandemic, as I've been working with these digital specimens, my wife, Ying, has also been working from home. She is a forest ecologist by training. In the early months, when we left the house for walks in our neighborhood and local conservation areas, we were encouraged by the sights and sounds of spring. Plants flowered and produced leaves as usual, and the seasons have continued to flow like Vivaldi's melodies. This ceaselessness is echoed in our preserved herbarium specimens, each of which documents a particular moment from seasons past. Seasons and generations accrue. When brought together\u2014and shared with researchers and teachers\u2014the long-hidden symphonies, at last, resound. Anthony Brach is a senior curatorial assistant at the Harvard University Herbaria and a research associate of the Arnold Arboretum. Previously, between 1993 and 2012, he served as an editor of the Flora of China, while based at the Harvard University Herbaria as a Missouri Botanical Garden staff member, after completing his PhD in environmental and forest biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Redefining \"Remote Fieldwork\"","article_sequence":2,"start_page":5,"end_page":7,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25715","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24eb326.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":2,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Hruska, Amy; Komatsu, Kimberly","article_content":"During the summer, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), in Edgewater, Maryland, is typically buzzing with activity. Scientific staff and volunteers arrive early in the morning to load gear into field vehicles and begin long days of research on land or at sea. Much of this fieldwork, near or in the Chesapeake Bay, deals with pressing and complex environmental threats, such as climate change and invasive species. Roughly two dozen visiting undergraduate researchers move into campus dormitories during the summer and join the research labs where they diligently work to complete independent projects in just ten weeks. In SERC's Ecosystem Conservation lab, we investigate how ecosystems respond to global threats, such as nutrient runoff, land-use conversion, and invasive species. Our plan for the summer of 2020 was to revisit over a dozen forest fragments in the Chesapeake Bay watershed for the first time in more than forty years to assess how land-use change has affected plant and songbird populations. Undergraduate researchers were to be instrumental in resurvey efforts and would have the opportunity to design complementary field experiments or surveys that would broaden their experience. Over the winter, we assembled an all-star team: Skye Austin, a rising sophomore from Shenandoah University, enthusiastic about the environment and conservation and ready for her first research experience. Rachael Brenneman, a rising senior at Eastern Mennonite University, eager for the chance to design and implement her own field research after conducting class research projects. And Julia Smith, a recent graduate of the University of Chicago and a data modeler, excited to get outside and experience the nuances of ecological field research. During any given field season, we anticipate that not everything will go as planned\u2014an unexpected storm may shift the schedule or cause extensive damage to a site, or we might add measurements to account for new field observations. This year, however, the very idea of conducting fieldwork and mentoring students seemed to hang in the balance as the coronavirus pandemic led to nationwide shutdowns and internal policy changes. As stay-at-home orders went into place in March, it was unclear how field research programs would proceed\u2014if at Redefining \"Remote Fieldwork\" Amy Hruska and Kimberly Komatsu 6 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 all. Overnight, SERC's research campus became an unrecognizable ghost town as most of the staff began to telework and only pre-approved, essential staff (including members of our lab) came in to maintain critical operations and experiments. Over time, it became clear that this would be the new normal, and as a result, the organizers of the undergraduate research program decided to take everything remote. As our lab began planning a remote field season that did not involve a plane ride, we initially inventoried existing datasets related to plant mutualisms, biodiversity, and ecosystem function, and generated a list of possible questions that undergraduate students could address while living at home, turning a fun field-based research experience into ten weeks in front of a computer screen gathering data from the web or navigating the world of statistical analyses. While this type of experience would certainly be valuable for many students, the idea of a computer-based internship did not meet the goals of our three undergraduate researchers who were eager for the chance to design and conduct field experiments. Cue inspiration from none other than Charles Darwin. While most of us go through school associating Darwin with his voyage on the HMS Beagle and the theory of natural selection, many of his theorytesting experiments took place from the comforts of his own home (see Darwin's Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory by James Costa). We asked, would it be possible for our undergraduate students to conduct field experiments at their family homes? Before the undergraduate researchers started in mid-June, we determined their locations in relation to SERC, their indoor and outdoor spatial constraints for an experiment, and compiled topics and resources that would help shape the type of questions they'd be able to ask. Coincidentally, everyone lived within three hours of SERC, so with extra steps to keep materials disinfected and acquire administrative approval, we could drive materials to their homes. Furthermore, everyone had outdoor space in their family yards to set up an experiment. Thus, a summer of backyard ecosystemconservation research began. Our undergraduate researchers hit the ground running. With minimal direction other than the compiled topics and resources related to our broad research themes and the agreed-upon spatial constraints, they worked together to develop an overarching research question and experimental design that they could each have in their yards. Over two weeks, they read the scientific literature and met daily to settle on one overarching question: how does nitrogen pollution from runoff affect plant and soil communities? To address this question, they would each set up sixty one-gallon pots in their yards, each pot containing two native plants. Plants within a pot could be one of three native species: Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum), sensitive partridge pea (Chamaecrista nictitans), or Virginia wild-rye (Elymus virginicus). All possible combinations were represented, meaning that a pot could be planted with either two of the same species or two different species. Next, the team identified measurements that would allow them to answer more specific questions based on their individual interests. Skye was interested in the capacity of these native plants to uptake added nitrogen under different diversity treatments. Rachael asked how added nitrogen and plant diversity treatments affect the soil microbial community. And Julia wanted to understand how nitrogen addition and diversity treatments affect plant competition. Everyone was responsible for collecting the data that would be needed to address each of these three questions. They would take plant growth measurements, collect soil and invertebrate samples, and harvest plants for analyses of biomass and nitrogen content. After settling on the questions, experimental design, measurements, and materials, we spent a week purchasing and preparing all the required materials. We then made a ten-hour road trip to drop off the materials at each house. Traditionally, lab mates would help with project setup, but this year, the undergraduate researchers were left to handle those steps on their own. Previous page: Julia Smith, an undergraduate researcher at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, receives a delivery of remote research supplies. PHOTO BY AMY HRUSKA Remote Fieldwork 7 To ensure each researcher made the same judgment calls during setup (such as how to orient the plants in the pot), they held a multi-hour video meeting to discuss the process. Later, long video discussions became a reoccurring theme as the team took each measurement for the first time and harvested their plants at the end of the experiment. But various household members (parents and friends) did help each student with the setup (and maintenance and harvest). In some cases, parents became just as invested in the success of the plants as the undergraduate researchers themselves, checking on the experiment periodically just to see how the plants were getting along. In total, the experiment ran for a little over five weeks, with plants exposed to four weeks of fertilizer treatments in concentrations that matched those found in runoff from residential yards. After the last plant was harvested, we made a final road trip to collect their samples, as well as the equipment loaned for the summer. Back at SERC, we dried and stored samples that will be analyzed in the lab at a later date. For our undergraduate researchers, a final virtual presentation bookended their summer experience. Together, the researchers eloquently presented their fieldwork experience and discussed how they designed a single experiment to answer a host of meaningful questions related to ecosystem conservation. While this summer was a far departure from our initial plans, and a deviation from what is traditionally considered remote fieldwork, each undergraduate researcher experienced the hallmarks of conducting field research. Everyone coped with the heat and humidity of the DC, Maryland, and Virginia metropolitan area as they took their late-summer measurements. They anxiously sat and watched their pots from indoors as Hurricane Isaias brought heavy winds and rains to their yards. They all agreed to add herbivory observations to their data collection after each experiment had evidence of unintended interactions with residential wildlife. But, most importantly, everyone felt the ownership and satisfaction that can only come from developing and completing an experiment. Data analysis for this project is ongoing and will continue through the fall and winter. Many of the samples still need to be processed in the lab to determine plant biomass, and leaf and soil nitrogen content. While Julia is currently starting her doctorate, Skye and Rachael have continued as fall interns in the Ecosystem Conservation lab, working to finish these analyses and lead the efforts to publish their results. The initial results are beginning to tell an exciting story as to how plant diversity may help combat nutrient pollution. The data suggest that some species can continue to grow just as well under high nitrogen conditions from runoff and in different diversity treatments. A bonus of conducting remote research from home this summer was the realization that undergraduate researchers can, in some cases, continue to be supported once they return to school. As our lab continues to function over video conferencing, undergraduate researchers can be involved in lab meetings and SERC virtual events. And as SERC moves through the phases of its reopening plan as coronavirus cases drop in the region, the undergraduate researchers will finally be able to make it into the lab to process their samples. The current pandemic has changed many aspects of our day-to-day lives and how we conduct science. At times, these changes are overwhelming and do not have clear resolutions. Yet, this pandemic has also demonstrated our ability to be resilient and adapt to the previously unimaginable. Our ability to pivot from an in-person field program to conducting remote science in our backyards is one of many examples of how field scientists have coped this summer. These examples, however, should not come as a surprise. As field scientists, we know that disruptions are inevitable, and we need to be flexible and open to new solutions. If anything, conducting science during an unprecedented time is what field research has been preparing us for all along. Amy Hruska is a postdoctoral fellow in the Ecosystem Conservation lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). Kimberly Komatsu is the senior scientist and principal investigator of the Ecosystem Conservation lab at SERC."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Closing the Book on Sargent's Weeping Hemlock","article_sequence":3,"start_page":8,"end_page":33,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25716","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24eb36a.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":2,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Del Tredici, Peter","article_content":"Sargent's weeping hemlock (Tsuga canadensis 'Sargentii') is one of the world's greatest dwarf conifer cultivars in terms of its beauty, longevity, and stability. As opposed to the typical eastern hemlock with a tall straight trunk reaching upwards of a hundred feet, the weeping variety is a totally horizontal tree that can form a giant dome of foliage up to twenty feet high by forty feet across\u2014\"a vernal fountain of perpetual joy\" is what one writer called it.1 The tree was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century in the Hudson Highlands,2 about sixty miles northeast of New York City. This part of the world was a critical supply depot for the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and later its scenic vistas inspired both the Hudson River School of painting and the \"picturesque\" landscape movement championed by Andrew Jackson Downing. This region is one of the areas where modern American ornamental horticulture first took root, and many of its earliest practitioners built country estates in the area based on aesthetic principles that Downing laid out in his writings from the 1840s and 50s. One such horticultural pioneer was Henry Winthrop Sargent, the man for whom the weeping hemlock was named. In 1841, he purchased a twenty-two-acre parcel of woodland overlooking the Hudson River at Fishkill Landing\u2014also known as Fishkill-on-the-Hudson\u2014where he developed a country estate called Wodenethe, which included sweeping vistas and an especially notable collection of conifers.3 Sargent's younger cousin Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arnold Arboretum, would describe the conifer collection as \"the most complete in the United States.\" H. W. Sargent made his place famous by describing the design and construction of its grounds in the supplement to the sixth edition of Downing's classic book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, published in 1859. In an update to the supplement, in 1875, Sargent produced a vivid description of the \"gardenesque\" landscape effects he sought to achieve through the use of exotic plants with extreme growth habits and foliage textures and tints. \"There should be certain groups all color, other groups all form, and others again pendulous or drooping,\" Sargent wrote. \"But these colors and forms must be harmoniously arranged by very careful blending. Sometimes in contrast (not so great as to shock), and sometimes by the delicate merging and intermingling of one color with another, the deeper and darker first, to disappear and melt away as it were into the lighter and fairy-like tones.\" For Sargent, landscape gardening was more about art than science, and the garden itself was a kind of living sculpture. The weeping hemlock that now bears his name fit so perfectly into Sargent's gardenesque landscape style that, as has been said, had he not introduced it, he would have invented it.4 My own interest in Sargent's weeping hemlock began in 1970. I had just moved to Boston from California and was teaching biology to children ages five through eighteen at an experimental school in Watertown, Massachusetts. Always on the lookout for interesting field trips, I visited the Arnold Arboretum for the first time in the fall of that year. In my aimless wandering, I came across a bizarre, low-growing tree with twisted, ribbon-shaped branches, the likes of which I had never seen before\u2014it was Sargent's weeping hemlock. Why did it have its amazing shape? Where did it come from? How did it get here? Although I did not recognize it at the time, I had been seduced by the tree and the Arboretum where it was growing. Closing the Book on Sargent's Weeping Hemlock Peter Del Tredici Facing page: The story of Sargent's weeping hemlock often centers on the plant's namesake, Henry Winthrop Sargent, who grew the horticultural curio at his estate, Wodenethe, in the Hudson River Valley. But archival discoveries have introduced new characters to the story. SARGENT\/ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES; WODENETHE (DOWNING, 1859)\/BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY; ARNOLD ARBORETUM SPECIMEN (15820*B )\/JONATHAN DAMERY; DUTCHESS COUNTY, NY, MAP (1850)\/ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION \u222b 10 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 When I finally began working at the Arnold some nine years later, in 1979, my interest in Sargent's weeping hemlock was rekindled when Augustus M. Kelley, publisher of Theophrastus Books in Little Compton, Rhode Island, wandered into the Dana Greenhouses where I was the assistant plant propagator and, without introducing himself, started talking to me about weeping hemlocks. At some point in the conversation, after I had expressed interest in the topic, I mentioned that I had a theory about why hemlocks weep. Gus said he'd like to hear it and, after listening carefully for about five minutes, asked if I would write it up. I told him I'd think about it, and a year later, I published my first-ever article for Arnoldia, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum: \"Sargent's Weeping Hemlock Reconsidered.\" As soon as the article was published, however, I discovered several new references related to the origin of the tree, including one that pushed its first mention in print from 1875 to 1868. Gus suggested that this new information warranted an update of the weeping hemlock story and offered to publish a book about the tree if I would write it. To make a long story short, A Giant Among the Dwarfs came out in 1983, providing a new account of the tree's history. There were still gaps in the story, of course, but I did my best to fill them with well-reasoned speculation. Predictably, after the book came out, people wrote to me with new information about various specimens of Sargent's weeping hemlock, which I dutifully stashed away in a file folder, never really expecting to revisit the subject. In the years since the publication of my book, the internet was invented, and the door that I had closed some thirty-six years ago cracked open with the unexpected discovery of a statement from H. W. Sargent himself, in 1880, about who actually discovered the tree that carried his name. One thing led to another, and the cold case of the true discoverer of Sargent's weeping hemlock suddenly got very hot. With the help of various websites\u2014especially the Biodiversity Heritage Library\u2014I was able to access a slew of old references that shed new light on the story of how this sublime conifer came into being. And so, it is with some trepidation that I make my third attempt at resolving the contradictions that have plagued Sargent's weeping hemlock since its discovery. Hopefully, this time will be the charm. In the Beginning Based on research that I completed for A Giant Among the Dwarfs, I concluded\u2014correctly as it has turned out\u2014that the first written reference to Sargent's weeping hemlock was from 1868. The critical passage appears in The Book of Evergreens by Josiah Hoopes, a well-known nurseryman and conifer specialist, in the midst of his description of H. W. Sargent's Wodenethe estate. \"Near the mansion are two very handsome specimens of Araucaria imbricata, grown in boxes,\" Hoopes wrote, referring to the monkey puzzle tree (now A. araucana). \"These had attained the height of 5 or 6 feet, and were perfect examples of this species in a young state. Near these we noticed a remarkable variety of the Hemlock Spruce, of dwarfish habit, with long drooping branchlets, and altogether quite unique in character. This plant was found growing on the mountains near by.