![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This gem in Boston’s Emerald Necklace of parks provided open space to an expanding and diversifying city. Yet Harvard’s tree museum was not just for the botanical connoisseur. With these integrated living, preserved, and archival collections, the Arnold Arboretum had become an international destination for scholars of woody plants. The herbarium of two hundred thousand sheets complemented a thirty-five-thousand-volume library and archival collection of nearly ten thousand photographs. While many of the plants were botanical taxa, including wild-origin species newly cultivated in North America, there was no shortage of infraspecific forms and varieties that we would now call cultivars. The institution was well on its way to meeting its initial charge (a nascent collections policy, if you will) to cultivate every tree, shrub, and vine hardy in Boston. ![]() Sargent and his team transformed the landscape into a composite of taxonomic tree groups and research plantings, including an intensely cultivated shrub and vine collection, all nestled among a few natural and naturalized woodlands.īy 1922, botanical exploration-particularly of East Asia and North America-and horticultural exchange yielded a living collection of over five thousand taxa growing at the Arboretum. Frederick Law Olmsted had reimagined Benjamin Bussey’s farm with carriageways and pathways, collection areas and viewsheds. At the time of Sargent’s writing in 1922, Harvard’s tree museum (founded in 1872) had expanded from 125 to 250 acres. Much has been written about them, and Charles Sprague Sargent’s “The First Fifty Years of the Arnold Arboretum” describes the first five decades with aplomb. Just as the sequoia’s history is written within its rings, branches, and form, the Arboretum’s landscape and collections reflect a history rich in dramatic events and subtle ripples. Photograph from Arnold Arboretum Archives The First Fifty Years A forty-two-foot-tall giant sequoia moves to the Arnold in 1972. I’m certain that the wooden rings within that branch would reveal not just what was going on with that single tree but the surrounding Arboretum landscape as well. A new leader eventually took over: a dog-legged branch that formed fifty years ago from the initial crown’s tip, some forty-three feet above the ground. That spring, a twenty-four-year-old, forty-two-foot-tall, pointy-topped tree was dug, transported, and transplanted in its current spot in the conifer collection.The magnificent specimen survived, but its central leader died due to transplant shock, leaving an oval-shaped form for decades. In 1972, in honor of the Arboretum’s centennial, Boston College-which had recently acquired the Hovey property-donated the tree. Most of the branches seem normal, erupting out of the main stem at right angles, but if you step back and keep your eye on the crown, you’ll see an odd conglomeration where one branch over another attempted to bend skyward.īack in 1948 (the same year that Metasequoia glyptostroboides, the dawn redwood, arrived in North America), a supporter of the Arboretum, Chandler Hovey, collected giant sequoia seedlings from California and planted several near his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, a stone’s throw from the Boston College campus. Shift your gaze up along the orange bark to the sky, and you’ll see the tree’s candelabra-like branching pattern. After crossing the brook and walking up the slope, you’ll see that the wide bole (almost five feet in diameter) begs to be hugged. Among the trees is an upright individual with a rather abrupt taper at the top, the Arnold Arboretum’s largest giant sequoia ( Sequoiadendron giganteum, accession 1320-72*A), now standing eighty-three feet tall. Your eyes will skim a patchwork of conifer textures, colors, and forms. Round the bend on Hemlock Hill Road and look across Bussey Brook and Kent Field to the north. This is the third installment in a series that opened with Charles Sprague Sargent’s monumental “The First Fifty Years of the Arnold Arboretum.” Richard Howard and Donald Wyman shared focused assessments at the Arnold’s centennial. ![]()
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