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Look to the Trees
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bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa): This massive old North American native is one of just a few trees remaining from English landscape gardener William Carvill’s original landscape plan for Haverford. (The other is the swamp white oak on Lloyd Green, now fenced to protect its root system.) The bur oak’s gracefully lobed, leathery leaves shade the Magill portion of Lutnick Library, and its chunky, hairy acorns (“They’re crazy-looking,” says Kent) clatter down on the library roof in autumn. Library renovations in 1968 featured a curving entrance ramp engineered to bypass the tree’s fragile root system, just inches below the soil surface. “Trees this old are beginning to show their age,” says Haverford Horticulturalist Carol Wagner. “We’re hoping it can live many more years. Cables support the weight of the long branches, so a big limb doesn’t come crashing down in heavy rain or high wind.”
Look to the Trees
They’ve always provided food, shade, and shelter. Now scientists are finding that trees also can boost human health and play a key role in addressing climate change. The Haverford College Arboretum is home to more than 5,000 of them.
BY SARI HARRAR ■ PHOTOS BY PATRICK MONTERO
With new urgency and awe, trees—from ancient old-growth forests to the brand-new maple sapling in your backyard—are capturing the human imagination.
Breakthrough science is revealing the amazing ways these botanical beings communicate and share resources via vast fungal networks. Above ground, researchers are documenting the profound health benefits of “forest bathing”—a quiet walk in the woods that can reduce blood pressure, soothe stress hormones like cortisol, and even sharpen memory. Trees have been critically important to humans for food, fuel, and shelter, and we may depend on them now more than ever: Climate scientists recently estimated that reforesting 25 percent of planet Earth could reduce atmospheric carbon by 205 gigatons, slowing global warming significantly.
Just how much are we waking up to the extraordinary power of trees? Consider this: As the pandemic upended our lives, sales of garden plants, including trees, soared. One-third of Americans told a national survey they were spending more time outdoors, and 60 percent said they appreciate nature more. Trees grabbed headlines when University of British Columbia forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, Ph.D., published her 2021 book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, outlining her groundbreaking research on tree communication via mycorrhizal networks in the soil. Simard’s work helped inspire the 2009 movie Avatar and the bestselling novel The Overstory. “The work I do about trees being connected and nurturing each other represents a worldview that has been known for thousands of years by the Aboriginal people of North America,” Simard told New Scientist magazine in April. “… I want [people] to want to go to the forest. That’s the most simple, basic thing. Just go and be with it and love it and care for it and talk to it and show your respect for it.”
With more than 5,000 trees, Haverford’s 216-acre campus arboretum is a great place to begin. “People have been passionate about trees here since the College was founded,” says Arboretum Director Claudia Kent. “It continues today. We get tens of thousands of visitors each year who come just to use our walking trails. And whenever we have to make the difficult decision to remove a big, old tree for safety reasons, we hear from people who loved those trees.”
Haverford’s extensive Arboretum Revitalization Program (reported on in the winter 2018 issue) aims to plant 1,000 new trees on campus by 2027, including replacements for 400 trees requiring removal and another 100 knocked down in a massive windstorm. “We are planting two trees for every one we remove,” Kent says. “One goal that’s very important to me is using native trees in wooded areas. We want habitat for wildlife, not just for people.” You can use Haverford’s Arboretum Explorer app to guide a walking tour of notable campus trees—and turn the page to meet a few of these beautiful botanical beings that share the 216-acre campus. Spending time with the trees is “a respite, like taking a deep breath,” Kent says. “People call the Arboretum a hidden gem.”
China-fir “Chanson’s Gift” (Cunninghamia lanceolata)
With its delicate needles and tiny, dangling cones, this graceful conifer located along McIntosh and Woods roads at the Athletic Center follows a surprising campus tradition that combines horticulture with wayfinding. “Everywhere there was an intersection or a crossroad on the original landscape plan, William Carvill planted evergreens,” Wagner says. “If you were walking and saw pines up ahead, you knew that’s where the next crossroad was.”