\" On the basis of the description alone, one could not say absolutely that Hoopes was talking about Sargent's weeping hemlock, but when the location of the discovery on a nearby mountain is added, the plant could be nothing else. Hoopes, nonetheless, omits the tree from the main body of the book where the \"hemlock spruce\" (listed as Abies Canadensis5) and two of its varieties are discussed, suggesting that the plant was relatively unknown in 1868. I recently found a second reference to the plant at Wodenethe in an 1874 article about mutant conifers by one Thomas C. Maxwell, a nursery owner from Geneva, New York. \"On Mt. Hounes, Fishkill-on-the-Hudson, is found a sport from our well known Hemlock,\" Maxwell reports. \"The species we all know is remarkably graceful and beautiful, lofty and grand, but this sport grows down as persistently as the Kilmarnock Willow\u2014a real deformity, and yet on Mr. Sargent's lawn it is one of the most interesting and ornamental plants in his entire collection\u2014 'a thing of beauty,' with which scarcely another tree or plant on these most beautiful grounds or in all the land can compare.\" It took me a while to figure out that \"Mt. Hounes\" was an alternate spelling for what is today known as Honness Mountain, a 906-foot \"peak\" near the present-day town of Fishkill\u2014 about five miles northeast of Wodenethe.6 Maxwell's description of the tree is particularly noteworthy because he describes how the wild weeping hemlock that was discovered on Honness Mountain\u2014\"a real deformity\"\u2014was transformed into \"a thing of beauty\" after being cultivated at Wodenethe, as if the plant had somehow gone to finishing school. Sandwiched between these two early references to H. W. Sargent's stunning new hemlock was a more complete description of the tree published by Frank Jessup Scott in his monumental work, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent. Curiously, there are two different versions of this book with an 1870 publication date: One is 274 pages long and deals mainly with garden design issues. The other contains an additional 244- page section titled \"Part II: Trees, Shrubs and Vines,\" which contains detailed descriptions of woody ornamental plants suitable for planting in home landscapes. In the shorter of the two 1870 editions, Sargent's weeping hemlock is mentioned only in the fifteenth chapter, \"Plans of Residences and Grounds.\" This section of the book presents written descriptions of twenty-nine hypothetical landscape layouts, along with detailed drawings showing the locations of recommended plants. In the seventh plan (as well as in seven others7), Scott uses the letter H to designate the position of a plant he identifies as \"Sargent's hemlock, Abies canadensis inverta\" and recommends that \"its main stem to be kept tied to a stake until it has a firm growth six feet high.\" Remarkably, this first attempt at giving Sargent's weeping hemlock a proper scientific name is one of only two times that the epithet inverta appeared in print. In the longer of the two 1870 editions of Suburban Home Grounds, which is identical in all respects to an 1873 edition (except for the date), Scott preserves the use of the name Abies canadensis inverta in the chapter \"Plans of Residences and Grounds,\" but in the second part, under the entry on \"Hemlock Fir,\" he introduces a new name for the tree, \"Sargent's Hemlock: Abies canadensis Sargenti.\" He The author first encountered Sargent's weeping hemlock in 1970, at the Arnold Arboretum, and was instantly enamored with its unusual form. ARNOLD ARBORETUM MAP (1969); ARNOLD ARBORETUM SPECIMEN IN 1970 (10712*A)\/BOTH ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES 12 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 goes on to describe it as being \"of an eccentric rambling nature, but well clothed in verdure,\" and he provides information about its cultivation: \"Grown without training it will probably be a broad, irregular, flat-headed tree or great bush, with an over-laying of downward growing branches like that of the Scamston elm. By grafting it well up on other trees, or by tying its leader to a stick or stake we believe it will be one of the prettiest and most picturesque of evergreens. The best effect will be produced when grafted well up on an ordinary hemlock stem.\" While Scott's use of two different names for Sargent's weeping hemlock in the longer of the two 1870 editions is confusing, the discrepancy suggests that there was a gap between the publication of the two editions. In fact, I found a review of the longer version of the book in the August 1871 issue of The Horticulturist by Henry T. Williams, which clearly suggests that the complete version of Scott's book did not come out until mid-1871. For whatever reason, this edition retained the 1870 publication date and constitutes the earliest publication of the name Abies canadensis Sargenti. In the longer of the two 1870 editions of his book, Scott also states that the plant had been \"brought into notice by H. W. Sargent, Esq., who found it growing wild on Fishkill mountain.\" I could find no reference for this specific mountain in the literature of the period, but given that the town of Fishkill lies at the base of Honness Mountain, which is shown as part of the \"Fishkill Mountains\" in period maps, it could well have been an alternative name for it. If so, then Scott is in agreement with Maxwell that Sargent's weeping hemlock was discovered on Honness Mountain. Scott and Maxwell also agree on the need to stake up Sargent's weeping hemlock in order to make it a proper \"ornamental\" plant and that without this treatment it would sprawl across the ground, eventually forming a strongly pendulous shrub. Henry Winthrop Sargent's house at Wodenethe, photographed in 1886. ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 13 One final detail in Scott's description of Sargent's weeping hemlock that should be noted appears in the appendix at the end of the second part where he lists \"Sargent's Hemlock\" as reaching ten feet tall by ten feet across under the column headed \"Usual Size 12 Years from Seed\" and thirty feet tall by forty feet across under the column \"Usual Size at Maturity.\" When I first read these numbers in the early 1980s, I couldn't figure out how Scott managed to come up with them given that they were written just two years after Hoopes published the first written description of the tree, so I chalked it up to a lucky guess. The Parsons Brothers of Flushing Scott's description of Sargent's weeping hemlock and his prescient projections about its size clearly suggest that its propagation must have been well underway in the early 1870s. Samuel B. Parsons of S. B. Parsons & Sons, Kissena Nurseries in Flushing, New York, confirmed this supposition in a lecture that he presented on November 12, 1874, to the Rural Club of New York, with many prospective clients in attendance. \"But the gem of all gems is the Weeping Hemlock,\" Parsons declared. \"If left to itself, it will remain trailing upon the ground, but if the leader is tied to a firm stake it can be carried to any reasonable height, and each tier of branches will then droop in graceful curves toward the ground.\" A year later, in October 1875, Parsons sent a letter to the editor of The Garden introducing Sargent's weeping hemlock to British audiences, using the name Abies canadensis var. pendula. Parsons's promotion of the weeping hemlock to both national and international audiences clearly suggests that he was already selling or getting ready to sell the plant to the general public. As far as I have been able to determine, however, it was the nursery owned by Parsons's brother, Robert, who first offered Sargent's weeping hemlock for sale in the fall of 1874. Some two years earlier, in the fall of 1872, the brothers had decided to split up Parsons & Sons Nursery, which they had inherited from their father and jointly operated since 1841. Samuel got half of the plant stock and established S. B. Parsons & Sons, Kissena Nurseries in a new location in Flushing while Robert took control of the other half of the stock and remained at the original nursery site but changed the name to R. B. Parsons & Co.8 In his fall 1874 catalogue, Robert Parsons listed Sargent's weeping hemlock under the heading \"Abies canadensis, weeping.\" Ten onefoot- tall plants were available for the reasonable price of eight dollars, and ten larger plants (up to two feet tall) were selling for twelve dollars. Samuel's firm, S. B. Parsons & Sons, first offered the weeping hemlock in their autumn 1877 wholesale catalogue. Both brothers clearly had a financial stake in the success of the plant and cooperated in introducing it into cultivation. One of the curiosities of the weeping hemlock history is that up until 1875\u2014after its production and sale was well underway\u2014the supposed discoverer of the plant, H. W. Sargent, had said nothing about it. He finally broke his silence in the fourteen-page supplement he wrote for the ninth edition of Downing's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening: \"Abies Canadensis pendula, or Sargenti, as sometimes called, is a very interesting and distinct variety of hemlock,\" Sargent wrote. \"It is as pendulous as a Weeping Cherry, perfectly hardy, and admirably adapted for small places, though as yet very rare, Messrs. Parsons, of Flushing, alone having plants for sale. It is a sport of our native Hemlock, found in the Fishkill Mountains.\" This brief description occurs in the supplement to the 1875 edition of Downing's book but is not included in his 1859 supplement to the sixth edition where fifty-one pages are devoted to \"The Newer Evergreen Ornamental Trees.\" This omission is significant because it suggests that Sargent did not learn about the tree until after 1859. From Fishkill to Philadelphia One of the long-standing questions surrounding the history of Sargent's weeping hemlock concerns the date when it was first propagated for commercial sale. In 1939, Arlow B. Stout of the New York Botanical Garden identified J. R Trumpy, the propagator for the Parsons & Sons Nursery, as the person who visited Fishkill and collected scions from H. W. Sargent's plant, but Stout didn't provide a date for the 14 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 15 trip. Trumpy was a Swiss-born horticulturist who immigrated to America in 1856 to work for the Parsons Nursery.9 When the Parsons brothers split up the nursery in 1872, Trumpy went to work for Samuel's newly established S. B. Parsons & Sons (the name Kissena Nurseries was added later), and their very first Descriptive Catalogue, from 1873, listed him as propagator on the title page. Thanks to a recently discovered article in an 1877 issue of the Moore's Rural New-Yorker\u2014written by the magazine's \"conductor,\" Elbert S. Carmen\u2014we now know what happened when Trumpy went to Fishkill in search of Sargent's weeping hemlock: Grace is not an adjective often serviceable in descriptions of Evergreens, but it is the first that comes to mind in any attempt at describing the Weeping variety of the Hemlock spruce [Abies Canadensis pendula]. The variety is comparatively new and its history interesting. The original tree was, as we learn, in the possession of an old gentleman named BURROW. Mr. J. R. TRUMPY, the well-known propagator of one of the Parsons of Flushing, heard about it, and visited BURROW for the purpose of purchasing the tree. But BURROW would not sell. Mr. TRUMPY, thus disappointed, and having a desire to possess so promising a novelty, which only those who have their hearts in the business can understand, set out for Mr. H. W. SARGENT'S (Fishkill, N. Y.), who, he had been informed, was possessed of a small specimen which, either from a layer or graft, was derived from the original tree of Mr. BURROW'S. Mr. SARGENT was gracious to the enthusiastic TRUMPY, who left him with a pocketful of cions [sic], and from this start the Weeping Hemlock was propagated and disseminated. This stunning description of J. R. Trumpy's trip to Fishkill came as a complete shock to me and upended the traditional story of Sargent's weeping hemlock by asserting that the mysterious Mr. Burrow was in possession of the \"original tree\" and that Sargent's tree had been propagated from Burrow's plant. In light of the publicity that the tree had received prior to 1877, it's surprising that none of the earlier writers\u2014or any of those that came after\u2014 mentioned Burrow, a sign that naming him as discoverer must have been somewhat controversial. The other remarkable thing about Carmen's article is that it is accompanied by the first known illustration of Sargent's weeping hemlock, which shows a healthy young specimen grafted about five feet up on the understock. Curiously, the lingering question of when Trumpy actually visited Fishkill does not get answered until eleven years later when Carmen published a second article about Sargent's weeping hemlock, in an 1888 issue of the Rural New-Yorker, that repeated (and embellished) his earlier story about Trumpy's trip to Fishkill and described how best to use the tree in the garden.10 Carmen ended his article with \"A Note from S. B. Parsons,\" which offhandedly revealed when Trumpy's fateful visit had occurred. \"I do not know the precise age of my Weeping Hemlock, but conjecture it is 25 years old, as it was one of the first we grew when we discovered it in the grounds of Mr. H. W. Sargent in 1861,\" Parsons stated. \"My specimen is 11 feet in height and 13 feet in diameter of foliage. Its height has been obtained by training up a leader, and there is no reason why it cannot be carried 20 feet high.\" In light of this 1861 date, Scott's 1870 prediction that a mature weeping hemlock would be thirty feet high by forty feet across no longer seemed so outlandish. In addition to introducing Burrow into the weeping hemlock story and identifying Sargent's \"small specimen\" of the weeping hemlock as the source of Parsons's first propagation material, both of Carmen's articles present a negative assessment of the attempts to make the tree more ornamental by grafting it \"upon high stocks.\" His 1877 article is particularly blunt: \"But the great expectations of securing an evergreen tree-form of unique and incomparable grace, thus reasonably entertained, have not been fulfilled.\" To support this assessment, Carmen quotes Samuel Parsons as saying, \"We graft it readily upon high stock in the nursery, but it does not thrive as well\u2014the naked stem cracks and suffers and the massive foliage, like most evergreens perched on high stems, is too Facing page: Jean R. Trumpy (right) propagated Sargent's weeping hemlock on behalf of the nurserymen Samuel and Robert Parsons. Samuel (left) began promoting the plant in 1874, the same year that his brother, Robert, offered it in the fall catalogue for R. B. Parsons & Co. PARSONS (T. MEEHAN, 1887)\/ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES; TRUMPY (AMERICAN FLORIST, 1913) AND CATALOGUE (PARSONS, R. B. & CO., 1874)\/BOTH BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY heavy for grace and proportion, and is beaten and tossed by the winds.\" In November of 1877, just four months after Carmen's first article came out, the botanist George Thurber published an article in the magazine he edited, American Agriculturist, which echoed Carmen's negativity about high-grafting weeping hemlocks and published the second known illustration of Sargent's weeping hemlock. The intensity of the debate about whether to graft the weeping hemlock high or low on the understock dates back to 1870 when Scott advocated grafting \"well up on an ordinary hemlock stem\" in his initial description of the tree. In 1874, Samuel Parsons implicitly supported the practice of high-grafting when he stated that such weeping hemlocks were \"more like an evergreen fountain than any tree known.\" In Carmen's 1877 article, however, Parsons came out against high-grafting, and he repeated his opinion ten years later in The Garden, an English publication edited by William Robinson. Curiously, Parsons chose to illustrate this article with an image of an extremely beautiful, twenty-five-year-old specimen growing on the grounds of his nursery that had clearly been high-grafted and trained to a stake. The fact that three prominent horticulturists expressed strong negative opinions about highgrafted weeping hemlocks suggests there must have been serious survival issues with specimens propagated this way. In addition, Parsons com- The first three illustrations of Sargent's weeping hemlock depicted specimens that had been grafted high: The first (bottom) appeared in The Rural New Yorker in 1877. The second (left) appeared in the American Agriculturist that same year. The third illustration ran in The Garden in 1887 and depicted a specimen, grafted in 1862, that was eleven feet tall by thirteen feet across. ALL BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY CARMEN, 1877 THURBER, 1877 PARSONS, 1887 Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 17 mented that such plants were \"too heavy for grace and proportion,\" subtly expressing his preference for the low-growing specimens that, in 1874, he had disparaged as \"trailing upon the ground.\" The first commercial sales of Sargent's weeping hemlock took place in 1874 and 1875 and were followed by the tree's first public showing at the famous 1876 Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. In what must have been a remarkable display, 105 exhibits in the \"Ornamental Trees and Shrubs\" division were arranged in the landscape surrounding Horticultural Hall.11 In his 1878 report on the Centennial Exposition, the chairman of the Awards Committee, William Saunders, published a detailed description of eight of these exhibits, only one of which was reported to contain specimens of the weeping hemlock\u2014the Hoopes Brother & Thomas Nurseries of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Amazingly, their display featured three separate varieties of weeping hemlock: Abies Canadensis inverta, pendula, and Sargentii. Contrary to my expectations, Saunders's descriptions of both the S. B. Parsons and R. B. Parsons exhibits noted that varieties of Abies Canadensis were present but did not specifically mention any weeping types. After the exposition ended in November, the commissioners of Fairmount Park arranged to purchase the plants used in the nursery exhibits for planting in the park. According to a December 15, 1876, report by Eli K. Price, chairman of the Committee on Trees and Nurseries for the Fairmount Park Commissioners, many of the nurseries that displayed plants at Horticultural Hall\u2014including Hoopes Brother & Thomas, R. B. Parsons & Co., and S. B. Parson & Sons Co.