Reunion and Commencement is the season when memorial trees always come to my mind. Middlebury has over 85 class trees and memorial trees-a class tree may be planted by a class during a reunion, while a memorial tree is often dedicated to a professor, or a classmate that died while they were a student. People often come back and look at the trees, a living memorial to a memory, or to a person they love and remember. I bet I get 2-3 calls a year from someone looking for a special tree.
One I remember was right after a commencement ceremony several years ago. Someone walked up to the “chair general” asking where the tree planted by the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was located. They were impressed when, after reaching me on the radio, I knew right where it was. Really, though, how often do you run into maples planted by the Dalai Lama? Of course I knew where it was. You can visit all the class and memorial trees in Google Earth.
All the memorial and class trees get a little extra love and care, as you can imagine. They’re on a 2 year inspection schedule, as opposed to 5 or so, and get more regualarly pruned and mulched. Planting a new one is a sad honor, and a little stressful. It’s something you don’t really want to mess up. Even simply picking the variety of tree is tough. It’s got to live a long, long time. Having the memorial tree for someone die is just immensely sad and un-imaginable, so I tend toward longer lived species, like oak or maple.
At my previous job at a garden center I had to help a couple I vaguely knew pick a memorial tree they wanted to plant for a young man who had died that had worked for them. I take them out to the large trees, and I steer them towards the Sugar maples. He veers away, makes a beeline right toward the Birches (a short-lived tree I wasn’t walking near on purpose), points to one, and says “That’s the one I want to plant”. His wife looks at him, jaw dropping, hauls back, and slugs him in the arm as hard as she can. He stares at her in disbeilief (she’s very pregnant at the time), and she says, “You can’t pick that kind of tree, that’s the tree he skied into!” They went with a maple.
Location is obviously important too. While I would hope all trees I plant will be there for until the end of time, the reality of an evolving campus means a careful reading of the master plan is in order when choosing a spot to plant a memorial. Class trees tend to be clustered around Library Park, while Memorials try to get planted somewhere meaningful to the person, perhaps near a dorm or an old office. Perhaps the finest example of tree species and location is found in a memorial tree to Pavlo Levkiv ’11, a Bur Oak on the west side of Bicentennial Hall. A very long lived species, and all the room it needs to grow. I wish I was around in 200 years to see it mature.
Pavlo Levkiv '11
Prompting this post was a Chinkapin Oak, rare in Vermont, but native to the Clayplain forest. We’d planted one outside Allen Hall, next to the Limestone ledge behind Chateau, in memory of Nicolas Garza ’11. Coming around the corner on what would have been his graduation day, I saw that his classmates hadn’t forgotten him, nor the tree.
4:30 comes early. I like to say I’m a morning person, but the alarm goes off, it’s summer, it’s dark, and well, that’s just too early. I drive to campus, and park behind Kenyon Arena. All facilities staff park there, so the incoming guests can park closer, and we walk to the Service Building, not talking a whole lot. I’m mainlining coffee. The walk towards campus feels a bit like a fish swimming upstream, as most of the senior class is walking away from campus, towards Alumni Stadium to watch the sunrise. Both sets of people, though, look a little bleary eyed and tired. They get to go take a nap later.
The work day starts at 5, with all hands walking the campus picking up any trash we may find. It’s never really all that bad, more like sweeping the front porch before 6000 guests arrive. We walk our snow shovel routes, with others dispatched to hot spots. I like this time of day, the calm before the storm. I also like ending up near the stadium as the sun rises. The shouts, whoops, and hollers of the graduating class as the sun comes up quickly gets subdued, and all becomes quiet, maybe as the reality of the light of day hits-it feels like an end, and a new beginning for them.
At 6 or so the swarm of workers descend to the commencement site, the main quad below Mead Chapel. The tents were erected previously in the week, including the main tent, technically called the clamshell. Some in Facilities spent part of yesterday setting chairs in front of the tent. It’s a delicate balance. While it’s nice to have some of the many many thousand chairs we need to place already up, we could spend a large chunk of the morning drying them off from dew or, even worse, rain. Towels work best, although we have resorted to backpack blowers in the past.
My day begins in earnest as well. My job is to set up the flowers in front of the commencement tent. There is a giant seal of Middlebury College right in front of the stage, and 300 red geraniums are placed at the base. First secret exposed? I leave them in the trays, and mound mulch around them to make them look like a planted bed. All life is a stage.