College Lane oak allée
Originally named Maple Avenue for its rows of circa-1834 sugar maple trees, College Lane’s iconic allée has evolved to overcome many arboreal threats. An ice storm ravaged the original trees in about 1902, though five survived into the 1980s. Red oaks were added to the allée, but succumbed to the contagious and deadly bacterial leaf scorch. “We countered with an assortment of oaks in the white oak family,” Wagner says. White oaks are less susceptible to the disease; using a variety of trees rather than planting a monoculture reduces odds that a major campus tree feature will be entirely decimated by a single pest, she explains. Attempts to reintroduce sugar maples among the allée’s oaks in the 1990s—a nod to Carvill’s original landscape design—encountered an unexpected setback. “Unfortunately, the climate has warmed enough that the maples are not very happy down here anymore,” Wagner says. The silver lining? Damage from that 1902 ice storm galvanized interest in preserving Haverford’s botanical treasures by an organization called the Campus Club. It later became the Haverford College Arboretum Association.
hinoki falsecypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa)
Bonsai enthusiasts grow hinoki falsecypress trees as stunning miniatures. But this towering 77-foot-tall specimen, located at the Barclay Beach entrance to Barclay Hall, is a state champion tree. It’s the tallest on record in Pennsylvania. Championship trees are determined via a point system, with one point each for height and trunk circumference and a quarter-point for every foot of crown spread. Haverford has eight state champion trees, all conifers, including a 61-foot-tall Siberian spruce (Picea obovata) and a Shensi fir (Abies chensiensis) standing 79 feet tall with a trunk girth of 115 inches, both in the Pinetum. Step beneath the hinoki falsecypress’s sweeping branches and you’ll discover this conifer’s beautiful secret: a double trunk with soft red bark that naturally shreds away in long, graceful strips. The tree’s cones, as small and round as marbles, turn from summer green to rich brown in fall.
London planetree (Platanus x acerifolia)
This iconic urban street tree can sequester more than 90 pounds of carbon per year, U.K. government scientists estimated in 2019, courtesy of broad, toothed leaves that harness sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into energy. A horticultural cross between the American sycamore and Oriental planetree, the London plane was once a European sensation—greening the glamorous boulevards of Paris in the 1850s, adopted by the sootchoked city of London by the 1920s, and then exported to the United States and beyond. A planetree “rustled its green leaves” in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and gets namechecked for its “tender and beautiful fronds” in George Frideric Handel’s comic opera Serse. These hard-working trees don’t just clean up the air around them; a single mature urban tree can supply half the oxygen a human needs in a year, reduce stormwater runoff by 31 percent, and release enough moisture to cool the air as effectively as six room-size air conditioners on a hot day. This specimen towers over Sharpless Hall.
tigertail spruce (Picea polita)
One of the stars of Haverford’s Ryan Pinetum, this 58-foot-tall tigertail spruce has a spot on Pennsylvania’s state champion tree roster. “Most of Haverford’s champion trees are in the Pinetum because they’re old and somewhat rare,” says Kent. “Few other places have them.” The Pinetum is “a little treasure that a lot of people are not familiar with,” says Haverford Horticulturalist Mike Startup. Begun in the late 1920s, the Pinetum features five of the world’s seven conifer families. Grouped by tree family, the collection was inventoried and labeled by volunteers in the late 1980s. In winter, the tigertail spruce grows redbrown buds at the ends of branches—and the subtle shapes and colors of this towering giant and the rest of the evergreen collection are striking. “It’s especially beautiful in a snowstorm,” Kent adds.
Osage orange (Maclura pomifera)
Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) Before barbed wire burst onto the scene in 1875, Osage orange trees fenced America’s agricultural lands from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains. Farmers planted 60,000 miles of the tough, thorny hedges in 1868 alone, historians report. In the 1930s and ’40s, a new “hedgemania” gave this American native species a second act, when 200 million Osage oranges were dropped into the ground by the federal Works Progress Administration as windbreaks against soil erosion—and insurance against another Dust Bowl. But none of that explains the mysterious presence of Haverford’s famous “climbing tree,” one of a pair of Osage oranges in the playground beside the library. “The Osage orange tree species was discovered in about 1803 in Arkansas, and then it appears on Carvill’s landscape plan for the campus just three decades later,” Wagner says. “That’s an amazingly short time.” Dots on the old plan suggest the trees—also called “hedge apples” for their softball-sized green fruit—marked the entrance to a flower garden, Wagner says. A bigger unknown: when and why the climbing tree toppled over yet survived, providing kids (and a few adults) with plenty of sideways branches to scramble on.