\u2014\"were actuated by a liberal desire that their collections should remain in the Park, and offered them at prices which they esteemed little over half the cost to them. It was an object to the Commissioners to secure these permanently for our Park, to be transplanted as thinning out shall be required for their healthy growth, and they have been secured by purchase.\" Later records indicate that at least four weeping hemlocks were planted near Horticultural Hall, on a site that had formerly been occupied by the Women's Pavilion.12 Who Deserves Credit? The fact that Scott initially referred to the weeping hemlock as inverta in 1870 but quickly changed it to Sargenti suggests that there might have been an issue deciding who deserved credit for introducing the plant. This idea is supported by the story of the weeping hemlock that Carmen published in 1877, which credited the mysterious \"BURROW\" with discovering the tree. In his second article, from 1888, Carmen made a bold proposal to formalize Burrow's role over that of Sargent's: \"Now this Weeping Hemlock is catalogued as Abies Canadensis Sargentii pendula. Ought not the varietal name to be Burrowii pendula, in justice to the originator? Otherwise we should say that Mr. Trumpy's name should be given, since it was due to him rather than to Mr. Sargent that the tree was introduced.\" It took a while, but I eventually figured out who Burrow was thanks to a pair of advertisements I came across in the January and February 1875 issues of The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Taste. The advertisements\u2014for Burrow, Wood & Co., Mt. Hanas Nurseries\u2014 offered \"a few thousand grafts\" of the weeping hemlock from the \"Original Tree.\" This not only confirmed Carmen's assertion that someone named Burrow played a central role in the weeping hemlock story but also identified him as a nurseryman living in the town of Fishkill. A quick check of the 1880 census records for the town of Fishkill indicated that John G. Burrow was born in 1839 and lists his occupation as \"Hybridizer & Originator of New Variety of grapes.\" He had two partners, the brothers Isaac C. and Joseph J. Wood, both listed in the 1880 census as \"nurseryman.\"13 The Burrow, Wood & Co. advertisements raise the intriguing question of why Sargent insisted in late 1875 that the Parsons brothers were the only ones selling the weeping hemlock when he certainly must have known that Burrow, Wood & Co.\u2014located just five miles from his home in Fishkill Landing\u2014had started selling the plant earlier that year. Could it be that Sargent was annoyed that Burrow claimed to have discovered the weeping hemlock before he did and therefore chose to ignore him? This 18 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 idea is supported by two items in the advertisement: first, an unusual postscript at the end of the advertisement, \"P.S.\u2014 We were the first to send out this very desirable novelty,\" indicates that Burrow, Wood & Co. was directly challenging the Parsonses' claim to have introduced the tree into commerce; and second, by using the name pendula14 to describe the weeping hemlock\u2014as opposed to Sargenti\u2014they were rejecting proposals to attach Sargent's name to the plant. Clearly, the issue of priority had caused bad blood between Burrow and Sargent, especially in light of Carmen's 1877 statement that Burrow had provided Sargent with his first weeping hemlock. One final detail in the Burrow, Wood & Co. advertisement that should be noted is that the name of their nursery, \"Mt. Hanas,\" is an alternate spelling for what is now called Honness Mountain\u2014the same location where both Maxwell and Scott said the weeping hemlock had been discovered. An 1867 map of Dutchess County by Frederick W. Beers clearly shows \"Mount Honness Nursery, Burrow & Wood\" located about a half-mile west of the center of Fishkill. The map also shows the home of \"J. Burrow\" nestled into the south slope of Honness Mountain. I suspect that this coincidence is best explained by the fact that both Maxwell and Scott were referring to the specimen of the tree\u2014\"The Original Tree\"\u2014that Burrow had growing on his property rather than to one he had found growing in the wild. An Evolving Myth Following its commercial debut in the mid- 1870s, Sargent's weeping hemlock became something of a horticultural sensation. In 1897, fifteen years after Sargent's death, his cousin Charles Sprague Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, attempted to formalize the tree's origin story in a Garden and Forest An 1875 advertisement for Burrow, Wood & Co. confirmed the role of an enigmatic character in the weeping hemlock story: John G. Burrow, a nurseryman who lived at the base of Honness Mountain. ADVERTISEMENT (BURROW, WOOD & CO., 1875)\/BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY; DUTCHESS COUNTY, NY, MAP (1867)\/DAVID RUMSEY MAP COLLECTION, DAVID RUMSEY MAP CENTER, STANFORD LIBRARIES Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 19 article. He noted that the plant had been found \"about forty years ago on the Fishkill Mountains, in New York, and was first cultivated and made known by Mr. H. W. Sargent \u2026 Several of these plants were originally found together and transplanted and the largest of them which I have seen is on the Howland estate, in Matteawan, New York, and is now about twenty five feet across. This variety has been propagated by grafting the branches on the ordinary Hemlock, but in a few years, the grafted plants form an erect stem and lose the dense low habit which is the charm of the original seedlings.\" Keeping in mind that Sargent's statement was written some forty years after the events described, it puts the date of the discovery at \"about\" 1857. For the first time, the article also reports that \"several plants were found together and transplanted,\" but it does not say by whom. Indeed, Sargent carefully counters Scott's 1870 suggestion that H. W. Sargent was the discoverer of the \"seedlings\" by noting that he was the one who \"first cultivated and made known\" the tree. Sargent followed his cousin's lead by not mentioning John Burrow or Honness Mountain, but he does weigh in on the high-grafting debate by expressing his preference for the lowbranched \"seedlings.\" Sargent's article is also noteworthy because it mentions that one of the original plants was growing at the Howland estate in the village of Matteawan (now Beacon), New York. This marks the first time that General Joseph Howland is mentioned in connection with the weeping hemlock, but Sargent does not credit him with its discovery. This attribution came fifteen years later, in 1912, in an unsigned article in the Arnold Arboretum's Bulletin of Popular Information written by Sargent's colleague Ernest H. Wilson:15 Many years ago, four or five plants of this form [Tsuga canadensis var. pendula] were found by Taxonomist Alfred Rehder photographed the Sargent's weeping hemlock at Holm Lea, in Brookline, in 1900. ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES 20 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 the late Joseph Howland of Mattapan [sic], New York, on one of the mountains back of Fishkill Landing on the Hudson River and were named by him Sargent's Hemlock for his friend and neighbor Henry Winthrop Sargent. One or perhaps two of these wild plants are now living, although the variety has been much propagated by nurserymen by grafting its branches on the common Hemlock \u2026 The plant in the Arboretum on Hemlock Hill Road is a grafted plant, but at Holm Lea in Brookline there is one of General Howland's original plants. In Wilson's retelling of the weeping hemlock story, he makes several mistakes: first, he confuses Howland's hometown of Matteawan with a Boston suburb, Mattapan, and then he goes on to identify Howland as the discoverer of Sargent's weeping hemlock when no one else mentioned him in this role. The saving grace of Wilson's article is that he mentions, for the first time, that one of the original weeping hemlocks was growing at C. S. Sargent's private estate, Holm Lea. In 1923, the British horticulturist Murray Hornibrook put the finishing touches on this widely cited but factually challenged version of the weeping hemlock story in Dwarf and Slow-Growing Conifers: \"Professor Sargent informs me that the nurseryman's stock has all been produced from grafts from the four original plants found near the summit of Fishkill Mountain (near Beacon City, on the Hudson River) by General Joseph Howland about 1870. The finder grew one in his own garden at Matteawan, N.Y., gave the second to Mr. Henry Winthrop Sargent of Fishkill; the third to Mr. H. H. Hunnewell16 of Wellesley, Mass., and the fourth to Professor C. S. Sargent of Brookline, Mass. The second and third are dead, but the first and fourth have made very fine specimens.\" The Horton Hemlock Hornibrook's Sargent-approved version of the weeping hemlock story from 1923 received its first serious challenge in 1939, when Arlow B. Stout of the New York Botanical Garden announced to the world that \"the largest and presumably the oldest specimen of this type (Tsuga canadensis var. pendula) is a tree that stands in stately splendor in its original wild location on the mountainside overlooking the hamlet of Hortontown,\" about eight and a half miles as the crow flies from H. W. Sargent's home in Fishkill Landing. According to Stout, \"My first knowledge of this tree was during 1937 when it came into view as I passed by auto along the newly constructed Eastern State Parkway [now the Taconic State Parkway].\" The tree was sixteen feet tall and had a single trunk\u2014eighteen inches in diameter\u2014that was unbranched for its first five feet. Stout interviewed the owner of the tree, Joseph Horton, who told him that he had known the tree \"since sixty-five years [1874] and that it was then at least one half as large as it is now.\" In February 1980, when I first visited the Horton hemlock, it was owned by Jacob Veldhuis, who was using the tree\u2014which was over eighteen feet tall and thirty-one feet across\u2014as a kind of storage shed, a use to which it was admirably, if ignobly, suited. The pendant branches concealed no less than half a cord of wood, a hundred-gallon oil tank, a ladder, a wheelbarrow, several packages of shingles, and innumerable other artifacts of country life. The branches that formed the tree's canopy grew out from the trunk at about eight feet, and within the canopy, considerable self-grafting occurred where the branches touched one another. In his 1939 article, Stout noted that the Horton hemlock was growing \"close to a dwelling,\" but I was surprised to see that it was only about twenty feet away from the corner of the house\u2014a fact that cast some doubt in my mind on Stout's \"original wild location\" hypothesis, as did the tree's single, unbranched trunk. This doubt was reinforced by the fact that I had been told that the so-called \"Knapp house\" where the tree was growing predated the American Revolution. At the same time, however, I chose to ignore the fact that the tree was growing at the edge of a relatively steep, rocky slope where it was unlikely to have been planted. Having seen the Horton hemlock in the flesh, I felt the need to learn more about it, so Facing page: Eva Scofield, photographed in 1938 (bottom), stands with the Horton weeping hemlock. The tree grew outside of a family home that first appeared on maps as \"E. Horton, Grocery\" in 1876. The author first visited and photographed the plant in 1980. SCOFIELD\/HAMILTON, ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES; HORTON HEMLOCK IN 1980\/PETER DEL TREDICI; PUTNAM COUNTY, NY, 1876\/PUTNAM COUNTY HISTORIAN'S OFFICE DIGITAL COLLECTION 22 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 I persuaded Jack Karnig, chief forester at the nearby (and now disbanded) Harvard Black Rock Forest in Cornwall, New York, to take core samples from the lowest branches on the tree\u2014at heights of five and six feet\u2014in order to calculate its age. The cores that Jack sent me in March of 1980 came with the following note: \"Your hemlock was a son of a b----. Twice I bored and got nothing. Finally got a reserve borer (smaller one) and managed to pull two cores.\" Under the dissecting microscope at the Arboretum, I counted 119 rings in the lower of the two cores\u2014with an average width of 0.5 millimeters\u2014which meant that the tree was at least five feet tall in 1860. In other words, the Horton hemlock was already a substantial tree when Burrow and Sargent first learned about it! While I was surprised by the 1860 date, I was still skeptical that the tree was growing in its original wild location given its single-trunk form and its proximity to the house. My suspicions were confirmed a year later when I unexpectedly discovered two photographs of the Horton hemlock in the Arnold Arboretum Archives. They were taken in May 1938 by Ormond Hamilton, a noted conifer enthusiast from Conway, Massachusetts, and the handwritten caption on the back of one of them stated that the tree was \"growing on place of Miss Eva Horton, Horton Town, Hopewell Junction, N. Y. This is not far from Beacon, N. Y. It was transplanted from mountain back of Beacon to its present site by Miss Horton's grandfather.\" I was stunned by this discovery, and in 1983, when I published my book on Sargent's weeping hemlock, I rejected Stout's theory that the Horton hemlock was the original tree in its original location and postulated instead that \"grandfather Horton discovered at least five weeping hemlock seedlings on the mountains between Hortontown and Beacon, New York. Sometime after 1859 but before 1865, he collected one plant for himself (and staked it) and sold the rest to H. W. Sargent.\" At the time, I naively thought I had finally solved the mystery of Sargent's weeping hemlock. Inspired by my book, Dennis Murphy of Warwick, New York, wrote me a letter on July 17, 1986, describing how he had visited the Horton hemlock in the company of a local dairy farmer, Vern Jackson, who told him that the house adjacent to the tree had been used as a store for many years. Murphy also spoke with Smith Townsend, one of the oldest residents in the area, who told him that Eva Horton's grandfather Alvah never lived in the house and that her father, Joseph, did not move there until \"after the death of Enoch Horton [in 1913] who was the last proprietor of the store.\" According to Townsend, Enoch, Alvah, and Joseph Horton were all buried in the cemetery located behind the old Calvary Methodist Church on Hortontown Road, and indeed, when Murphy visited the cemetery, he located the tombstones for both Alvah and Enoch. When I received Murphy's letter, I had no idea what to think given that it upended my published version of the origin of Sargent's weeping hemlock. I thanked Dennis for his letter and filed it away. And that's where things sat until 2015, when, by chance, I came across a statement by H. W. Sargent, from 1880, about who really discovered the weeping hemlock. This unexpected discovery got me thinking about the tree again and prompted me to pull out my old files where I rediscovered the letter from Dennis Murphy and the questions it had raised. One thing led to another and, with the help of the internet and several local historians, I was able to piece together the history of the Horton family farm. It turns out that the house where the tree was located\u2014now listed as 339 Hortontown Road, Hopewell Junction\u2014was not pre-Revolutionary at all but had been constructed by Enoch Horton in 1874, on an acre of land he acquired from his father, Jefferson Horton, for the price of one dollar.17 A local map from 1876 shows 339 Hortontown Road as \"E. Horton Grocery\" just as Vern Jackson had remembered. The same map, as well as one from 1854, shows Jefferson Horton's house just down the road apiece. According to Smith Townsend (as reported by Dennis Murphy), Alvah Horton lived about a half mile away from Jefferson Horton on Long Hill Road, and Alvah's son, Joseph, moved into the house on Hortontown Road after Enoch Horton's death in 1913. In 1939, Joseph Horton told Stout that he had \"known\" the weeping hemlock since 1874\u2014 when he was thirteen years old\u2014which coin- \u222b Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 23 cidentally was the date that Enoch Horton acquired land from his father and would have begun clearing the land around the weeping hemlock in order to build his house. In 1938, Joseph Horton's daughter, Eva Scofield, told Ormond Hamilton that her grandfather had transplanted the tree \"to its present site,\" but this is highly unlikely since her grandfather Alvah never lived in the house where the tree was located. Given that the Horton hemlock was at least five feet tall in 1860, the most plausible explanation for why it was growing where it was is that it had always been there. The Internet to the Rescue As stated above, my research on Sargent's weeping hemlock remained dormant until 2015, when in the course of doing internet research on the history of the introduction of Japanese plants into North America,18 I came across an article from 1880 by Samuel Parsons Jr., the son of nurseryman Samuel B. Parsons and an eminent landscape architect and horticulturist in his own right. The article was a transcript of a \"prize lecture\" Parsons delivered in Boston before a meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society on January 17, 1880. In his talk, Parsons described in detail\u2014and at length\u2014 how best to use the flood of new woody plants that were coming into the market, especially Japanese species recently introduced by his father's company, Kissena Nurseries. Three-quarters of the way into his presentation, Parsons mentioned Sargent's weeping hemlock. \"If the broad-leaved hemlock [Abies Canadensis macrophylla] is somewhat stern and masculine in its outline,\" Parsons began, \"the weeping hemlock [Abies Canadensis pendula Sargentii] is essentially feminine in its graceful curves and fountain-like sprays of green.\" Parsons went on to credit H. W. Sargent for discovering the tree \"about twenty years ago [1860], near his place, at Fishkill on the Hudson, and moved by his enthusiasm and appreciation of choice ornamental trees, entrusted it for propagation to the distinguished expert, J. R. Trumpy.\" As I reached the end of Parsons's article, a paragraph appended to the conclusion of his lecture caught my attention. In it, the chairman of the Saturday morning meeting, the nurseryman William C. Strong of Brighton, Massachusetts, thanked Parsons for his lecture and then said that he was going to cut the discussion short so that the attendees could hear from \"a gentleman well known to be thoroughly versed in the subject before the meeting, and the editor of the new edition of Downing's Landscape Gardening\u2014Henry Winthrop Sargent, of Fishkill, N.Y., of whose presence he desired the Society to have the advantage.