To give you some idea of how long Facilities plans the commencement ceremony, I first get asked to order the geraniums in September. I say you bet, but I don’t worry about them all too much. (perhaps I shouldn’t be writing this?) I buy the geraniums from a local wholesale grower, so 300 is just a tiny little drop in the bucket. It doesn’t even make a dent in the greenhouse. He gets the stress though, and the fact that they have to be right shade of red, so he doesn’t pick on me too much when I’m ordering plants 9 months in advance.
While I’m there working, I’m also watching the second coolest job for the day, the hanging of the flags. Behind the tent, hanging off of Voter Hall, are flags of every country represented by the graduating class. I was told we had to buy 9 new ones this year. I counted 59 flags when they were done, but I was supposed to be working, not counting, so there may have been more. They use a lift truck, 65′ boom, and I bet it takes them a good hour or two. One year, someone in Facilities that was attending the festivities looked up, and noticed one of the flags was for the Boston Red Sox. Oh, the horror, and the humor. Mostly horror, but we had to admit it was pretty funny. We got into the student’s room, where he thoughtfully leaned the correct flag against the wall after he leaned out his window and made the switch.
The lift truck hanging flags
I also rent some shrubs to do a fake little planting where the tent guy lines get staked in front of the clamshell. When I first arrived on campus, I noticed a plethora of White Potentilla and Dwarf Garland Spirea planted here, there, pretty much any little corner. You see, they used to come buy them off me when I worked up the road at Greenhaven, for the very same purpose I now use Ivory Halo Red Twig Dogwood (not white flowers, but a pretty variegated leaf). I don’t want to fill the campus exclusively with a plant that looks for great for two weeks in the spring, so I just rent them and bring them back to Greenhaven the next week. They don’t make a habit of it, but I still have a little bit of influence. (I also tend to help a customer or two while I’m there-old habits and all)
There is a huge amount of activity taking place around me. It’s too much for a blog post, it could be it’s own blog. The brunt of it, though, is chair setting. Some chairs get set the day before, but the bulk are set this morning. And by bulk, I’m talking thousands. We have a tractor trailer we keep filled with chairs, I think it’s about 4000. The trailer is parked on the road, and trucks and gators are used to ferry them to the setters, following the lead of the string setters, who assure the chairs are placed in straight lines.
Seriously, we use string and stakes to set chairs. Not because the person setting chairs is a civil engineer, although that helps, but because looking at 5000 chairs set out, well, they just NEED to be straight. For a great video picture diary of chair setting, view the pictures taken by the communications department of the (very wet) day before.
The early arrivals for the ceremony begin arriving around 8 or so. There’s a couple key places to sit, and they usually go first. One is the area around a Red maple, which offers some key shade most years. The other isn’t in the chairs at all, but up the hill towards Gifford, where the day beforehand the landscape department sets all the Adirondack chairs out. Watching commencement while reclining in a comfy chair? Oh yeah, that’s the way to do it.
Graduates start arriving soon as well, and get staged east of Old Chapel. I usually run into Matt Biette, the extraordinary head of dining, for the first of several times today, handing out water and breakfast sandwiches to the seniors. Starch and re hydration-Matt’s a genius.
Time to pull out, get out of Dodge, and pretend we aren’t even there. Some years, the landscape department goes and pulls weeds, radio close by. I have another semi-official job, though, that of weather-boy. Luther Tenny, Chair General (you did click that link on chair setting above, right?) calls me occasionally, wondering what the weather radar looks like. I’m the local weather geek, next to Luther, who is in an information tent on site, so isn’t close to a computer. I was watching this year by Android phone, as it was a spectacular day to pull weeds. The year Bill Clinton was the speaker several thunderstorms were forming in upstate New York, and I was freaking out. 6000 plus guests, and a storm on the way? I deferred to the experts, and called the National Weather Service in Burlington, who thought I was nuts, until I explained just exactly why I was calling, and they set my mind at ease. It rained for about 3 minutes, and then the sun came out and all was well. So, really, I’ve never seen the ceremony.
11:30 all the workers start traipsing up the hill towards Mead Chapel, where we get fed. All parents and graduates get fed by Matt Biette and crew, and that’s another blog post all together. Middlebury has an amazing home-grown dining service, and the food is great. They are brave feeding the landscape crew before the guests, but they certainly cook enough. Second Matt sighting-right below Mead Chapel telling guests walking up the hill that food is on both sides of Mead, and the lines are never too long. It seems like almost every student stops to talk to him.
The lure of the food works, and the chairs and stage empty soon enough, and facilities goes berserk in reverse. It’s easier to take things apart than put them up, and the chair trailer fills again. We also store chairs all over campus, so trucks are dispatched to places I haven’t even seen yet in my 5 years here. It’s a logistical nightmare, and always goes off without a hitch. I take apart the flowers, and plant them in the coming week by Admissions. We’re done by 3 or 4 PM most years.
