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Page arno ·~a 2 Shrubs and Vines at the Arnold Arboretum: A History Volume G2· Number 2· 2003 Sheila Connor 16G and in the Leventntt Arnoldia USPS Ordering Terracing (ISSN 004-2633; 866-100~ is Garden published quarterly by the Arnold Arboretum of P. Reed c~ Hilderbrand Harvard Umversity. Periodicals postage paid at Douglas Gary Boston, Massachusetts. 20 Shrubs and Vmes for the Leventntt Garden Peter Del Michael Tom Subscnptions are $20.00 per calendar year domestic, Tredici, Dosmann, $25.00 foreign, payable m advance. Smgle copies of Ward ~ Julie Coop most issues are $5.00; the exceptions are 58/4-59/1 (Metasequoia After Fifty Years) and 54/4 (A Source- 27 Genetic Piracy: A Newly Discovered book of Cultivar Names), which are $10.00. Remit- Marvel of the Plant World tances may be made m U S. dollars, by check drawn Richard B. Primack on a U S. bank, by international money order; or by Visa or Mastercard. Send orders, remittances, 311 Book Note and all other change-of-address notices, subscription- Karen Madsen related commumcations to. Circulation Manager, The Arnold 125 Arnoldia, Arboretum, Arborway, 32 Arnold Arboretum Weather Station Jamaica Plam, Massachusetts 02130-3500. Data-2002 Telephone 617 524.1718; facsimile 617.524.1418; e-mail [email protected] Front Cover Clockwise from the upper left, Lomcera Smilax Postmaster: Send address changes to semper virens (trumpet honeysuckle), spp. (briar), both photographed by Peter Del Tredici; Arnoldia Circulation Manager Hamamehs molhs (Chinese witch hazel); and The Arnold Arboretum , Viburnum furcatum (forked viburnum), both by 125 Arborway Robert G. Mayer. The background, Ilex cornuta, is Jamaica Plain, MA 02130-3500 also by Peter Del Tredici. Karen Madsen, Editor Inside front cover: Malus prumfolia var. xanthocarpa Mary Jane Kaplan, Copyeditor on the left; M ’Wyema’ on the nght. Andy Wmther, Designer Inside back cover Inside a crabapple canopy looking Editomal Committee out: it is a very good year for crabapples. Andersen Phylhs Back cover: The center of the M. Victor Robert E. Cook greensward and Frances Leventritt Peter Del Tredici Garden, photographed by Karen Madsen, as were the inside covers. Jianhua Li Stephen A. Spongberg Erratum. In volume 62, number 1, our last issue, the Kim E. Tnpp photographs of the Leventntt Garden on both front and back covers were not credited; they are the work Copynght © 2003. The President and Fellows of of Alan Ward, author of Amencan Designed Land- Harvard College scapes~ A Photographic Interpretation. B Shrubs and Vines at the Arnold Arboretum: A History Sheila Connor In the Arboretum every effort has been made to foster the natural beauty of the landscapes and add to them wherever possible, but it has not been able to overcome the disadvantage of being a public garden. In the arrangement of the collection of shrubs the aesthetic has had to give way to the practical. Even in the matter of place there was no option since a considerable flat area of land was necessary and there is but one in the Arboretum. -E. H. Wilson, America’s Greatest Garden (1925) or almost one hundred years, gardeners, accomplished that task, Charles Sprague and students who wanted to Sargent and Frederick Law Olmsted. homeowners,J-. learn about shrubs made their way to a In 1874, when he first approached Olmsted gently sloping plot of land just inside and to the with the notion that an arboretum would be a right of the Arboretum’s Forest Hills gate. valuable addition to the plan for the Boston park Bounded by the Arborway and Forest Hills Road system, Sargent was 33 and although he had on the north and east and by the ponds, natural only "a modest reputation as gentleman land- woods, and maple collection on the south and scape gardener," his professional standing was west, the linear arrangement of the three-acre impressive and growing. In May of 1872 he shrub collection made it easy to identify. Today was appointed professor of horticulture at the the site hosts the Bradley Collection of Bussey Institution (founded 1869; closed 1940s), Rosaceous Plants, but-as directors’ reports and a position first held by his friend, neighbor, and archival records document-before this trans- mentor Francis Parkman. (Sargent resigned this formation began in 1981, it had been home to position at Harvard’s school of scientific agricul- the oldest continually maintained collection in ture, which abutted on the Arboretum’s land, in the Arboretum’s landscape. 