\" Strong went on to report that \"Mr. Sargent spoke first of the weeping hemlock, which was first introduced by him, and which he said was a very good 'find' by an old farmer on the mountains back of his (Mr. Sargent's) house. He has the largest tree of it, which is eight feet high, and spreads from fifteen to twenty feet. He has assisted the leader by tying it up to a stake. It is difficult of propagation.\" This brief quote\u2014a proverbial smoking gun\u2014 struck with the force of a thunderbolt. Shockingly, Sargent contradicted Parsons who, just a few minutes earlier, had claimed that Sargent had discovered the weeping hemlock. No, says Sargent, the tree was found by an \"old farmer\" who had a large specimen of it at his home. The fact that Sargent specifically says, \"He has assisted the leader by tying it up to a stake\" is undoubtedly a reference to the single-stemmed Horton hemlock. In addition, Sargent's use of the present tense indicates that the \"old farmer\" who found the weeping hemlock was still alive as of 1880. Assuming a discovery date in the late 1850s, Enoch Horton, born in 1846, would have been too young to qualify as Sargent's \"old farmer.\" But his father, Jefferson Horton (1804-1888), was still living at the time of the lecture and would have fit the bill\u2014especially given that the 1860 census lists his occupation as \"farmer.\" Taken together, all the evidence indicates that Jefferson Horton discovered Sargent's weeping hemlock growing wild on his own property. The size of the Horton hemlock in 1880\u2014 eight feet high by fifteen to twenty feet across\u2014 coupled with my tree ring data showing that the tree was at least five feet tall in 1860, strongly suggests that Frank Scott had seen the tree and used it as the basis for his prediction that Sargent's weeping hemlock would reach a mature size of thirty by forty feet. It also seems possible 24 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 that John Burrow knew about the Horton weeping hemlock and that it was the \"Original Tree\" he referred to in his advertisement from which he had produced \"a few thousand grafts.\" Hemlock Layering Around the time that I discovered H. W. Sargent's bombshell statement in 2015, I was also working on an article documenting the layering behavior of hemlocks growing wild on Wachusett Mountain, in central Massachusetts.19 My research showed that the low-hanging branches of stunted hemlocks growing on exposed, rocky sites can form adventitious roots where they come in contact with the soil and, over time, readjust their orientation from horizontal to vertical. In a moment of clarity, it dawned to me that the layering behavior of hemlocks that I had observed on Wachusett Mountain might be relevant to Jefferson Horton's discovery of the weeping hemlock. Could it be that the low-growing \"seedlings\" that C. S. Sargent first mentioned in 1897 were actually rooted branch layers dug up from the periphery of the wild weeping tree that Horton discovered? To my mind, finding a lone weeping hemlock with attached branch layers is much more plausible than finding five virtually identical mutant seedlings growing in one place. If there was just one original weeping tree sprawling across the ground, then it was probably growing on a sunny, exposed site with thin soil\u2014similar to the examples that I observed on Wachusett Mountain\u2014and its strongly pendulous lower branches would have been retained long enough to develop into layers. If this layering theory is applied to Sargent's weeping hemlock, it seems likely that when The size and age of the Horton weeping hemlock, photographed here in 1938, suggests that it was the original tree\u2014 staked in the location where Jefferson Horton found it. The photographer, Ormond Hamilton, reported that the trunk measured twenty-two inches in diameter at three feet off the ground. ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 25 Jefferson Horton discovered the weeping hemlock on a steep, rocky slope on his own property, it would have been growing prostrate along the ground. Assuming the tree behaved like the ones I saw on Wachusett Mountain, he might well have dug up a couple of the layered branches and sold them to Burrow and Sargent. He then tied a branch on the remaining plant to a stake to create a single trunk. It also seems possible that he might have induced his tree to form the additional layers by pinning its pendulous branches to the ground. Evidence for the layering of Sargent's weeping hemlock comes from multiple sources: First, many of the mature, multistemmed specimens of the tree display layered lower branches. In fact, Al Fordham, a former propagator at the Arnold Arboretum, successfully removed one such layer, in 1966, from the weeping hemlock that C. S. Sargent had planted at his Brookline estate, Holm Lea. Second, when the nurseryman Jacob C. van Heiningen20 spoke to Stout about the origins of Sargent's weeping hemlock, in 1939, he reported that he had stopped grafting the hemlock because of their poor survival rate and that he had propagated several hundred plants by \"the old fashioned way of layering which is naturally perfect, as they are on their own roots.\"21 Third, H. W. Sargent himself never used the word seedling, but instead called the plant \"a sport of our native Hemlock.\" Sport is an old-fashioned horticultural term that describes a mutant plant that obviously deviates from the normal type. In his 1874 article \"Evergreens, Novelties and Dwarfs,\" Maxwell also uses the term \"Sports of Nature\" to describe various mutant conifers and points to the weeping hemlock sport found on \"Mt. Hounes\" as an example of \"a real deformity\" that became a \"thing of beauty\" after receiving proper horticultural treatment (high-grafting and staking). Perhaps the most convincing bits of evidence for the theory that Sargent's weeping hemlock was derived from a single plant comes from the Burrow, Wood & Co. advertisement that referred to an \"Original Tree\" and from Carmen's 1877 statement that Sargent's tree at Wodenethe, \"either from a layer or graft, was derived from the original tree of Mr. BURROW'S.\" Taken together, all of these early references clearly suggest that Jefferson Horton's original discovery consisted of a single tree that he propagated by layering\u2014the \"single sport theory\"\u2014 rather than the \"multiple seedlings theory\" proposed by C. S. Sargent some forty years after Horton's initial discovery. Indeed, Sargent's statement that \"the dense low habit which is the charm of the original seedlings\" implies a level of uniformity that is more characteristic of vegetatively propagated layers than a group of genetically distinct seedlings.22 As I reported in A Giant Among the Dwarfs, there is considerable variation in the size and form of the oldest specimens of Sargent's weeping hemlock as well as considerable debate as to whether these differences are genetic or the result of horticultural practices.23 The surprisingly heated debate about the merits of highgrafting among the horticulturists of the day make it clear that the different appearances of the original specimens are a reflection of their mode of propagation\u2014layering versus grafting\u2014 and whether or not they were staked.24 The Final Story Putting all this information together, I can now present the most likely\u2014and hopefully final\u2014version of the Sargent's weeping hemlock story: Sometime in the 1850s, \"an old farmer,\" Jefferson Horton, discovered a wild weeping hemlock growing on his property in Hortontown (Hopewell Junction), New York. The tree, which was rediscovered by A. B. Stout in 1937, was growing in its original wild location about twenty feet from the house and grocery store that Jefferson Horton's son Enoch had built in 1874. Sometime prior to 1861, John Burrow learned about Horton's weeping hemlock and obtained a layer, which he planted on his own property on Honness Mountain in Fishkill. Around the same time, Henry Winthrop Sargent also learned about the weeping hemlock and obtained a layer of it from either John Burrow or Jefferson Horton. The specimens that both men were growing were relatively small when J. R. Trumpy of Parsons & Sons Nursery visited Fishkill in 1861 looking for propagation material. After Burrow refused to sell him his tree, Trumpy visited Sargent who gave him some 26 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 scions, and he grafted these when he returned to Flushing. At some point, Sargent obtained at least three additional weeping hemlock layers from either his own tree or from Horton's tree. He planted one of them at General Joseph Howland's estate, Tioronda, in Matteawan, New York; gave a second to his cousin C. S. Sargent, who planted it on his estate, Holm Lea, in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1871; and gave the third to his kinsman Horatio Hollis Hunnewell of Wellesley, Massachusetts. Josiah Hoopes published the first description of the weeping hemlock in 1868. Frank J. Scott gave the tree its first Latin name, Abies canadensis inverta, in 1870, and later that year published the first proper description of Sargent's weeping hemlock under the name Abies canadensis Sargenti. Robert B. Parsons & Co. of Flushing, New York, was the first nursery to offer the tree for sale in the fall of 1874, and his brother, Samuel, started writing about it in horticultural magazines around the same time. Burrow, Wood & Co., Mt. Hanas Nursery of Fishkill, began offering grafts of the \"Original Tree\"\u2014Jefferson Horton's tree\u2014in January 1875 under the name Abies canadensis Pendula, the first time this name was applied to the plant. At least four specimens of Sargent's weeping hemlock were put on public display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and were later planted out on the grounds of Fairmount Park. Elbert Carmen published the first illustration of Sargent's weeping hemlock in 1877, followed a few months later by a second one from George Thurber, and a third from S. B. Parsons in 1887. In 1937, Arlow B. Stout rediscovered Jefferson Horton's specimen of Sargent's weeping hemlock in Hortontown, about four miles southeast of Fishkill and eight miles from Beacon. The convoluted story of Sargent's weeping hemlock\u2014which should by rights be called Horton's weeping hemlock\u2014is a cautionary tale about the confusion and infighting that often surrounds the issue of who gets credit for the discovery and introduction of a new plant as well as the myth-making that sets in once the facts have been clouded by the passage of time.25 Nomenclature In 1983, I accepted Alfred Rehder's 1949 determination that the correct scientific name for Sargent's weeping hemlock was Tsuga canadensis forma pendula. I did this because of C. S. Sargent's assertion that the original discovery consisted of \"several seedlings\" found in the wild fit the technical requirements of a botanical forma.26 Because I now know that the original specimens of Sargent's weeping hemlock were actually layers from a single plant, the tree should be reclassified as a horticultural cultivar.27 In the light of this new information, the relevant question becomes what the \"correct\" cultivar name for Sargent's weeping hemlock should be rather than what rank it should be. According to Article 29.2 of the International Code of Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants,28 \"When there are two or more names in use for the same cultivar \u2026 the name that best preserves existing use is to be chosen as the accepted name by the appropriate International Registration Authority without regard to any rank in which those epithets might have been established or to the principle of priority.\" Scott's first epithet, inverta, from 1870 is clearly out of the running given that it lacked a proper description and it last appeared in print in 1876. Scott's second 1870 proposal, Sargenti, was properly described and is in wide use today as 'Sargentii'.29 Pendula came late to the party, first appearing in 1875, and seems to be used more commonly today than Sargentii. In 1983, I chose to use the name pendula because I thought that the tree was a botanical forma and the German botanist Beissner, in 1887, was the first author to describe Sargent's weeping hemlock as a forma with the name pendula. Now that I know Sargent's weeping hemlock is actually a cultivar, I prefer using the name 'Sargentii' because it helps clarify the distinction between the two categories. I also like the name 'Sargentii' because it has temporal priority and reflects the plant's common name, but it's up to the International Registrar to make the final determination. Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 27 HORTONTOWN: Based on branch core data, the single-trunked Horton hemlock was at least 5 feet tall in 1860, making this the oldest known specimen of Sargent's weeping hemlock. In 1880, H. W. Sargent said the tree was 8 feet tall by 15 to 20 feet across. In 1980, it was 18.3 feet tall by 31 feet across with a trunk diameter of 24.5 inches. When I visited the tree in December 2018, it was completely dead but still standing with a trunk diameter of 28.3 inches. A picture of the tree on the internet from spring 2015\u2014when the house at 339 Hortontown Road, Hopewell Junction, New York, was put up for sale\u2014shows it to be in poor condition. In a Google Earth image of the site on April 16, 2016, the tree appears dead. WODENETHE: Henry Winthrop Sargent purchased the twenty-two-acre parcel of land that became Wodenethe in 1841 and described the evolution of its landscape in the supplement to the sixth edition of Andrew Jackson Downing's Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, published in 1859. Sargent died in 1882, but the property remained in the family until 1921, when the house and grounds were sold and incorporated it into the Craig House Sanatorium. In 1955, Wodenethe was sold to a developer. The house was burned down as part of a fire-training session by the Beacon Engine Company in order to prepare the land for subdivision and housing construction. The first reference to a weeping hemlock at Wodenethe came in 1868 from Hoopes, and the last came from Maxwell, in 1874, who called it \"one of the most interesting and ornamental plants in his entire collection.\" As for the question of when Sargent's tree might have died, it is worth noting that Charles Sprague Sargent made no mention of a weeping hemlock in the article he wrote about Wodenethe in 1897. Current Status of Notable Sargent's Weeping Hemlocks TIORONDA: In 1859, Joseph Howland purchased sixty-five acres of land as a site for his country estate, Tioronda, in the village of Matteawan, on the other side of Fishkill Creek from the home of H. W. Sargent. Construction of the house was completed in 1861 while Howland was off fighting the Civil War. He returned home with the rank of brigadier general. Sargent oversaw the laying out of the grounds for Howland, and at some point, he planted a layer from the original weeping hemlock near the entrance. Howland died in 1886, and his widow sold the estate in 1911. In 1915, the property was converted into America's first privately run psychiatric center and renamed The Hortontown weeping hemlock 1981 (above) and standing dead in 2018. Note the Taconic Parkway in the background. ALL \"CURRENT STATUS\" PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR UNLESS NOTED 28 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 Craig House.30 The facility closed its doors in 1999.31 The tree was heavily pruned in the late 1990s or early 2000s and treated for hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae). In December 2018, the Tioronda specimen was 16 feet tall and 40 feet by 34 feet across and had four major trunks with basal diameters ranging from 16 to 29 inches. HOLM LEA: H. W. Sargent also provided a weeping hemlock to his cousin Charles Sprague Sargent, who planted the specimen at Holm Lea, in Brookline, Massachusetts. According to the caption on the back of a May 1923 photo, located in the Arnold Arboretum archives, the tree was planted in 1871. When I measured it in 1980, it was 7.5 feet tall and 32.5 feet across with multiple trunks emerging from the ground. On February 23, 1984, the tree was destroyed by a fire of suspicious origin, perhaps set by some teenagers who were reported in the vicinity of the tree that night. Indeed, the tree had long been an attraction for neighborhood children who called it \"The Fort\" and often played beneath its pendant branches. The Arnold Arboretum collected a layer off of the Holm Lea tree in 1966, and the resulting plant (accession 655-66*A) is currently 7.6 feet tall and 17.3 by 15.5 feet across with a basal trunk diameter of 16 inches. HUNNEWELL: H. W. Sargent described the making of Horatio Hollis Hunnewell's estate in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in his 1859 supplement to the sixth edition of Downing's book, in the same chapter that described the creation of Wodenethe. Hunnewell was married to Isabella Wells, H. W. Sargent's first cousin, and through this connection was also related to C. S. Sargent. Some people have suggested that a large weeping hemlock in the Hun- The Tioronda weeping hemlock in 1980 and December 2018 (top two). The Holm Lea weeping hemlock in 1980 and in 1984, with Gus Kelley, after the fire. Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 29 newell Pinetum might have been one of H. W. Sargent's original plants because of its multistemmed form, but it does not appear on an 1895 map of the collection. In 1923, Murray Hornibrook\u2014on C. S. Sargent's authority\u2014announced that one of the original seedlings went to Hunnewell but that it had died. In 2012, the estate's longtime horticulturist, David Dusenbury, uncovered a reference from the late 1920s among the unpublished writings of Theophilus D. Hatfield, who worked at the Hunnewell estate from 1887 until 1929: \"The original plant [of Sargent's weeping hemlock] I believe is still on the late professor Sargent's estate in Brookline. Our plant, of course, is a graft, and indeed a very handsome specimen, admired by all visitors.\" As of 2019, the tree measured 22 feet tall and 47.5 feet by 42.2 feet across; it has four large trunks with breast-height diameters ranging from 13 to 27 inches. FAIRMOUNT PARK: Following the end of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, at least four weeping hemlocks were sold to the Fairmount Park Commission and planted near Horticultural Hall, on a site that had formerly been occupied by the Women's Pavilion. In 1896, Joseph Meehan reported that the four trees were \"a source of much interest to the numerous visitors to the park. Having been grown for twenty years, they excel [sic] probably any other specimens in these parts. They are about six feet high and eight feet in width.