Once you see one, you start seeing them everywhere.
Cedar Apple Rust-Juniper Spore Horn
The first warm rain in the spring makes these spores appear on Red Cedar (Juniper) trees, completing part of its life cycle. Red Cedar is a first-growth conifer pretty common in Vermont in abandoned pastures, along roads, and elsewhere, so finding these disgusting things aren’t hard. Sometimes they are as big as your fist, sometimes just a golf ball, but they are always bright orange, and disgustingly slimy and gelatinous. I remember being thrown one by my landscaper employer in Connecticut, and being grossed out for the entire rest of the day, catching it absentmindedly.
This is brought to you by a fungus called Cedar Apple Rust, latin name (brace yourself) Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae. The fungus is a ‘dual-host’ fungus, needing two different type plants to complete its life cycle. Part is on the Red Cedar, where small galls sit and lie in wait for the warm rain in the spring to activate. They can be mistaken for cones for those not totally up on their conifer botany. Once activated, spores then alight on the wind, and carry to apple trees (or crabapples), where they infect the twigs and leaves. On this host, it appears like small orange or yellow spots. These spots then produce spores in July or August, and re-infect the juniper.
Because of the ubiquity of Eastern Red Cedar control is very, very difficult. Like many things, the best techinique is prevention, which entails removing all cedar from within a mile (!) of the orchard. Fungicide sprays are effective, but need to be done now, which is another whole host of problems, seeing as the apples and crabapples are starting to bloom, a delicate time to say the least. Apples and crabapples vary in their susceptibility to the disease. I fell in love with a crabapple once, a double flowered variety named ‘Brandywine’, with dark pink flowers like tiny roses (I won’t post a picture and tease you too), only to watch it totally defoliate by the end of July-not a leaf left the rest of the year-all from a severe infection. Resistant varieties can be found, though, and are probably a good idea.
We’re a little removed from Lake Champlain up in Middlebury, but probably not as far as you think. My own house sits above the Lemon Fair River, draining into the Otter Creek north of Middlebury, which empties into Lake Champlain just north of Vergennes. The lake itself also drains to the north, out the St. Laurence Seaway, which seems counter-intuitive. Everything is supposed to flow south and down, right? Wikipedia says the residence time (the amount of time the lake turns itself over) is 3.3 years. That’s some serious water flow.
The lake peaked a day or so ago at 103.25 feet, that’s the elevation above sea level. It is considered above flood stage at anything over 100′, and seems to spend most of the summer at about 95.5′ above sea level. That means the lake is 7 3/4 feet (!) higher than normal. The previous record, which I remember from a job being a caretaker on a lakefront property, was 101.88′. So all that snow we were cursing this winter? It’s still around.
The Lake Champlain Basin Program has a picture gallery up of flooding and sediment flow that’s worth a look, and below is an animated GIF from the National Weather Service of Hi-Res satellite pictures of the snow melting off the Green Mountains.
Over on the Turf Battle blog, I’ve posted the plan we’ve developed for the Atwater area of campus. It is still a work in progress, and I’d like to invite all my readers to add comments or suggestions. As we (hopefully) start construction this summer I’ll be posting updates here on Middland.
And by the way, I swear I just saw the sun. At least I think that’s what it was.
As you would expect from a bunch of tree fanatics, Arbor Day is a flexible holiday. The national holiday is the last Friday in April, but Vermont has snow experience in April, and pushes the date back to the first Friday in May. Here at Middlebury, we’re pushing it back even a little further, as a welcome diversion from studying for finals.
Come Celebrate Middlebury College’s Arbor Day
Wednesday May 11
Take a break before Finals start and celebrate Middlebury’s new title as a Tree Campus USA, designated by the Arbor Day Foundation! After over a year of planning and coordination, Middlebury was named a Tree Campus by the Arbor Day Foundation for 2010 this February. We are one of only two schools in New England to receive this recognition.
The schedule for our celebration is the following:
1:30 pm- Tree campus tour, beginning from McCullough patio, ending at Bi-Hall, in time for—
3:00 pm- Tree planting, located between Coffrin and Bihall. Plant your legacy on campus. Planters get eternal gratitude, and an ice cream sandwich.
4:30 pm- Tree-K running race (3mi, starting from McCullough patio and following the cross country course). Touch 20 or so trees on the McCullough Quad before finishing back at the patio. Fastest Male and Female students win a gift card to the Campus Bookstore, Fastest Faculty/Staff to win a blueberry bush.
5:00 pm- Saplings kids’ race (1/4 mi loop around the main quad in front of Old Chapel, start at the McCullough Patio)-Prizes and ice cream for all kids.