1877.) In November of 1873 he became director Visually, it was perhaps also the most distinc- of Harvard’s botanic garden in Cambridge, tive. Completely different from the rest of the working under Asa Gray, the father of American Arboretum, where the picturesque reigns botany, and at the same time, he was named supreme despite the collection’s taxonomic director of Harvard’s newly established Arnold arrangement, the shrub collection’s rows of for- Arboretum in Jamaica Plain; it was in hopes mal, parallel beds probably confounded most of linking the new arboretum to the Boston visitors. The very existence of a separate shrub park system that he addressed his proposal collection is a reminder of the difficulty of to Olmsted. accommodating in a single design the disparate Olmsted, then 55 and still working in New requirements of a scientific collection and a York-on Central Park, among other projects- public park. It also reminds us of the sometimes had a national reputation in landscape architec- opposing views held by the two men who ture and had been a proponent of arboreta since The Arboretum’s shrub and vme collection as photographed from a hehcoptor by Massachusetts State Department of Publ1c Works aenal photographers m june 1969, the year horticulturist Donald Wyman retmed. The trellis, overwhelmed m places by vmes, can be seen at mght. From the Archives of the Arnold Arboretum 4 the beginning of his career. Sargent’s proposal Early in the planning process, Sargent insisted may have appealed to him because an arbore- on accommodating "a working or experimental tum had been included, though never realized, collection" within the otherwise wooded and in the Olmsted and Vaux 1858 plan for naturalistic design. The idea may in fact have Central Park. begun as a practical method for dealing with the abundance of shrubby plant material already on AND THE SARGENT, OLMSTED, hand soon after the Arboretum’s founding. SHRUB GARDEN Months before Olmsted’s involvement and The collaboration between the novice botanist before any work had been done on the design, the and well-established landscape designer future site of the shrub collection served as a worked. Under Asa Gray’s tutelage, Sargent had nursery and a holding area for the thousands of learned the importance of the individual ele- plants intended for the rest of the grounds. Estab- ments within a landscape, and he valued the lishing a nursery and making an inventory of ability to recognize, identify, and compare each plants on hand were among the few projects that plant to all others. Olmsted, by contrast, looked Sargent could undertake with "the very limited beyond individual plants; for him, they were means at the disposal of the Director" during subordinate to the overall design and composi- 1873, the first year of the Arboretum’s existence. tion. But the two men agreed that the design The nursery site was possibly one of the most for the Arboretum’s landscape would have to fertile areas of what an elderly Sargent much satisfy both scientific and aesthetic require- later recalled as the "worn-out farmland" on ments. And as Ida Hay writes in her preface to which the Arboretum was established. Science in the Pleasure Ground (1995) "the Described in 1692 as upland and meadow by its dynamic tension between science and aesthet- first recorded owner, Samuel Gore, the land ics turned out to be one of the most interesting became part of the farm of Joseph Weld in 17188 themes of Arboretum history." and remained in the Weld family until pur- chased by Benjamin Bussey in 1810. It was also conveniently adjacent to the Bussey Institu- tion, where Sargent had established an office for himself and commandeered space in the greenhouses that were now to be "devoted to the raising of forest and ornamen- tal trees and shrubs for future plantations" at the Arbore- tum. Seed for the new arboretum was pouring in from other institutions through- ~ ------- out the world, and Jackson Taken from the hillside Just above the hlac and forsythia collections, this is one the Arboretum’s of the earhest known Images of the Arboretum. The upland m the middle Dawson, distance became the site of the shrub collection, and the treelme represents the first propagator (originally future route of the Arborway, constructed m the early 1890s. Puttmg Olmsted’s the Bussey’s), was making design mto effect transformed the standmg water of the low-lymg, wet meadow ambitious collections of mto three distinct ponds, two of which were bisected by Meadow Road. This native plants. Within just is the Lantern at image from Shde Collection the Harvard Design School, an three would especially comprehensive assemblage of images of early Amencan landscape years, Sargent report that "to relieve the design. They were taken between 1850 and 1920 and digitized m 1996 through a Library of Congress-sponsored competition. The 2,800 lantern shdes can be overcrowded nurseries, 3,181 accessed through the Amencan Memory Page of the Library of Congress (http:// forest trees have been memoryloc.gov/ammem/award97/mhsdhtml/aladhome.html). planted out." Published in the October 1898 issue of New England Magazme, this image shows an early version of the collection’s layout when the rows of "young shrubs" extended mght up to the edge of the roadbed.

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