European beech (Fagus sylvatica ‘Laciniata’)
This perfectly rounded tree has been thriving in solitary splendor on Founders Green since planted through a donor’s generosity in the 1980s. With lacy, serrated leaves and encircling web of low branches, it’s a one-tree outdoor room—a good spot for lounging, napping, or admiring the smooth, gray bark and the glossy foliage that changes from dark green in summer to golden in fall. Surprisingly, this European beech’s whimsical shape is not the result of pruning, Startup says. It just grows that way. “We nicknamed it the gumball,” Kent says.
chinkapin oak (Quercus muehlenbergii):
The chinkapin oak kept America on the move in the 1800s and early 1900s—and provided snacks for the journey. Its durable wood was a fence-post favorite that also served as hot-burning fuel for steamships and long-lasting ties for railroad tracks. Its lovely leaves are scalloped as delicately as the edge of a fancy, Sunday-dinner pie crust. In 1898, the Trenton Evening Times extolled the pleasures of its famously delicious little acorns: “They are more delicate than the chestnut and of rare flavor, but too small for the candy and cake maker to bother with or to be used for the table,” the article reported. “They are nice to nibble at in between times. … The best of them are exceptionally sweet, tender and well-flavored.” This young tree may not look imposing, but saplings ensure a future of healthy, big trees for the Arboretum. “It’s an image of hopefulness for the future,” notes Haverford Plant Curator Sally Anderson.
Sari Harrar is a health and science journalist whose articles appear in AARP Bulletin, Consumer Reports on Health, Reader’s Digest, and other national publications.
VIRTUAL TREE TOUR
If you can’t get to the Haverford College Arboretum to see its glorious trees in person, the next best thing is a virtual tour. Just go to the Arboretum Explorer app at haverford.arboretumexplorer.org and select “Tours” from the top menu bar. Then click on “Select Tour” to choose a campus tree tour, a Pinetum tour, or a tour of our state champion trees. All of the tours provide photos and information about the trees featured, and even identify their locations on a map.
A Leafy Tradition
From a red-tipped Norway spruce to oaks, maples, tulip trees and rows of young Okame cherry trees near the library that bloom each spring, 67 “class trees” dot Haverford’s campus. Among the earliest classes whose tree still survives? The Class of 1936, who planted a Green Mountain sugar maple (Acer saccharum) in 1986 at the corner of Founder’s Hall. Among the newest: The Class of 2021’s bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) installed behind the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) facility during Customs Week in 2017.
“The tradition changed two years ago, from giving a class tree to each [first-year] class to planting a graduation tree in students’ senior year, when they feel a deeper connection to the campus,” says Arboretum Director Claudia Kent. (Classes have also planted trees during reunions.)
Fords have been putting down botanical roots in the Arboretum’s tree collection for a very long time. A 1903 song, written by the Class of 1899’s J.H. Redfield, commemorates an Arbor Day tradition of planting a “Senior Tree” in early April. The second verse goes like this: “So deep, deep down we dig a hole / And then, where all can see / Upon the lawn at Haverford / We plant our Senior Tree.”
To see if your class has a class tree and find its species and location, go to Haverford’s Arboretum Explorer app at haverford.arboretumexplorer.org. Choose “Features” from the top menu bar and then select “Class Tree” from the “Type” drop-down list to search by year. —S. H.
DO YOU RECALL A FAVORITE TREE ON CAMPUS?
Maybe it’s one that you walked by every day on your way to class or whose shade you enjoyed in warm weather. Perhaps it’s a lovely specimen you got to gaze at from your dorm window, or visited during walks on the Nature Trail or in the Pinetum. If so, we’d love to hear about it. (No problem if you don’t know the tree species, just give us a description and the location.) Send a note to hc-editor@haverford.edu.
