Arnold Arboretum

The planning for the Arnold Arboretum Centennial celebration began in 1967 when Dr. Richard A. Howard, Arboretum Director from 1954-1978, appointed committees of supporters and visiting-committee members to raise funds for the upcoming event. The week-long celebration (May 21-28, 1972) opened with a banquet in a downtown Boston hotel that featured an address by William T. Stearn, famous taxonomist and botanist from the British Museum of Natural History. Events included a daylong symposium on "Potential of Arboreta and Botanical Gardens," a picnic at the Case Estates in Weston, MA, a Boston Pops Dinner Concert, and an exhibit at Harvard's Houghton Library. Three public lectures included the larger community. The Arnold Arboretum also offered "reverse birthday gifts" as part of the celebration. Young katsura trees were distributed to every member of the Friends of the Arboretum. Select colleges, universities, arboreta, and botanical institutions were offered their choice of a planting of "educational value" and "horticultural interest." New England garden clubs were given large trees or shrubs for public plantings. The Centennial Celebration was followed in the local and regional New England newspapers. Participants came from 37 states, 10 countries, 69 institutions, and 46 organizations.

The Arnold Arboretum was officially established in March 1872. C.S. Sargent was chosen to manage the new institution. These Director's reports began in 1873, one year after the Arboretum was established. They are addressed to the President of the University and discuss all aspects of Arboretum work for a given year. At different times in the Arboretum's history, the Director's report was published in the Journal of the Arnold Arboretum or Arnoldia. Since 1983 the report is published separately.

Larz Anderson (1866-1937) was born in Paris in 1866, while his parents were visiting Europe. In August 1888, after graduating from Harvard College in June, he embarked on a trip around the world which lasted two years and included his first exposure to Japan. Upon his return from Japan in 1913, Larz Anderson imported at least forty trees from the Yokohama Nursery Company. Following his death in April, 1937, Isabel Anderson donated the major portion of the collection (30 plants) to the Arnold Arboretum, along with the funds necessary to build a shade house for their display on the grounds of the Bussey Institution. In 1949, following her death, the remaining plants were donated to the Arboretum.

These documents reflect the evolution of land use in an area of the Arboretum. The area, which is in the southeastern corner of the property, is adjacent to the Forest Hills Gate and lies between the Arborway and the Arboretum's ponds. Bounded by Willow Path and by Forest Hills Road, the area was the site of the Arboretum's first nursery. A shrub collection superseded the nursery in the 1890's and occupied part of what is now the Eleanor Cabot Bradley Collection of Rosaceous Plants until the early 1980's. The Bradley garden was dedicated on June 2, 1985.

In 1991 the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University signed a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service (NPS) with the purpose of setting up a structure to collaborate on a range of programs and services in the area of historic landscape preservation. The collaboration brought together the resources of the North Atlantic Region of National Park Service, which owns and manages one of the largest groups of historic gardens and cultural landscapes in the country, and the Arnold Arboretum, which has been collecting and curating plants hardy in the North Temperate Zone for over 100 years. The design of the Arboretum itself was a joint effort in the late 1880s and 1890s of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927), the Arboretum's first director. This new collaboration linked the Arboretum with the NPS Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation housed at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Jackson Dawson was Plant Propagator of Arnold Arboretum, 1875-1916, was succeeded by William Judd, 1916-1946.

In 1996, the 24-acre Bussey Brook Meadow was added to the Arboretum, marking the first addition to the property since 1895.

James Russell Lowell Memorial Park was created in 1898 as a memorial to Cambridge native and Harvard graduate James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). During his lifetime, Lowell also served as a Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Harvard, editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1857-1862), and ambassador to England (1880-1885). The park encompases 140,000 square feet of land at the end of Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass behind the land where Lowell's estate stood. The James Rusell Lowell Memorial Park is held in trust by the Metropolitan District Commission.