\" In 1939, they ranged in size from 12 to 14 feet tall. When I visited the park in 1994, all four trees were still alive, and the largest specimen measured between 34.5 feet tall and 40 by 50 feet across with a basal trunk diameter of 31 inches. In November 2018, only this tree and one other were still alive. The Hunnewell weeping hemlock in 1930 and 2010 (top two). The Fairmount Park weeping hemlocks in 1938 and one in November 2018. A. B. STOUT, ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES H. G. MAYER, ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES 30 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 ARNOLD ARBORETUM: A singlestemmed, grafted specimen (accession 1514-2*A) was propagated in 1881 from scions taken from a grafted plant received from S. B. Parsons & Sons, Kissena Nurseries in 1880. In 1980, a large branch with sixty-six growth rings was removed from the tree 6 feet up the stem, indicating that it was at least this tall in 1913. As of December 2018, the tree was 16 feet tall by 25 feet across with a trunk diameter at breast height of 19.4 inches; its trunk had a pronounced lean to it and structural roots near the base were protruding out from the ground. LOVE LANE: Claiming to have found the largest anything is always a risky proposition, but with that caveat, the largest weeping hemlock I have seen is growing in a lawn on a private estate in Weston, Massachusetts. It was planted in the early 1900s on property owned by John G. Freeman and his wife, Caroline Case, the sister of Marian Case, who established Hillcrest Farms at the Case Estates.32 In 1980, this giant, multistemmed specimen of Sargent's weeping hemlock was 19 feet tall and 47 feet by 43 feet wide. In 2018, it was 22 feet tall and 79 feet by 70 feet across with eight huge, ribbon-shaped stems with diameters ranging between 20 and 32 inches. It's a truly magnificent tree, but the main trunk was starting to split apart and one of its upper limbs had broken, leaving a large hole in the once closed canopy. The Arnold Arboretum's oldest weeping hemlock (1514-2*A) in September 1945 and June 2019 (top two). The Sargent's weeping hemlock on Love Lane in 2019 and, showing the branching structure, in 2016. J. F. ROCK, ARNOLD ARBORETUM ARCHIVES Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 31 DEDICATION This article is dedicated to the memory of Gus Kelley of Little Compton, Rhode Island, who first inspired me to take up the study of Sargent's weeping hemlock. Endnotes 1 Jenkins, 1946 2 According to A Book of the United States, edited by G. Mellen and published in 1838: \"The Highlands of the Hudson, or Fishkill Mountains, which first appear about forty miles from New York, are marked for their sublimity and grandeur, and interesting from their connection with many great events of the revolution. This chain is sixteen miles in width, and extends twenty miles along both sides of the Hudson.\" 3 Smith (1856) paints a vivid picture of Wodenethe in all its glory, and Spingarn (1937) documents the significant role that Sargent played in the history of American horticulture not only as a writer and plant collector but also a horticultural innovator. He was one of the first Americans to use a lawn mower and marveled, in 1855, at how it could do in eight hours what \"formerly occupied two men and a boy the better part of nine days to do, and infinitely better too.\" 4 Sargent's ideas about gardening were heavily influenced by the writings of the British horticulturist J. C. Loudon. According to Spingarn (1937), \"Loudon's 'gardenesque style' became Sargent's ideal, as it became that of the Arnold Arboretum\u2014in other words, an arboretum landscaped like a park-like English estate.\" 5 The earliest scientific name for the eastern hemlock, also known as the hemlock fir or hemlock spruce, was Pinus canadensis, bestowed by Linnaeus in 1763. Andr\u00e9 Michaux changed it to Abies canadensis in 1796, and in 1855, the French botanist L. Carri\u00e8re created the genus Tsuga to encompass all hemlocks and assigned the name Tsuga canadensis to the eastern hemlock, a change that was accepted slowly. 6 Apparently Honness Mountain is a corruption of the Dutch term hondenneus, meaning \"dog's nose.\" 7 Plans VIII, IX, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, and XVII also feature \"Sargent's hemlock, Abies canadensis inverta.\" 8 Williams, 1872; Hoopes, 1875 9 Jean Rudolph Trumpy was born in Glarus, Switzerland, in 1830 and died on May 21, 1913; he worked in the gardens of the King of Bavaria before coming to America in 1856 (A. F. F., 1913). 10 The illustration that Carmen used with his article is of a specimen at Parsons's Nursery and first appeared in an article that S. B. Parsons wrote for The Garden in 1887; it also appeared in an unsigned 1887 article in the Horticultural Art Journal, volume 2, page 72. 11 T. Meehan, 1876 12 Rothrock, 1880; Jenkins, 1933 13 See also the 1910 obituary of Isaac C. Wood, published in Horticulture, 12(5): 156. 14 This advertisement constitutes the first use of the epithet Pendula to describe Sargent's weeping hemlock. 15 The article can be ascribed to Wilson due to the fact that he reprinted much the same information\u2014including the mistakes and much of the same phrasing\u2014in an article he wrote for The Garden Magazine in 1920. 16 Horatio Hollis Hunnewell was married to Isabella Wells, H. W. Sargent's first cousin (Sutton, 1970). 17 Sallie Sypher, deputy historian for Putnam County, located the Horton Claim Deed (executed on June 10, 1874) in Liber 67, pp. 21-22 at the Putnam County Clerk's Office. 18 Del Tredici, 2017 19 Del Tredici and Orwig, 2017 20 Van Heiningen established South Wilton Nurseries in Wilton, Connecticut, in the early 1900s. 21 See Hoopes (1868) and Wells (1955) for a description of layering in nursery practice. 22 It is tempting to speculate that the tendency of Sargent's weeping hemlock to \"come true\" from seed (first observed in 1906) provides evidence for Sargent's seedling theory (Jenkins, 1935; Stout, 1939; Del Tredici, 1983). The parsimony principle (Occam's Razor), however, suggests that propagating six layers off one parent tree is more likely than finding six identical seedlings growing in a single location. 23 Bean, 1914; Stout, 1939; Swartley, 1984 24 My own research at the Arnold Arboretum demonstrated that, after four years, grafted plants of two dwarf hemlock clones, 'Nana' and 'Cole's Prostrate', were significantly larger and broader than cutting-grown plants on their own roots (Del Tredici, 1985). Presumably these differences were due to the fact that a grafted plant is \"bi-genomic,\" with a normal root system and a dwarf top, while both the roots and the shoots of a cutting-grown plant are derived from the same dwarf genome. As regards staking, the early propagators knew that tying the leader to a stake dramatically increases both a plant's height and the speed of its growth. 25 In St. George and the Pygmies (1984), I describe the tangled story of Tsuga canadensis 'Minuta', which bears remarkable similarities to the story of Sargent's weeping hemlock. 26 According to Davis and Haywood (1965), the rank of forma (abbreviated f.) is the lowest unit of botanical classification and describes a single-character variation with a random distribution within a natural plant population. While horticultural taxonomy still uses the forma designation, it has fallen out of favor in botanical taxonomy. 27 In 1953, the horticultural concept of the cultivar was introduced as the preferred way to describe plants that have undergone some degree of human selection. Over time, the cultivar name in single quotes has largely 32 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 supplanted the use of the botanical concept of forma to describe horticultural selections. With woody plants, the cultivar name is typically, but not always, used to describe asexually propagated clones. 28 Brickell et al., 2016 29 According to the rules of nomenclature, when a plant name is derived from a person's name that ends in a consonant, the letters ii are added to it. 30 Craig House hosted many famous \"guests,\" including F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda; Frances Seymour, the wife of Henry Fonda and mother of Jane Fonda; Rosemary Kennedy, after her catastrophic lobotomy; and the actors Jackie Gleason and Marilyn Monroe. 31 In 1933, Jenkins describes meeting Clarence Slocum, who initially managed Craig House. I met with his son Jonathan on several occasions in the 1980s, and on my last visit, he gave me the remains of H. W. Sargent's library as a donation to the Arnold Arboretum Archives. 32 According to the \"Love Lane Historical Narrative\" on the Town of Weston website, the landscape plan for the Freeman\/Paine house at 55 Love Lane was drawn up in 1901. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.weston. org\/687\/Love-Lane-Area-Historical-Narrative References A. F. F. 1913. Obituary, Jean Rudolph Trumpy. The American Florist 40(1304): 1059. See also: Anon. 1913. Obituary, J. R. Trumpy. Horticulture 17(22): 844; Anon. 1913. Noted horticulturist dead. New York Times: May 24, 1913: 4. Bean, W. J. 1914. Trees and shrubs hardy in the British Isles. London: John Murray. Beissner, L. 1887. Systematische eintheinlung der coniferen. F. L. Winterlich: Dresden. Brickell, C. D., Alexander, C., Cubby, J. J., David, J. C., Hoffman, M. H. A., Leslie, A. C., Mal\u00e9cot, V., and Jin, X. 2016. International code of nomenclature for cultivated plants (9th ed.). Leuven: International Society for Horticultural Science. Burrow, Wood & Co. 1875. Weeping hemlock grafts [Advertisement]. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, 30(343): 1; and 30(344): 5. Carmen, E. S. 1877, July 21. The weeping hemlock (Abies Canadensis pendula). Moore's Rural New- Yorker, 36(3): 37. Carmen, E. S. 1888, January 21. The weeping hemlock. The Rural New-Yorker, 47: 38. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. 1867. Map of Fishkill, Dutchess Co., N.Y. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.davidrumsey.com\/luna\/servlet\/ detail\/RUMSEY~8~1~272985~90046810:Fish kill,-Dutchess-County,-New-York?qvq=w4s:\/ where%2FDutchess%2BCounty%2B%25252 8N.Y.%252529%2F;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=1& trs=50 Davis, P. H. and Haywood, V. H. 1965. Principles of angiosperm taxonomy. New York: D. Van Nostrand and Co. Del Tredici, P. 1980. Sargent's weeping hemlock reconsidered. Arnoldia, 40(5): 202-224. Del Tredici, P. 1983. A giant among the dwarfs: The mystery of Sargent's weeping hemlock. Little Compton, RI: Theophrastus. Del Tredici, P. 1984. St. George and the pygmies. Little Compton, RI: Theophrastus. Del Tredici, P. 1985. Propagation of Tsuga canadensis cultivars: Softwood vs. hardwood cuttings. Combined Proceedings of the International Plant Propagators' Society, 35: 565-569. Del Tredici, P. 2017. The introduction of Japanese plants into North America. The Botanical Review, 83(3): 215-252. Del Tredici, P. and Orwig, D. A. 2017. Layering and rejuvenation in Tsuga canadensis (Pinaceae) on Wachusett Mountain, Massachusetts. Rhodora, 119: 16-32. Downing, A. J. 1875. A treatise on the theory and practice of landscape gardening [1841] with two supplements [1859, 1875] by Henry Winthrop Sargent (9th ed.). New York: Orange Judd Co. Hoopes, J. 1868. The book of evergreens. New York: Orange Judd and Co. Hoopes, J. 1875. A visit to Parsons' Nurseries. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, 30(351): 257-259. Hornibrook, M. 1923. Dwarf and slow-growing conifers. London: Country Life Ltd. Ingram, J. S. 1876. The Centennial Exposition, described and illustrated. Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers. Jenkins, C. F. 1933. Sargent's weeping hemlock again; Hemlocks at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. The Hemlock Arboretum at \"Far Country,\" Bulletin, No.5. Jenkins, C. F. 1935. Sargent's weeping hemlock from seed. The Hemlock Arboretum at \"Far Country,\" Bulletin, No.11. Jenkins, C. F. 1946. Hemlock\u2014the queen of conifers. Arnoldia, 6(11-12): 49-60. Maxwell, T. C. 1874. Evergreens, novelties and dwarfs. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, 29(337): 200-203. Meehan, J. 1896. Group of weeping hemlocks. Park and Cemetery, 5(11): 192. Meehan, T. 1876. Editorial notes: Horticulture at the Centennial. The Gardener's Monthly and Horticulturist, 18: 254-256. Sargent's Weeping Hemlock 33 Meehan, T. 1885. Editorial notes, Frank J. Scott. The Gardener's Monthly and Horticulturist, 27: 375-376. Meehan, T. 1887. Editorial notes, S. B. Parsons. The Gardener's Monthly and Horticulturist, 29: 378-379. Mellen, G. 1838. A book of the United States. Hartford: H. F. Summer and Co. Parsons, R. B. & Co. 1874. Wholesale catalogue, Fall 1874. Flushing, NY. Parsons, S. B. 1874. Evergreens. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, 29(342): 362-364. Parsons, S. B. 1875. The weeping hemlock spruce. The Garden, 8: 310. Parsons, S. B. 1887, October 22. Weeping hemlock spruce. The Garden, 32: 363. Parsons, S. B., Jr. 1881. The most promising, new, hardy, ornamental trees and shrubs, and their tasteful and effective arrangement. Prize essay for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, presented Saturday, January 17, 1880. Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for the Year 1880: 20-43. [Reprinted in 1881 as: Rarer ornamental trees and ornamental gardens in Gardner's Monthly and Horticulturist, 23: 260 ff.] Parsons, S. B. & Sons. 1873. Descriptive catalogue of ornamental trees, flowering shrubs, fruit trees, plants and evergreens. Flushing, NY. Parsons, S. B. & Sons' Kissena Nurseries. 1877. Wholesale trade list, autumn 1877 and spring 1878. Flushing, NY. Parsons, S. B. & Sons Co., Kissena Nurseries. 1878. Wholesale trade list, autumn 1878 and spring 1879. Flushing, NY. Parsons, S. B. & Sons Co., Kissena Nurseries. 1887. Descriptive catalogue of hardy ornamental trees, flowering shrubs and vines. Flushing, NY. Price, E. K. 1876. The Michaux trees. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 16(98): 340-345. Putnam County Historian's Office Digital Collection. 1876. Putnam County New York map from 1875. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.hrvh.org\/ cdm\/singleitem\/collection\/pchc\/id\/377\/rec\/2 Putnam Historical Society Digital Collection. 1854. Putnam County, NY map from 1854. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.hrvh.org\/cdm\/singleitem\/ collection\/pchc\/id\/256\/rec\/1 Rehder, A. 1949. Bibliography of cultivated trees and shrubs. Jamaica Plain, MA: Arnold Arboretum. Rothrock, J. T. 1880. Catalogue of trees and shrubs native of and introduced in the horticultural gardens adjacent to Horticultural Hall in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. Philadelphia: s.n. Sargent, C. S. 1897. Wodenethe. Garden and Forest, 10: 449-450. Sargent, C. S. 1897. Notes on cultivated conifers, no. 11. Garden and Forest, 10: 490-491. Sargent, H. W. 1855. The Shank's lawn mower. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, 10: 335. Saunders, W. 1878. Ornamental trees and shrubs. In: F. A. Walker (ed.), United States Centennial Commission, International Exhibition 1876, Reports and Awards, Group XXIX (pp. 15-29). Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co. Scott, F. J. 1870 and 1873. The art of beautifying suburban home grounds of small extent. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Smith, J. J. 1856. Visits to country places, no. 3. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Taste, 11: 445-449. Spingarn, J. E. 1937. Henry Winthrop Sargent and the early history of landscape gardening and ornamental horticulture in Dutchess County, New York. Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook 1937: 36-63. [Reprinted in 1938 in Landscape Architecture, 29(1): 24-39.] Stout, A. B. 1939. Weeping or pendulous hemlocks. Journal of the New York Botanical Garden, 40(475): 153-166. Sutton, S. 1970. Charles Sprague Sargent and the Arnold Arboretum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Swartley, J. C. 1984. The cultivated hemlocks (revised by H. J. Welch). Portland: Timber Press. Thurber, G. 1877. Small evergreens for small places. American Agriculturist, 36(11): 429-430. Wells, J. S. 1955. Plant propagation practices. New York: MacMillan Co. Williams, H. T. 1871. Scott's Suburban Home Grounds. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, 26(302): 238-239. Williams, H. T. 1872. Editorial notes: Parsons & Co. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, 27(316): 316. Wilson, E. H. 1912, November 14. Arnold Arboretum Bulletin of Popular Information, no. 36. Wilson, E. H. 1920. The romance of our trees, no. 12: The pygmies and dwarfs. The Garden Magazine, 32(1): 36-40. Peter Del Tredici is senior research scientist emeritus at the Arnold Arboretum and the former director of living collections. The second edition of his book Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide was published in March 2020."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Each Year in the Forest: Autumn","article_sequence":4,"start_page":34,"end_page":43,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25717","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24eb76d.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":2,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Hipp, Andrew L.","article_content":"Each Year in the Forest: Autumn Andrew L. Hipp Illustrated by Rachel D. Davis HIPP, A. L. AND DAVIS, R. D. 2020. EACH YEAR IN THE FOREST: AUTUMN. ARNOLDIA, 78(2): 34-43 Bonnets I September is the attenuated tail of summer. The last flowers of great blue lobelia bloom in meadow openings or in partially shaded forest edges where they can find a little extra soil moisture. Tangles of calico aster spill into the trails, branching and short-leaved, strewn with flowers. White rattlesnakeroot flowers hang like trombone bells at the ready. Jackin- the-pulpit berries turn gradually from green to red, the masses of fruits on some plants as variable as kernels of multicolored flint corn. False Solomon's seal berries ripen from salmon to bright red and become thin-skinned and heavy with juice. Blue cohosh seeds ripen on the plant, toxic but delicious looking, a rich blue that will hold its own through winter, when you may still find an occasional seed abandoned by a gray squirrel on top of a fallen log, beside a scattering of scratched red oak acorn shells. Forest: Autumn 35 Acorn production peaks in northern Illinois around the first of the month. Nuts pile up along the trails. Many are immediately split open by squirrels or eaten by deer. Others are not eaten by mammals but are preyed upon by weevils that devour the starchy cotyledons and fill the shells with frass, exposing the baby plants to fungi and desiccation. In some cases, the only violence weevils do the seedling is to deprive it of some of the nutrients left by the mother tree in its cotyledons. Perhaps this will be enough to kill the seedling over time, leaving it too weak to hold on for a few years in the understory until there is a blowdown or an old tree falls, taking a few others with it, letting in enough light for the baby oak to photosynthesize on its own and possibly win the race to the canopy. If it fails to do so, the oak will never produce offspring of its own. The seeds falling from the tips of the tree of life in the weeks flanking the equinox are the ones we will find growing next spring. They were sparked into life in an instant of unlikely pollination. They were provisioned with food all through development. Now, we find them dispersed on feathers or fur, in the stomach of a bird, in mud lodged between toes or talons or claws. Some are dropped unceremoniously at the base of the tree to roll downhill, in a move that might appear clumsy, but what are appearances? Each species has gambled successfully over tens of thousands of generations, if not more, on that drop to the ground or that risky flight on wind, or on the passage of squirrels or jays or extinct passenger pigeons or mammoths whose interests were never identical to those of the trees. The dice drop; then the plant prepares for winter. Perhaps their seeds will germinate before they can be eaten by a vole or squirrel. If so, these notes of fall will echo for hundreds of years. II Near the end of September, the white fungal bodies of aborted entoloma sprout from the leaf litter like manna. These knots of mycelia push leaves out of the way overnight to sit on the surface of the forest floor. Over a few days, they grow into misshapen white loaves as large as an infant's fist. They are caused by a pathogenic fungus (Entoloma abortivum)1 infecting one of the honey mushrooms (Armillaria gallica).2 The latter are known best from their black, cord-like rhizomorphs that scout the soil's surface for trees to infect and then ascend the trunks beneath the bark, where they remain long after the tree is dead. Near these masses of intertwined Armillaria and Entoloma mycelia, the yellowish-brown fruiting caps of Armillaria can often be found, and sometimes the whitish caps of Entoloma as well. By night, when the rains have been just right, glowing Armillaria marks the edges of the trails, ghosts of the cambium devoured by the fungal mycelia. Rings of light mark the ends of severed boles, squeezing through passages where sunlight formerly passed from the leaves down to the roots as fixed sugars. 