Ask 20 gardeners, and you’ll get 40 or more answers on what they consider signs of spring. One of the most common answers, though, will probably be Pussy Willow.
Salix, the Willow family, claims more than 400 members, with a range from the tropics all the way up to being the last woody plant before you are stumbling across the Arctic Circle. Many kinds are native to western China, including the magnificent but weak-wooded Weeping Willow, but North America claims her share as well, about 75 varieties. Pussy Willow is one of these, although there are several willows with that name.
Go to your local garden center, and you’ll probably find, well, you probably won’t find pussy willow at all. Garden centers have a hard time selling very early or very late bloomers, like pussy willow or Witch hazel. Both bloom before most garden centers this far north are even open, and, during the regular growing season, these wonderful shrubs probably wouldn’t even catch your eye.
Should you happen upon one, though, probably in the sale bin, odds are it is a Salix caprea, a European Pussy willow also know as Goat Willow. Native from Europe to northeast Asia and northern Iran, it is nearly identical to our native species, Salix discolor. Our native form is more susceptible to canker, and have deeper brown branches and a nearly bluish white underside to the leaves, but it is the canker scaring plant propagators from growing the native species.
Pussy willow (both) reach about 15-25 feet high, and about 12-15′ in width. Native to wet, moist areas, they are frequently seen in marshes, wetlands, and on the edges of rivers and ponds. The ‘pussies’ we are familar with in kindergarten are male catkins, flowers with inconspicuous or, like Salix, no petals. While most catkins are designed for wind pollination, the Willows are known for insect pollination. Perhaps the non-showiness of the catkins is forgivable in the wild, as nothing else is in bloom, competing for the insects to visit them. For you pollinators among us, they are high-sugar flowers. At any rate, they are easy enough to force in a vase starting in February for the spring-desperate.
In the wild, Pussy Willow is an important source of food for browsing animals, such as deer and moose, although not the most palatable (who asks?). Duck and other waterfowl feed on the catkins in the early spring, while mice and other rodents can be found eating the stems in the winter.
Majorie Harris, in Botanica North America, writes of the Pussy Willow, and references a somewhat sketchy web site for the legend of how Pussy Willows got their name. It’s a Polish legend, and involves a sad, crying cat next to a river, whose kittens had fallen into while chasing Butterflies,as kids and kitts are likely to do. Hearing their cries, the Willow trees next to the banks swept down, arching into the river and allowing the kittens to cling to their branches, when they were safely brought to shore. Every spring since, the willow sprouts tiny fur-like buds at the tips of their branches in remembrance.
We have some Pussy Willows at Middlebury, but I had to do some thinking to remember where. While there undoubltalby some wild native species along Bi-Hall Road or the wetlands next to the Johnson Parking lot, the best species on campus proper are probably right next to Atwater Dining Hall, on the south side, where they were planted in the ditch that runs along there as part of the storm water mediation.
The most remarkable thing about this last snow storm on Monday is probably the fact I almost didn’t write about it. After this punishing winter of snow removal, yet another storm didn’t seem worthy of taking the time to whine. But, after setting some records, I thought I’d write about it, if only so students can brag to their parents.
We don’t know how much snow we got here on campus, as the wind was drifting the snow so radically that some places were devoid of snow, while others were 6′ deep in drifts. I asked the guys in the landscape department how much snow we got, and the answers are unprintable. I measured 20″ in my driveway, but that was pretty windblown too. According to the National Weather Service, Cornwall got 22″, Bridport 24″, so we’re thinking somewhere in that neighborhood sounds about right.
Snow Totals Map-click for larger version
This is one for the record books, both the storm and this winter. The Burlington Weather Service office recorded 25.8″ of snow, beating our Valentine’s Day storm of 2007 by a tenth of an inch. (Incidentally, the record storm was last year, January 2-3, where they got 33.1″. I’ve erased that from my memory) This is the largest March storm, however.
In terms of our yearly records, we’re at 124.3″, third highest total. Number two comes in at 132″, in 1886-87, and the record holds at 145.4″, in 1970-71. I can see us beating 1886, but if we break the ’70 record there is going to be some sore shovelers at Middlebury.
Speaking of sore, yes, there are still some sidewalks not cleared yet. We’re trying! The problem with massive snows like this is that our regular plows just can’t handle it. You can only push a huge pile of snow for so long before the wheels start spinning or you have nowhere to put it. For these types of events we put large snowblowers on a couple of our tractors, but that’s slow going too. And because classes were still being held, the extra sidewalk traffic impeded progress all the more. Uncleared sidewalks means snow shovelers are walking through snow from building to building, dragging a snowblower through drifts.