The Records of the South Street Footpath Construction Project collection was acquired by the Arboretum's Archives in 2002 from Laura Tenny Brogna, Landscape Project Manager. The collection documents the clearing of the Arnold Arboretum's South Street Tract and the construction of a new footpath between Washington Street and South Street. It also documents the construction of the Washington Street and South Street gates and contains correspondence, notes, photographs, drawings, and slides. The bulk of the materials in this collection date from 1998 to 2002.

The earliest nursery inventories held by the Arboretum date from 1930 by which time the nursery/propagation facility had been relocated four times. While a nursey area has consistantly occupied a site adjacent to the propagation facilities, additional nurseries have also been located elsewhere on the Arboretum grounds, and beginning in 1946, at the Case Estates in Weston, Massachusetts. Today the nursery inventories are filed electronically and held in the Living Collections Department.

The Arnold Arboretum Visiting Committee is an advisory group that meets twice a year and makes recommendations regarding the Arboretum's research, living collections, public programs, and physical facility. The members of the Visiting Committee are appointed by Harvard University. Membership consists primarily of people outside of the Arboretum or Harvard who work in appurtenant fields, such as horticulture, dendrology or botany. Harvard affilates and local supporters occasionally do serve on the Committee as well.

In 1996, building on a prior collaboration between the Arnold Arboretum and the National Park Service that began in the early 1990s, Diane Syverson, Arnold Arboretum Manager of School Programs, and Liza Stearns, Olmsted National Historic Site Education Specialist, began a project to design an elementary school curriculum. The curriculum was developed to engage students in defining and reading a landscape, and to reveal the stories of how people came to know the land and then collectively shape and care for its landscape. The education departments of both organizations jointly published Landscape Explorers: Uncovering the Power of Place, the first known landscape curriculum, in 1997. This landscape-based education curriculum is intended for 4th through 6th graders and includes a teachers' guide with background information and lesson plans, 11"x14" photographs of landscapes, and a student field journal to record exploration and observation of the landscape. At its inception the full Landscape Explorers program included a teacher orientation workshop and a visit to the Arnold Arboretum. Landscape Explorers supports learning standards identified in the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and National Standards for Social Studies, History, Art, and Science and won the 1998 Merit Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).

In 1946, the Harvard Corporation approved "The Bailey Plan," which was intended to avoid waste and duplication of financial resources. Under the plan, a large number of library materials, herbarium samples, and Arboretum funds were to be re-directed to the Botany Departments in Cambridge. Opponents of the Plan felt that it removed too many of the Arboretum's resources, and also argued that it violated the terms of the James Arnold Trust, which endowed the Arnold Arboretum since its inception. In an effort to protect the Arboretum's resources, a group of approximately 600 Harvard Alumni and Scholars formed the Association for the Arnold Arboretum. The Association tried to convince Massachusetts Attorney General Fingold (the only one with legal standing to sue a trust) to file suit against Harvard, but he declined. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Fingold's favor. In 1958, the Association successfully convinced Massachusetts Attorney General Edward J. McCormack, Jr. to allow them to file suit in his name against Harvard in an attempt to stop The Bailey Plan. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 3-2 for Harvard.

In the early 1930s, Ernest J. Palmer, a member of the Arnold Arboretum, collected a few dozen stone artifacts from sites at the Arboretum. Subsequently, this collection was augmented by Alfred J. Fordham, also a member of the Arboretum, with additional items found at Arboretum sites. The collection and its associated sites have been analyzed, identified, interpreted, and documented by anthropologists and archaeologists from various organizations, in particular: 1983, overall analysis of the collection by Thomas F. Mahlstedt and Valerie Talmage, Massachusetts Historical Commission; 1986, identification of the individual artifacts by Prof. Barbara Luedkte, University of Massachusetts (Boston); 1992-1993, site analysis by Steven Pendery, City of Boston Landmarks Commission.