36 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 Stump puffballs (Apioperdon pyriforme) sprout from downed logs or form colonies in the wood chips. Then their insides turn to spores. The precocious ones desiccate and become brown inside while their peers are still white and fleshy or just turning granular inside the taut skin. Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) sprouts from standing dead ashes, fallen oaks, and rotting trees of several species, forming scalloped orange shelves of delicious flesh. Months hence, its bleached carcasses will mark where the fungal bodies clung bright as lanterns to the dead trunks. Chanterelles (Cantharellus sp.), bonnets (Mycena sp.), oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus sp.), and giant puffballs (Calvatia sp.) emerge and then dry or decompose over the course of a few autumn weeks. As these decomposers crowd the woods, the flowering plants become increasingly tattered. Jewelweed spanned the entire growing season, beginning as forests of nickel-sized cotyledons crowded under the leaf litter in late March and then rising into rolling hills of adult plants that dominate the landscape well into September.3 Now, it begins to yellow and wilt, thinning and breaking over. Wild ginger leaves glow with golden margins as they senesce, like autumn leaves of Ginkgo biloba. False Solomon's seal becomes variegated and stringy, the vessels running the length of its leaves draped with torn and yellowing epidermis. Sheaths surrounding the glistening black wild leek seeds split open. The seeds stare out at the coming winter for a few days before they drop to the ground. Hop sedge and Gray's sedge become decrepit, and the swollen skins of their perigynia disintegrate. Straight-stigma and curly-stigma wood sedges shatter, scattering their last achenes onto the bare soil. The white oak acorns that have made it this far lie half embedded in the soil. They split at one end, opposite the cap, cracked open by the emerging root that swells in the autumn rains. They are feeling their way blindfolded, Blue Cohosh Forest: Autumn 37 trying to get a toehold while there is still time. Their impulse to grow is strong: collect a bagful of acorns, toss it into the refrigerator next to the carrots, and keep it cool and moist and dark; even there, some will start to germinate, senselessly looking for soil. The katydids have become quiet, and the morning-time crickets purr. They and the acorns are pacing the autumn to and fro,4 getting a little work done in advance of spring. III Rain falls and temperatures fluctuate in early October. Fog pools in the prairies beneath the power lines and drapes between the spruces. The trails become sodden. Stump puffballs ripen on fallen logs or stumps, syrupy brown. Earth stars (Geastrum sp.) crank their wings out and grip the soil. Young stinkhorns (Phallus sp.) erupt, crowded together like brussels sprouts, crawling with stink bugs. Over the course of several days, they grow obscenely to several inches in height and swarm with gnats. A few days later, they become flaccid and rot. One morning last year, our woods at the Morton Arboretum were overrun by spring peepers. I started hearing their squeaks, trills, and whistles on my walk into work, their sounds shifted upslope from the wetlands where they had been calling six months earlier. There wasn't anything they could be except for spring peepers. I did not expect them, however, and I consequently could not convince myself at first that I was hearing correctly. Songbirds were migrating, and I told myself the calls I heard were those of some itinerant bird I didn't recognize. I waded into the sunflowers and towering wild lettuce to flush out any birds that might be there, but the calls stopped, as frog calls always do when you go hunting their source. They picked up again after I was safely back on the trail. After about ten minutes of this, it was clear I was hearing frogs. Peeps punctuated the woods west of Big Rock Visitor Station and all the way down to the service road that runs north through the meadow. I walked into work surrounded by them. The peepers were with us for at least a few days. Colleagues found them in leaf traps and reported hearing their songs throughout the woods at all times of the day. Chorus frogs had also rediscovered their voices and were trilling in the warm afternoons. On a cool morning midweek, I made a quick stop to listen for the spring peepers again. The forest was silent. Gnats buzzed around the stinkhorns. Then, from a hollow tucked between the shortcut trail to Big Rock and the trail that runs west along the ridge of the moraine, a single peeper called. I walked down into the hollow and poked around for five or ten minutes, but there were no other calls. In early October, sugar maple leaves are turning yellow and starting to fall. Lower branches of the American black elderberry corymbs are broken, and ray flowers fall from wingstem in the floodplains. Zig-zag goldenrod heads are pale with feathery achenes. Wood nettle leaves are chewed to lace but still have plenty of sting left. Bedraggled pale jewelweed provisions its late-season capsules, galls blistering along its leaf midveins and darkening 38 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 Calico Aster Elm-Leaved Goldenrod Gray's Sedge White Rattlesnakeroot Wild Leek Forest: Autumn 39 along one side. Wild leek has dropped about a third of its seeds. Fowl mannagrass culms are reclining. Enchanter's nightshade leaves have almost all fallen, leaving the stalks bristling with fruits. But false rue anemone, one of our iconic spring ephemerals, often begins sending up fresh shoots. The species is known to be a fall germinator,5 a rarity in our forests. Yet many people miss it in the fall,6 myself included for my first twenty-five years as a naturalist. By mid-October, white-throated sparrows pass through town on their way southward and fill the fields with \"tssts\" and whistles, marauding the shrubs for berries and insects. Near sunrise, a single bird may belt out its spring song, the bold three-toned \"Old-Sam-Peabody-Peabody-Peabody\" or the two-toned \"Oh-Canada-Canada-Canada.\"7 The territorial song sparrows join in as they are skipping town, possibly defending their territory on the way south,8 as they did on the way to their breeding grounds in the north. These discordant echoes of spring reverberate through the months of fall: frog calls, spring wildflowers emerging under the year's falling leaves, sparrows guarding territory as though it were breeding season. Signs of the changing season are deeply inscribed, paid for with the lives of individuals whose instincts weren't as well tuned. Time your emergence right, and you'll make it through winter. Time it wrong, and you may not. A million hard-earned habits comprise this business of laying up treasure on earth, where the moth and dust corrupt. These are the forest's strategies for getting through winter. Beauty is a byproduct. IV Chlorophyll molecules become unhooked from the proteins that bind them as the days shorten and the nights become colder. They become phototoxic to the leaves in which they reside. Each leaf then begins the process of autumn housekeeping, breaking the chlorophyll into harmless components that can be recycled.9 It reabsorbs nitrogen, nutrients, and basic elements that are costlier to assimilate than to recycle. As the engines of photosynthesis are disassembled and reabsorbed, carotenoids are exposed, producing the brilliant yellows of fall. Anthocyanin production picks up, producing reds and oranges that may protect the leaf from sun or insects for a few weeks.10 It is a short period of intense color, shaped by the balance of daytime and nighttime temperatures, the shortening hours of daylight, the timing of precipitation, and the internal coordination of chlorophyll degradation, redistribution of resources in the tree, and the production of new pigments. Activity at the molecular level scales up to cells, to leaves, to canopies, finally to hillsides in color. Last year, an early snow fell on Halloween, weighing tree branches down and tearing leaves off prematurely. The next morning, an hour after sunrise, yellow sugar maple leaves chirped almost inaudibly as they hit the fresh snow and glowed like lanterns on its surface. The skeletons of jewelweed were knocked to the ground. The wood nettle leaves, frozen, hung like 40 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 rags. A woodcock stopped over on its way south, skating past a twelve-inch diameter red oak that had been hauled down by the snow. Fall can be over in a moment. In most years, though, autumn funnels down to winter. Conduits between tree leaves and their branches are squeezed by a scar forming at the base of the petiole, and the trees rain resources. Leaves falling to the soil return calcium, nitrogen, and other nutrients that were shuttled upward all through the summer. Maples, basswoods, ashes, tulip trees, sassafras, and black cherries shed nutrient-rich leaves that are thin and tasty. These decompose rapidly, forming an ephemeral and semitranslucent sheet over the soil's surface. Oaks, American beeches, and shagbark hickories drop leaves that decompose more slowly, remaining on the forest floor where they insulate and provide the raw material for rodent and insect activity and the matrix for ground fires.11 The chemical composition of these leaves, particularly their calcium content, shapes the sounds we will hear the next year in the quiet evenings, as Eurasian earthworms drag whole leaves into their burrows, selecting the calcium-rich species first12 and shushing along under the leaf litter. When I stamp my foot next summer, shaking the ground, the earthworms will all slurp down into their burrows and go silent for a moment before they begin again: shh, shh, shh. June beetle grubs go dormant. Cicada children, patient by nature, gradually cease their subterranean feeding. Forest understory herbs move their resources back into their corms or bulbs or rhizomes or bequeath them to the forest floor. Bald-faced hornet queens crawl into rotting logs and prepare for winter, quiet and still. Rotten black walnut husks disintegrate in puddles at the bases of hills. Needle ice appears again in the wet soil. V By the end of November, the days are cool and overcast. White oak and red oak and sugar maple leaves interbed. A few seedlings continue twisting over soggy earthworm castings that erode to granules beneath the litter. The crickets and birds are quiet, and colors become subdued. People are mostly gone from the woods. Orion begins to show up in the evening sky, gliding upward from the eastern horizon just about the time we are settling into bed. White Oak Acorns Germinating Forest: Autumn 41 The musclewood, ironwood, beeches, and oaks rattle with marcescent leaves: the branches either mistimed or willfully ignored the last freeze of the year, and in so doing, they failed to produce the scars that would have severed these leaves from the tree.13 The squirrels have mostly gleaned the acorns and walnuts they need. Their messy nests are exposed in the treetops. Bark on many of the slender ashes and sugar maples throughout the woods is shredded where bucks have rubbed, scraping the velvet from their antlers. Jewelweed skeletons are broken over and knocked to the ground. Zig-zag and elm-leaved goldenrods are sparsely fuzzed with achenes, while white snakeroot has fully dispersed its fruits, and the few remaining bracts that once subtended the flowerheads are recoiled and twisted like starfish arms. Sandhill cranes fly southward in flocks of a hundred or more, their backs scraping the clouds. Snow comes and goes, piling up on turkeytail fungus (Trametes versicolor) and secluding itself in the bark fissures of fallen logs. Juncos and chickadees glean and then spread the persistent berries of honeysuckle and gray dogwood. They are setting next year's seedlings into motion. White avens, spinulose wood fern, hepatica, white bear sedge, and a handful of other common species photosynthesize beneath the falling snow. The rhizomes of spring wildflowers are suspended for a moment, appear to rest for winter, but extend by a hair's breadth each time the soil thaws, bending around a buried stone. The future slowly unrolls with each cell division, shaping the forest we'll walk through two and three springs hence. Leaves abscise at intervals. They gyre downward. They touch the ground. Then, there is the shush of leaves against leaves. Everything that falls accumulates and shapes the forest floor. Here, a falling tree hides the entrance to a mouse's home and crushes a mass of puffballs, and spores are dispersed. Over there, the leaves pile deeply, and then a windstorm blows them away so that the next year's fires will not burn through: as a consequence, a handful of sugar maple seedlings survives one more year in the understory. These are the endings that form the forest's beginning. Endnotes 1 Czederpiltz, D. L. L., Volk, T. J., and Burdsall, Jr., H. H. 2001. Field observations and inoculation experiments to determine the nature of the carpophoroids associated with Entoloma abortivum and Armillaria. Mycologia, 93: 841-851. And for a readable summary: Volk, T. J. 2006. Entoloma abortivum, the aborting Entoloma, a.k.a. hunter's heart, totlcoxcatl, or \"ground prunes.\" University of Wisconsin Plant Teaching Collection. Retrieved from: http:\/\/botit.botany.wisc.edu\/toms_fungi\/sep2006.html. 2 For a great article on the story of Armillaria taxonomy: Volk, T. J. 2002. The humongous fungus\u2014Ten years later. University of Wisconsin Plant Teaching Collection. Retrieved from: http:\/\/botit.botany.wisc.edu\/toms_fungi\/apr2002.html. 3 The renowned forest ecologist John T. Curtis wrote of jewelweed, \"One interesting response to light is frequently seen in mesic forests in which selective logging has been practiced so that large openings have been made in the canopy. The yellow jewelweed (Impatiens pallida) regularly forms an almost pure stand under such openings. This succulent and tender annual is very sensitive to light and is markedly reduced in height at diminished intensities. The colonies thus take on the characteristics of an integrating light meter, with the tallest plants in the center of the colony and shorter and shorter 42 Arnoldia 78\/2 \u2022 November 2020 plants toward the edges. They produce contoured mounds which reflect the chance peculiarities in shape of the canopy opening with surprising accuracy.\" Curtis, J. T. 1959. The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities (pp. 122-123). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 4 \"Listen to the rain, more rain, treadling earth to the sodden cold wet spun heads of this room, pacing the winter to and fro.\" Borodale, S. 2012. 3rd December: Notes. Bee Journal. London: Jonathan Cape. 5 Baskin, J. M., and Baskin, C. C. 1986. Germination ecophysiology of the mesic deciduous forest herb Isopyrum biternatum. Botanical Gazette, 147: 152-155. 6 I have only dipped my toe into the woodland phenology literature, but an unpublished report by Max Partch is an interesting example. Partch took pains to observe all plant phases across numerous species well into October and still included no observations of new growth in the fall. Partch M. 1999. Plant phenology in central Minnesota. Biology Faculty Publications, 1. Retrieved from https:\/\/repository.stcloudstate.edu\/ biol_facpubs\/1 7 If you sense that the white-throated sparrow song has changed over the past decade or so, you may not be imagining it. Since 2000, the two-noted song has spread across the breeding ground in Canada to largely supplant the three-noted song, perhaps due to tutoring in the wintering grounds. Otter, K. A., Mckenna, A., LaZerte, S. E., and Ramsay, S. M. 2020. Continent-wide shifts in song dialects of white-throated sparrows. Current Biology, 30: 3231-3235.e3 8 Wingfield, J. C., and Soma, K. K. 2002. Spring and autumn territoriality in song sparrows: Same behavior, different mechanisms? Integrative and Comparative Biology, 42: 11-20. 9 Christ, B., and H\u00f6rtensteiner, S. 2014. Mechanism and significance of chlorophyll breakdown. Journal of Plant Growth Regulation, 33: 4-20. 10 The potential adaptive role of leaf coloration is an area of active study. For an informative review, see: Archetti, M., D\u00f6ring, T. F., Hagen, S. B., Hughes, N. M., Leather, S. R., Lee, D. W., Lev-Yadun, S., Manetas, Y., Ougham, H. J., and Schaberg, P. G., et al. 2009. Unravelling the evolution of autumn colours: An interdisciplinary approach. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24: 166-173. For a recent evaluation of competing hypotheses: Pena-Novas, I., Archetti, M. 2020. Biogeography and evidence for adaptive explanations of autumn colors. New Phytologist, 228(3): 809-813. 