And on top of all of that, a lot of us couldn’t even get to work. For the most part, the only workers that made it in lived in Middlebury, except for snow miraculous sidewalk tractor operators, who I’m thinking were airlifted in. My own road was roughly plowed by a Monument Farms tractor half the size of my house-the cows have to be fed-but the town plow didn’t make it until the end of the storm Monday evening.
Tired of the snow? If it makes you feel any better, the stake at the summit at the top of Mount Mansfield says they’ve got 90″. That’ll be there a while.
I spent yesterday helping set up the Central Display for the Vermont Flower Show-it’s my spring training like baseball players have in Florida. Shoveling mulch came easier this year than some past years, must be all of the snow shoveling. WCAX did a blurb on the news about the show, and in the interest of tempting more people to go this weekend (it’s going to rain all weekend, what else you gonna do?), I took some poor pictures with my cell phone camera. The theme (that Ed let slip in the WCAX video is thought of by a “past board members kids and wife”)(I’m saying nothing, but we’re thinking the next one should be “Tangled Up in You”) this year is “Sweet Dreams”, and Ed came up with a great design.
Here’s some pictures, but you aren’t going to get a good feel for the scale of the central display. Suffice it to say that it would just about fit on the ice at Kenyon. Click on the picture to view a larger size.
Lou Nop of Nop’s Metal Works in Middlebury made a metal bridge for part of the display, and it sits over a pond in a tropical setting.
Here’s some of the tropical garden. That’s a giant Banana plant in the center.
We forced an entire vegetable garden.
This is a 20′ “bird nest” complete with paper mache eggs. It was constructed with the help of the Urban Forestry program at the Northland Job Corp in Vergennes. Took them about a half of a day. And here’s a great Middlebury College connection-the branches making up the nest are leftovers from the harvesting of the Willow project out on Route 125.
I’m very (very) pleased write that Middlebury College has been named a Tree Campus for 2010, culminating work started in January of last year by the students in my Trees and the Urban Forest Winter Term class. Special thanks goes to two students in particular, Chelsea Ward-Waller and Hilary Platt, for being the driving force behind the application process, and for being strong advocates of our urban forest on campus.
I’ll quote from the letter we received-
The Tree Campus USA program is an initiative that sprang from a partnership between the Arbor Day Foundation and Toyota MotorNorth America, Inc., to foster the development of the next generation of Tree Stewards. The program is designed to award national recognition to college campuses and the leaders of their surrounding communities for promoting healthy urban forest management and engaging the3 campus community in environmental stewardship.
As you already know, trees are a vital component of the infrastructure in campus landscaping, providing environmental and economical benefits. Trees in urban areas, and especially on campuses, reduce the heat island effect caused by pavement and buildings. Leaves filter the air we breather by removing dust and other particles. Properly placed trees create a welcoming environment that makes students, administration,and alumni want to be a part of the campus.
Last year there were 74 Tree Campuses across the country,and this year there are 114. Middlebury is the only campus in Vermont that is a Tree Campus, and one of only two in New England. The older program, Tree City USA, has over 3400 communities, with 8 in Vermont, including Burlington and Rutland. We all can take great pride in our trees and campus landscape, and I enjoy being part of a team that places as much value as we do on our campus environment.
The standards to become a Tree Campus are designed to create a sustainable plan to care for and manage campus trees, and to provide opportunities to engage and educate college students and community members in tree planting, benefits of trees, and in Best Management practices. To be eligible for Tree Campus USA recognition, schools must meet five core standards of tree care and community engagement: Establish a campus tree advisory committee, evidence of a campus tree-care plan, verification of dedicated annual expenditures on the campus tree-care plan, involvement in an Arbor Day observance, and a service-learning project aimed at engaging the student body in sustainable efforts. Collaboration is encouraged-the program is a platform for students, faculty, staff, and community members to team up and learn from one another about the benefits of trees on college campuses. Ensures true sustainability of the urban forest by joining forces with the broader forest community.
Our service learning project was a high point in the entire process. Another group of students in the Winter Term tree class worked on a complete Street Tree plan for an area in Middlebury known as Buttolph Acres. This included an inventory of existing trees, recommended locations and varieties, as well as tree planting specifications. The students also used a computer model known as iTree to estimate what the potential carbon sequestration, storm water abatement, and pollution control the tree planting would yield in 25 and 50 years. The work they put into this is amazing-I highly recommend downloading it ( Buttolph Acres Proposal ) and reading it.
And yes, we’re planning a heck of an Arbor Day (May 6). Stay tuned!
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