This collection contains materials from a variety of exhibits shown by the Arnold Arboretum over the decades, including Magical Floral Forms, Blossoms on the Bough, Sargentia, Flowering Trees, Flora from Shakespeare, Bridge of Trees, and Museum in the Garden. There are also materials from annual exhibits like Christmas wreath making and the Camellia exhibitions. Exhibit organizers and researchers include Ida Hay, Cora Warren, Professor Margaret Henderson Floyd, Corliss Knapp Engle, and Mary Lou Amrhein.

Rehder arrived in the U.S. from Germany in 1898 and worked at Arnold Arboretum as a taxonomist and bibliographer. After Charles Faxon's death in 1918, Rehder was appointed curator.

The Arnold Arboretum's plant records system is the oldest continuously maintained system of its kind in North America. From the time of its founding, the Arboretum has had a record system that includes a standardized accession number assigned to every plant on the grounds for use in tracking its name and origin. The initial system of recording plant accessions began in 1874 and was created by Jackson Thornton Dawson (1841-1916), the Arboretum's first plant propagator. The records for these incoming plants included an assigned base number, Latin binomial, provenance, date and form received such as seed, graft, or plant.

The Science in the Pleasure Ground Exhibit opened on October 18, 1996 as a celebration of the Arnold Arboretum's 125th Anniversary. A product of 6 years of planning, the exhibit highlights the cultural history of the Arboretum, the design of the landscape, plant collecting expeditions, forest conservation, American horticulture, and the many uses of wood.

This collection contains group photographs of Arboretum staff, in both formal and informal settings taken at various celebrations, special events, and field trips. Includes activities in which many staff participated and occasionally includes friends, family members, and volunteers. This Guide provides a representational selection of the images the Archives holds. The additional photographs can be accessed onsite along with the images and information held by the Arboretum's Digital Asset Management System, ImagePortal.

The Arnold Arboretum was founded in 1872 for the purpose of furthering scientific research in dendrology and arboriculture, and providing a site for a garden of trees and shrubs suited to the climate of Massachusetts. The Arboretum includes an herbarium and a library for the study of plants all over the world.

Post Office Square was created to provide a 1400 space parking garage as well as a 1.7 acre park in the heart of the Boston's financial district. The park was conceived as a mini-arboretum featuring over 125 species of plants in the city's densest urban area. In 1989, Robert Cook, the Director of the Arnold Arboretum began working with the Friends of Post Office Square to help create the park. In 1990, an Agreement was signed between the President and Fellows of Harvard College (on behalf of the Arnold Arboretum) and the Post Office Square Redevelopment Corporation to place "on permanent loan" six large trees from the Arboretum's Living Collections. The Arnold Arboretum consults regularly on the care of the loaned trees. As of 2003, only one of the large trees remain.

The living collection of the Arboretum was to include representatives of all woody plants that would grow in the Boston area. The arrangement and design of these collections was collaboration between Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arboretum. The Arboretum was intended to function as a pleasure ground for the citizens of Boston and as an encyclopedic tree museum for scientists. In their design, Sargent and Olmsted were in agreement that they had both scientific and aesthetic goals. Together they created a design based on a botanical sequence devised by George Bentham and Joseph Hooker displayed in a naturalistic fashion. The Arnold Arboretum is the only extant arboretum designed by Olmsted.

This collection includes guides, books, articles, and maps that provide basic information about the Arnold Arboretum to visitors and the local community. Study of the guides reveals changes in the landscape and its interpretation.

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw an upswing in violence and vandalism in Boston's city parks, which lead to a subsequent drop-off in attendance and donations. In 1983 the Boston Park Ranger Program was instituted as a response to the growing concern for Boston's parklands. During the first year, rangers patrolled the Boston Common, the Public Garden, the Commonwealth Avenue Mall and the Arnold Arboretum on foot and on horseback.

In the following years the program was expanded to include Franklin Park, Jamaica Pond and the Back Bay Fens. The concept of park rangers originated in the nineteenth century with Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted advised that there be a force of 'Park Keepers' to patrol the parks in an effort to prevent vandalism and to encourage the wise use of the City's parks.