11 Among the species I have included here, those dominated by arbuscular mycorrhizae (e.g., the maples) tend to decompose more quickly than those by ectomycorrhizal fungi (e.g., the oaks). Phillips, R. P., Brzostek, E., and Midgley, M. G. 2013. The mycorrhizalassociated nutrient economy: A new framework for predicting carbon-nutrient couplings in temperate forests. New Phytologist, 199: 41-51. Chicken of the Woods PLANTS REFERENCED Forest: Autumn 43 Andrew Hipp is the senior scientist in plant systematics and herbarium director at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois. He conducts research on the origins and implications of plant diversity, with a focus on oaks, sedges, phylogenetic ecology, and trait evolution. You can read about his research at http:\/\/systematics.mortonarb.org and follow his natural history blog at https:\/\/botanistsfieldnotes.com. Rachel Davis is an independent visual artist in the Chicago area. She works at the interface of natural science, abstract painting, printmaking, and textiles, integrating the formal and empirical elements of the natural world in her work. You can see more of her work at https:\/\/artbumble.com and follow her on Instagram: @art_bumble. Acer saccharum - sugar maple Ageratina altissima - white snakeroot Allium tricoccum - wild leek; A. burdickii is sometimes recognized as a distinct species, and my account also applies to that species Arisaema triphyllum - Jack-in-the-pulpit Asarum canadense - wild ginger Carex albursina - white bear sedge Carex grayi - Gray's sedge Carex lupulina - hop sedge Carex radiata - straight-stigma wood sedge (I made up this common name, because the sometimes-applied \"straight-styled wood sedge\" is a misnomer; the stigmas separate this species from C. rosea, not the styles) Carex rosea - curly-stigma wood sedge Carpinus caroliniana - musclewood Carya ovata - shagbark hickory Caulophyllum thalictroides - blue cohosh Circaea canadensis - enchanters' nightshade Cornus racemosa - gray dogwood Dryopteris carthusiana - spinulose wood fern Enemion biternatum - false rue anemone Fagus grandifolia - American beech Fraxinus sp. - ash Geum canadense - white avens Glyceria striata - fowl mannagrass Helianthus sp. - sunflowers; here the common woodland species are H. strumosus and H. decapetalus Hepatica sp. - hepatica Impatiens pallida - pale jewelweed; the description in the first half of this essay also applies to I. capensis, though I. pallida is the more common in the woods I frequent Juglans nigra - black walnut Lactuca sp. - wild lettuces Laportea canadensis - wood nettle Liriodendron tulipifera - tulip tree Lobelia siphilitica - great blue lobelia Lonicera sp. - honeysuckle Maianthemum racemosum - false Solomon's seal Nabalus albus - white rattlesnakeroot Ostrya virginiana - ironwood Prunus serotina - black cherry Quercus alba - white oak Quercus rubra - red oak Sambucus canadensis - American black elderberry Sassafras albidum - sassafras Solidago flexicaulis - zig-zag goldenrod Solidago ulmifolia - elm-leaved goldenrod Symphyotrichum lateriflorum - calico aster Tilia americana - basswood Verbesina alternifolia - wingstem 12 Holdsworth, A. R., Frelich, L. E., and Reich, P. B. 2012. Leaf litter disappearance in earthworm-invaded northern hardwood forests: Role of tree species and the chemistry and diversity of litter. Ecosystems, 15: 913-926. 13 My understanding of this phenomenon comes primarily from an unpublished University of Wisconsin-Madison botany thesis on the anatomy of marcescent leaves in black oaks. As far as I know, the only published report on the thesis is a brief article I wrote in 1996 for NewsLeaf, the newsletter of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, then updated in 2005 as \"When Oak Leaves Fail to Fall,\" Plant Health Care Report, 2005.03: 11-12; reprinted in 2007 in the Taltree Arboretum's newsletter, Tag Along, 6: 6-7."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"How Trees Were Urbanized","article_sequence":5,"start_page":44,"end_page":47,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25718","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24ebb25.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":2,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Andersen, Phyllis","article_content":"The Roman engineer Vitruvius, writing in the first century BCE, suggests that trees were the original model for columns. The classical colonnade became the precursor to the tree-lined street. The repetition of identical elements evokes a kind of control, an organizing principle for settings otherwise subject to continual change. The tree metaphor persisted into the Renaissance with the architect Leon Battista Alberti, in the fifteenth century, pointing out the similarity between the increased diameter of the bottom of columns and the root flare of the planted tree. An association of trees and streets evolved. By the late nineteenth century, tree-lined streets were part of every urban planner's tool kit. Sonja D\u00fcmpelmann examines two approaches to street tree planting in her recent book, Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin. In the narrowest sense, her book is a case study of two cities and their approach to trees, but in the broader context, she weaves together the overlapping perspectives of urban design, tree management, and engineering and seamlessly integrates them with shifting political and social values. Her book is not only a contribution to the history of street tree planting but an original contribution to urban history. The nature-versus-culture divide applies here as it does to much of urban landscape history. \"Cities were naturalized,\" D\u00fcmpelmann writes, \"and trees were urbanized.\" In American cities, street planting was part of the Romantic \"urban pastoral\" movement of the late nineteenth century. Advocates proselytized about bringing elements of the countryside into the city, arguing that this would offer respite from the tension inherent in city life. In New York City, trees were part of the urban sanitizing movement that created Central Park. Tree care itself still depends on the health metaphor originating in that period. Trees are evaluated in terms of health and disease. Terms like immune systems, resilience, and injury are part of tree care. Until recently arborists were called tree surgeons. Conversely, contemporary urban tree-planting practices embrace sophisticated technology to create manipulated growing conditions\u2014 an honest, transparent recognition of the unique conditions of the urban landscape. Tree species are hybridized to create selections that can withstand urban conditions. Soil mixes are created with the specificity of prescription drugs. Planting pits are engineered. It is now clear that what happens underground is as essential (if not more) to tree survival as what happens above. In American cities, grand street-tree-planting projects are still part of political campaigns\u2014 a bread-and-circus approach to garner votes in upcoming elections with no provision for aftercare. Despite lessons learned about urban planting as an ongoing process that involves nurturing young plants, providing water, and protecting trees from damage and from insects and disease, municipal governments often leave trees on their own to survive with little intervention. Advocates promote trees in terms of ecosystem services, pointing out that trees moderate local weather conditions, filter pollution, and reduce global warming. Trees symbolize civic pride and the regeneration of neighborhoods. Altogether this is a heavy burden to place on young plants. Every city has tree haters as well as tree lovers. If, on one hand, trees clean the air, on the other, they are dirty: They drop leaves and fruit on sidewalks and cars. They attract bugs. Trees block signs and Facing page: Philibert de L'Orme described trees as the original inspiration for columns in his Le Premier Tome de l'Architecture, published in 1568. SOURCE GALLICA.BNF.FR \/ BIBLIOTH\u00c8QUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE ANDERSEN, P. 2020. HOW TREES WERE URBANIZED. ARNOLDIA, 78(2): 44-47 storefronts. Although a seemingly benign activity, tree planting still attracts controversy. Tree species selected for urban streets have been transformed by research and hybridization. But the selection of tree species is still vulnerable to fads. D\u00fcmpelmann quotes landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing in 1847: \"There is a fashion in trees that sometimes has a sway no less rigorous than that of a Parisian modiste.\" The tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), once recommended as a street tree, was quickly rejected because of its overwhelming odor. Norway maples (Acer platanoides), widely planted because of their ability to thrive in stressful conditions, are now banned in some communities because of their propensity to self-seed. American elms (Ulmus americana) are lost to disease. D\u00fcmpelmann reveals how the selection of tree species is vulnerable to xenophobic reactions both in Germany and the United States. Trees are caught in the debate between native-plants-only advocates and those who champion botanical cosmopolitanism. The strength of D\u00fcmpelmann's treatment of street tree planting in New York is her ability to point out the differences between the work of municipal government, high-minded philanthropic groups, and community-based initiatives that recognize the needs of specific neighborhoods. Top-down versus bottom-up. New York's tree-planting schemes are still controlled by the New York City Commissioner's 1811 plan that overlaid a grid from Houston Street to 155th Street, ignoring the island's rolling topography. The architectural historian Hilary Ballon calls New York City's grid plan \"a living framework.\" It is the tension between the rigidity of the grid and the looseness of the crowns of trees that defines the classic New York City street. While the practical benefits of street tree planting drove municipal efforts, philanthropic groups were also aware that tree-lined streets gave the rapidly growing city a veneer of a refined environment. One of the first to join the movement was Gifford Pinchot, head of the United States Forest Service. As residents of the city, Pinchot and his wife, Cornelia, were active members of the Tree Planting Association, founded in 1897. In addition to his interest in scientific forestry, Pinchot believed that trees were \"the only form through which the residents of the city can come in daily contact with nature as we know it in the woods and fields.\" By the early twentieth century, the New York landscape had become a gendered space dominated by male professionals. D\u00fcmpelmann describes how women gained entr\u00e9e to tree-planting projects by virtue of their social position and influence. Women were valued for their roles as caregivers, child protectors, and municipal housekeepers. Tree-planting efforts The Tree Planting Association highlighted plantings on New York City's West Sixty-Eighth and West Sixty-Ninth Streets as examples of \"model tenements\" in a 1903 report. GENERAL RESEARCH DIVISION, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, NYPL DIGITAL COLLECTIONS were a natural fit. Cartoonists had a field day. Later in the twentieth century, women were important leaders in groups like the Neighborhood Trees Corps and the Magnolia Tree Earth Center, which began to work in neighborhoods left behind in earlier planting efforts. African American groups, especially those in Bedford- Stuyvesant, organized local tree-planting projects to regenerate their neighborhood where the street was park space. Community groups came to resist top-down government initiatives and well-meaning but na\u00efve philanthropic efforts. Both New York and Berlin began street planting to build a healthy environment for residents. In contrast to New York City's efforts, street tree planting in Berlin is inextricably associated with destruction and loss. Berlin's important achievements in urban planning in the nineteenth and early twentieth century\u2014broad tree-lined avenues and gracious parks\u2014were destroyed by war. Trees were lost in massive numbers during World War II. Many were lost to bombing; those that remained were cut down for firewood and building materials. D\u00fcmpelmann's treatment of Berlin's rebuilding includes many small, poignant stories, from the struggle to plant trees on rubble to the protection of the city's mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia) street trees because of the nutritional value of their fruits. The partition of the city into East and West sectors after World War II removed any possibility of comprehensive urban reforestation. It was only after reunification that renewed planting efforts could build on Germany's earlier research in scientific forestry, expanding on their admired analytic methods and fieldwork. The goal of nineteenth-century German forestry research was to increase yield, yet the basic methods of scientific analysis used for research were intriguing to tree specialists well beyond the field of forestry. German plant scientists experimented with vegetative propagation and hybridization techniques to create \"the perfect tree.\" They warned of the dangers of monoculture. Charles Sprague Sargent, the Arnold Arboretum's first director, assembled a valuable collection of German forestry manuals. Information exchange in the twentieth century between American street tree specialists and their German counterparts resulted in more sophisticated and experimental planting techniques. Ideas on tree management spanned from the individual plant to the greater tree population of a city. The American landscape architect Elbert Peets, a long-time advocate of street tree planting as an essential component of city design, collaborated with the German urban planner Werner Hegemann on American Vitruvius: An Architect's Handbook of Civic Art, published in 1922. This book provided a compendium of examples of urban forms, including the integration of trees into streets and boulevards. William Solotaroff, the New Jersey-based city forester and author of the widely distributed Shade-Trees in Towns and Cities (from 1911), often referred to German models for street planting. D\u00fcmpelmann uses the complicated story of loss and rebirth of Unter den Linden, Berlin's famous tree-lined boulevard, to mirror Berlin's fractured history. It was created in the late seventeenth century and connects the pleasure ground of the Berlin Palace to the Brandenburg Gate. Long admired as one of the great promenades of Europe, the design was referenced in Frederick Law Olmsted's 1868 proposal for the parkways of Brooklyn. Unter den Linden is now freed from the isolation of East Berlin and is being restored with its long all\u00e9e of lindens as part of the greater unification of the city. For some, there is a certain cynicism about planting street trees in cities. As D\u00fcmpelmann reflects, street trees have an \"inbuilt a priori obsolescence.\" They die. In both New York and Berlin, we see that the ability of trees to thrive is contingent on human intervention. But even given that responsibility, we no longer question that they are an essential part of urban infrastructure. We have enough confidence in urban life to no longer reference rus in urbe, the country in the city. Trees on city streets are health-enhancing; they have a strong sensory presence. But in the end, it is the power of the eye, the visual value of trees on streets that sustains their place in the city. Phyllis Andersen is a landscape historian and former director of the Institute for Cultural Landscape Studies of the Arnold Arboretum Book Review 47"},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"A Writer's World: <i>Fagus sylvatica</i> 'Pendula'","article_sequence":6,"start_page":48,"end_page":49,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25719","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24e8128.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":2,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"","article_content":"An afternoon in July found me in the Arnold Arboretum landscape, on a writer's quest, looking for inspiration for new poems. I was back for the first time since mid-March, when the impact of the coronavirus became unmistakable. Masked in the brilliant summer sun, I revisited the copse of white pines atop Bussey Hill, and on my way back down the hill, I cut across the dry, dusty grass where the mansion of Benjamin and Judith Bussey (the hill's namesakes) once stood. There, I found what I had been looking for\u2014an entrance into a new world, one created by an old weeping beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula', accession 22746*A). Composing in my mind, I parted the emerald curtain of branches. Inside was a space of light and awe. Sequins of sun edged through a jangle of leafy streamers. At my feet, swollen roots appeared to be burnished like antique pewter. The tree forms a living memoir, written in the layering of branches that produce younger trunks. Those offspring encircle the mother trunk and echo its smooth gray. This was truly a tree to write about, with an allure both glorious and otherworldly. For me, all beeches have an aura of magic, but this tree, with its resplendent sanctuary, is my delight. It draws me in, hinting of a mythical forested world. Artists paint beeches; writers write about them\u2014and also on them. Their wide boles of smooth silver have beckoned lovers and poets through the centuries. In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Orlando hangs his love notes upon the trees, amorously declaring, \"O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books.\" This weeping beech is a well-annotated tree, incised with the names, initials, words of those who hoped to leave some mark, proclaim passion, or silently (!) voice an observation. My own words would never find a \"voice\" on a tree. Still, I am curious about the R's and E's, hearts, and watchful eyes on this trunk\u2014and I wonder about the impassioned sentiments that have already elongated and faded into its skin. When the tree was first mentioned in the Arboretum records, in 1942, it was described as \"an old tree,\" presumably part of the nineteenthcentury landscaping. The Bussey mansion was transferred to Harvard from the family in 1896, after the death of Thomas Motley, the husband of the Busseys' granddaughter, Maria. From that time until ours, how many must have marveled beneath this canopy? Weeping beeches have long inspired writers to mold that marvel into words. Garden and catalogue writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century featured the weeping beech frequently, embellishing its description with curious and sometimes contradictory adjectives. Consider Albany Nurseries' 1915 description: \"quite ungainly in appearance \u2026 of wonderful grace and beauty.\" One wonders that they sold. Frank J. Scott, in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent, published in 1873, resolved the contradictions into an enlightened use of prose: \"It is the very embodiment of all the odd freaks of growth that make trees picturesque, and the vigorous healthfulness of foliage that makes them beautiful.\" An etching in The Gardeners' Chronicle, from 1870, catches my own writing imagination\u2014 the tree leans and agitates, even in the stillness of an illustration. Its branches, from the very top to the thick undulating midsection, appear to swoop and splay about the ground in a hoary tapestry of leaf and limb. The tree's form and aspect appear as a landscape upon a landscape\u2014so yes, as the accompanying article proclaims, \"both grotesque and picturesque.\" Our tree stands steeple-like on the hill, catching a mosaic of sun. This specimen is surely, to echo a description from The Horticulturist in August 1872, \"like a cathedral built by one of the old masters of architecture.\" I consider the wonder of its life. It reassures me, even in our present world, that we, with this beech, remain, survive, hold to our roots. Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula' is evidence of nature's endurance and humanity's desire to be remembered. It is a witness. Though it does weep, I believe it is with a wondrous joy where it touches the earth. Sheryl L. White is coordinator of visitor engagement and exhibitions at the Arnold Arboretum. Her poetry chapbook, Sky gone, was published by Finishing Line Press this fall. A Writer's World: Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula' Sheryl L. White"},{"arnoldia_cover":true,"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25696","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d270a725.jpg","title":"2020-78-2","volume":78,"issue_number":2,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"New Life for Old Collections","article_sequence":1,"start_page":2,"end_page":5,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25708","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d2708925.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":1,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Clement, Wendy L.","article_content":"Facing page: Six of ten violet specimens collected by Nelson Pepper in the spring of 1892. Clockwise from upper left: Viola tricolor, V. blanda, V. pubescens, V. sagittata, V. pedata, and V. rostrata. HERBARIUM OF THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY (IMAGES CROPPED) When I first joined the faculty at The College of New Jersey, in 2012, I knew we had a small collection of herbarium specimens available for use in our classes. The specimens were tucked away in the cabinets of the botany lab. At the time, my attention was turned to setting up my lab and continuing my existing plant systematics research agenda, but five years later, a planned renovation of the area where the specimens were kept gave me a reason to sort through these collections more carefully. Upon doing so, my students and I discovered a fascinating story about the origins of this small collection, a more than century-old link to botanical studies in the area, and a reminder of the value of preserving historical specimens that document how plant life is responding to a changing world. Within the collection were nearly 450 specimens collected during the late nineteenth century by three students enrolled in what was then the New Jersey State Normal School. One of the students, Nelson H. Pepper, had collected more than one hundred specimens in the spring and summer of 1892. Some of his specimens were exhibited the very next year at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, bringing examples of the plants of Trenton, New Jersey, to an international audience. As I pulled out one of the first specimens, I noticed that the unmistakable pink anthers of the spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) were still visible under the white petals of the flower. The paper, thinning and stained with a shadow of the plant pressed upon it, could no longer support the weight of this 115-year-old specimen. This page was one of a hundred or more specimens that were kept together by a tattered leather binding. Nelson Pepper's name was still legible in gold print on the spine, along with the word \"HERBARIUM.\" Several folders were loosely stacked in alphabetical order inside the leather cover, each marked with botanical New Life for Old Collections Wendy L. Clement family names. The violet family (Violaceae) was located toward the bottom of the pile, with ten specimens of flowering violets collected in late April and May of 1892. Each plant was pressed and arranged carefully, permitting this set of specimens to illustrate the major differences of Viola species he collected in New Jersey. Each heart-shaped leaf of Viola striata and each arrow-shaped leaf of V. sagittata were separated to show the entire outline of each leaf, and the highly dissected leaves of V. pedata were similarly spread across the page. Nectar spurs\u2014 short and rounded in V. cucullata and long and pointed in V. rostrata\u2014extended out the back of the bilaterally symmetric flowers. The two other books from the same era, compiled by Sarah Elizabeth Kandle and Margaret Todd, also included over one hundred specimens. Our understanding is that all three collectors were completing an assignment for their botany class, led by professor Austin Apgar. In Apgar's more than forty-year career at the college, he was the botany and zoology instructor and, later in his tenure, the vice principal. All the while, he was a strong advocate for the establishment of the New Jersey State Museum. In his book Trees of the Northern United States: Their Study, Description and Determination for the Use of Schools and Private Students, published in 1892, Apgar presented a text for educating specialists and nonspecialists alike in botany. In the opening pages, he alludes to his own pedagogical approach of immersing students in studying botany and natural history. \"Teach [the student] to employ his own senses in the investigation of natural objects, and to use his own powers of language in their description,\" Apgar writes. Standing in his place a century later, with twenty-first-century students in my research group, I have continued the tradition of asking students to observe and document various aspects of plant diversity, such as 4 Arnoldia 78\/1 \u2022 August 2020 floral morphology or geographical distribution, as they begin to explore possible directions for their own work. After subjecting our collection to a typical freezing regimen applied to any specimen that has left an herbarium (to eliminate mold or insects), we relocated these books to archival boxes in the single herbarium cabinet in my lab. We then began the careful process of recording information from these specimens, wearing gloves to prevent further damage to the paper. The collection was rather typical of older herbarium specimens, having handwritten labels with little more information than a plant name, collection date, and vague locality. Herbarium labels now regularly include more information documented by the collector, such as detailed descriptions of the plant at the time of collection, robust accounts of the locality and habitat of the plant, and references to co-occurring species. Collectors increasingly include GPS coordinates, especially now that these data are collected with a tap on the screen of a smartphone. Most herbaria are likely to have more-recent, higher-quality collections of the nearly three hundred species documented in our herbarium books. Yet, these historic specimens represent an important snapshot in the history of the landscape surrounding Trenton, which has undergone significant changes over the past century. The specimens offer unique data points for the occurrence of these species and the developmental stage of the plant at the time of collection. My undergraduate research team often uses herbarium specimens in their work. The College of New Jersey is a primarily undergraduate institution, and at any given time, my lab is comprised of six or seven undergraduates engaged in multi-semester research projects directly related to my ongoing studies in plant systematics. Students working with me begin by engaging with projects that match their interests and then take their investigations in new directions often inspired by their own observations from herbaria or living collections. We are fortunate that our college is located near major herbaria such as the New York Botanical Garden's Steere Herbarium and the herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, which have holdings of 7.8 and 1.4 million specimens, respectively. And now, as a result of major efforts to digitize museum collections, my students can access images of specimens from herbaria across the globe while sitting in the lab. Yet, as my students embarked on extracting data from the historic sheets, deciphering the handwritten labels and updating names to reflect the latest taxonomic changes, this time they had a direct connection to the collectors. In reflecting on their experience transcribing data from these specimens, student collaborators Linda Zhang and Aaron Lee wrote, \"Between the faded illegible cursive and yellowed paper we got a glimpse of the lives of collectors and students that spent their time gathering, identifying, and preserving these records with little knowledge that they would be stumbled upon over a century later.\" A third student, Matthew Fertakos, came to see this collection as a way to think about how individuals of the same species, divided by time, may change their biology in response to the environment. Matthew had become fascinated with published studies that used herbarium specimens to document how important phases of a plant's life cycle, such as flowering, may have changed over the past century in conjunction with changes in climate. As a DaRin Butz Intern at the Arnold Arboretum, he learned to generate maps that show the predicted distribution of a species based on locality data gathered from herbarium specimens and corresponding climate data for the year the plant was collected. Combining these two interests, Matthew asked what changes were happening in the rare but notable ecosystems of his home state, New Jersey, such as in the Pine Barrens. To date, his work has incorporated over eighteen hundred herbarium specimens, some dating back to the same era as our small collection. Many of the specimens were obtained from the Chrysler Herbarium at Rutgers University, the same institution that generously assisted with digitizing our own small collection. Focusing on a dozen herbaceous species native to the Pine Barrens, Matthew has used these herbarium specimens to generate distribution maps and estimate the first flowering date for many years over the past century. His work continues to test for correlations between changes in first flowering dates and shifts in climate to understand why some species native to the Pine Barrens now exhibit earlier fl owering dates than the century prior. Matthew's work, inspired by this small collection, joins an ongoing movement that demonstrates the hidden potential of these historical artifacts to provide information about the effects of climate change on a plant's biology. Over the past decade, herbaria worldwide have prioritized efforts to digitize their collections, increasing accessibility not only to botanists but to all scientists whose work could benefi t from these data. The renewed life that digitization has brought to museum collections has also allowed us to establish our own herbarium at The College of New Jersey, registered with Index Herbariorum, the international registry for herbaria. Now, our collection, currently focused on historical plants of the Trenton area, will soon be accessible to all. Within this digital collective, our small collection is more powerful than it could have been alone. The fact that our collection was preserved, waiting for students to use them, was not a coincidence. The families of collectors saw value in these specimens. Rather than ignoring or discarding the specimens among other attic keepsakes, the families donated these otherwise dusty old books of plant pressings back to our department. Now, more than a century after the specimens were mounted and nearly a quarter-century after the collections returned to our department, we are in a unique position to be able to breathe new life into these plants and use them in our quest to understand the effects of climate change on biodiversity, assessing changes that have happened over the past and predicting changes that will happen in the future. The story of how the collections returned to us is a testament to the value and power of amateur botanizing (what we would today call \"citizen science\") and experiential fi eldwork as part of an undergraduate education. As an instructor, I share Apgar's emphasis on engaging students in hands-on observation and documentation of the natural world, and I stress to students the importance of preserving these botanical legacies. Now, the historical plant collections from our region of the country will join the millions of specimens available digitally as the botanical community continues to ask more questions about biodiversity in an ever-changing landscape. Wendy Clement is an associate professor of biology at The College of New Jersey. She is a plant systematist and evolutionary biologist, and her current research focuses on the evolution of fusion in honeysuckles. She is a current James R. Jewett Prize awardee at the Arnold Arboretum. Two violet specimens collected by Sarah Elizabeth Kandle in 1894: HERBARIUM OF THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY (IMAGES CROPPED) Viola pedatifi da (left) and V. pubescens."},{"has_event_date":0,"type":"arnoldia","title":"Model Maples","article_sequence":2,"start_page":6,"end_page":15,"url":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/action\/downloadFile?directDownload=true&b_downloadOriginal=true&id=25709","featured_photo":"https:\/\/assetbank.arboretum.harvard.edu\/assetbank-aahu\/servlet\/display?file=b34509f9d4e0d24ea328.jpg","volume":78,"issue_number":1,"year":2020,"series":null,"season":null,"authors":"Grossman, Jake J.","article_content":"For all of human history and many millions of years before it began, the forests of the temperate Northern Hemisphere have been populated by maples. Today, the maple genus (Acer) extends its reach from Guatemala to Canada, the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, and Southeast Asia to the Amur Valley. Like oaks, willows, and birches, among many other genera, the maples as we know them today differentiated from their nearest relatives at a time when the global climate was hotter and wetter than today's and have since survived a long period of cooling and drying, including many ice ages. Their evolution as a genus occurred through geographical radiation across the Northern Hemisphere, interspersed by extinctions and range retractions when climatic conditions became inhospitable. Contemporary maple diversity is the result of this history and represents only a single, still snapshot from a larger, unspooling reel. The extant maples have adapted, by and large, to climatically temperate conditions: warm summers and cold winters, with occasional dry periods interspersed with regular precipitation. But contemporary, human-caused climate change is rapidly reconfiguring this climate to a warmer one with less regular and more extreme events of rain or snow, making freakish droughts, early arrivals of spring, and warm winters more common. As the climate changes, maples, like other forest species adapted to the temperate north, face an uncertain future. In my research at the Arnold Arboretum, I make use of publicly available data, existing scholarship, and, most importantly, the Arboretum's collection of over six hundred maple trees (which is nationally accredited by the Plant Collections Network) to predict how the genus will respond to climate change. Specifically, I ask how maple species differ in their response to dry soil conditions and to the shorter, warmer winters that will likely become typical in the Northern Hemisphere. In doing so, I treat maples as a model for other kinds of temperate trees. The genus makes for a good model for several reasons. First, the maples are highly diverse. The genus consists of 120 to 160 species depending on the taxonomic authority, with half of these growing at the Arboretum. Second, maples have a very wide geographic distribution, unlike some temperate genera confined to only certain continents or regions. And third, as ecologically foundational, long-lived trees, maples are of interest in and of themselves, and so there is an existing body of research addressing their natural history, ecology, and evolution. Yet, in the final analysis, the story of the maples is powerful because it is typical: the genus is neither wildly more nor less vulnerable to climate change than other temperate woody genera. As such, maples can serve as a bellwether for other temperate trees: where goes the maple, so go other temperate taxa. Thus, the genus can tell us about the past, and potentially the future, of northern forests. Paleogene Origins Maples belong to the highly diverse angiosperms, or flowering plants, which probably had differentiated from their ancestors by the beginning of the Cretaceous period, some 145 to 66 million years ago (Coiro et al., 2019). During that period, the earliest flowering plants spread across the globe, competing with and living alongside the previously dominant woody gymnosperms (including pines, cypresses, and ginkgoes). But it was during the next geologic period, the Paleogene (66 to 23 million years ago), that maples split off from their relatives among the flowering plants and truly came into their own. By the beginning of the Paleogene, the world's continents were more or less in their present locations, although their climates and Model Maples Jake J. Grossman GROSSMAN, J. J. 2020. MODEL MAPLES. ARNOLDIA, 78(1): 6-15 Facing page: Historic maple diversity has arisen over the past sixty million years\u2014a period of extreme climate fluctuations. The physiological adaptations of modern-day maples are therefore a record of that history. The redvein maple (Acer rufinerve), pictured here, is native to Japan. PHOTO BY WILLIAN (NED) FRIEDMAN 8 Arnoldia 78\/1 \u2022 August 2020 the degree of connectivity among them differed from conditions in the present day. Land bridges between North America and both western Europe (through Greenland) and East Asia (through Alaska) emerged periodically during cooler parts of this climatic cycle and sank back beneath the waves during warmer ones. In general, the global climate was hot and wet: 18\u00b0F (10\u00b0C) hotter on average than global temperatures during the twentieth century. This means that tropical biomes extended across much of the Earth's land surface, with the poles experiencing temperate conditions like those we now have at the midlatitudes. Ice was absent\u2014or very scarce\u2014on the Earth's surface. As a result, the growth and abundance of plants living at the North and South Poles was probably limited not by cold temperatures but by the scarcity of light (Tiffney and Manchester, 2001). In these conditions, so different from those we experience sixty million years later, the population of trees that would give rise to the modern maples became distinct from its kin. Per fossil evidence\u2014the appearance of recognizably maple-ish leaves and fruits\u2014and complementary modeling based on the genetics of existing maple species, it was at this point that maples diverged from other genera in the soapberry family (Sapindaceae). This group, which also encompasses horsechestnuts and buckeyes (Aesculus) and lychee (Litchi chinensis), presently consists of over 130 genera and close to two thousand species. Of these, the maple genus is most closely related to Aesculus and to Dipteronia, the two extant species of which can be found in mainland China. Indeed, China is likely the evolutionary cradle of maples; despite some fossil evidence that maples originated in North America and spread to Asia over Pacific land bridges, the most recent molecular evidence points to an Asian origin (Li et al., 2019). From these beginnings in China, maples radiated across the entire Northern Hemisphere while the warm, wet climate of the Paleogene was at its acme. Studies of fossil evidence marshaled by paleontologists such as Toshimasa Tanai (1983), Jack Wolfe (Wolfe and Tanai, 1987), and Harald Walther (Walther and Zastawniak, 2005) indicate that, during this time, the maples were highly diverse and cosmopolitan in their distribution. For example, the maple flora of western North America, for which the fossil record is particularly strong, currently consists of three species: bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyl- Maples have a widespread distribution throughout the temperate Northern Hemisphere. This map was prepared for The Red List of Maples (2009). BOTANIC GARDENS CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL GLOBAL MAPLE DISTRIBUTION Model Maples 9 lum), vine maple (A. circinatum), and Douglas maple (A.