A Ramunto’s Pizza, your choice of toppings, to the student or students that help me discover who is behind this. THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL MIDDLEBURY BLOG, and this reward is not sponsored by Middlebury College or Facilities Services. This is me, frustrated, saddened, and pretty pissed upset over the stupidity and sense of entitlement these vandals have.

Someone knows who they are. It’s a small community. And they don’t want to tell. I get that. Based on the violence exhibited, I don’t blame you. So email me (tparsons @), campus snail mail me, whatever. I will pass along tips to a detective in public safety, anonymously if you like, and we will figure this out. Heck, I’ll even throw in a batch of cookies my kids will make.

Don’t believe we have a problem? Read what I’ve written in the past, or read the excellent article the Middlebury Campus wrote a couple of weeks ago.

I can’t even begin to write about how much of a pleasure it is to work here, and how much pride both myself and the entire landscape department takes in the outdoor environment here at Middlebury. As I begin to take my oldest daughter to other schools, I’ve yet to see a college that even comes close to our little peice of the world here. I look at young trees, but in my mind I see mature trees, 50, 75, 150 years down the road. Think this campus is pretty now? Wait until your 50th reunion. We’re planting trees for your grandkids. Wouldn’t it be nice to have them around?

So I’ll cook dinner some Friday night, instead of getting take out, if that’s what it takes to stop this stupidity.

Broken Cedar on way to Atwater B

Branches someone didn’t like on way to Atwater B

One entire trunk of a clump birch twisted and torn apart, scarring the other two trunks, then thrown 30 feet away, outside Atwater A

UPDATE 4/22

Happy earth day everyone! Four nights, and two more trees pulled up out of the ground. One, right in front of Atwater B, had been pulled up last fall as well. We’d replanted and staked well, hoping it would live, and now saw both tree and stakes pulled up and out. Excessive damage to the rootball didn’t make the tree worth re-planting. Chalk up another mortality. The other was a Japanese Stewartia pulled up in front of Ross Dining, We replanted, and are hoping for the best.

The guys in the department are chipping in for two pizzas now. Whatever it takes. Don’t want to send a tip to me? Call public safety and make it anonymous. Try Middbeat or Middblog. Somebody. Anybody. This is your chance for 15 minutes of Lorax fame.

Accolade Elm killed in front of Atwater B

Japanese Stewartia pulled out of ground

The plant vandalism on campus continues. We’re on year four, and I’ve been trying to document all the cases. The tally stands at 62 incidents in the last four years, 10 in 2009-2010, 25 in 2010-2011, 9 in 2011-2012, and 18 so far this school year.

Will Henriques wrote an excellent article for The Middlebury Campus on our spate of tree and  plant vandalism, after interviewing both myself and Brian Marland, a student in my winter term course who wrote a term paper on tree vandalism.  The thrust of Brian’s paper was how plant vandalism is an inherently violent act, and how this is more than likely related to alcohol consumption. Not even consumption by the vandals. Studies he found show an increase in violent tendencies by people not even drinking, but merely in the presence of alcohol or alcohol advertising. Brian writes, “aggression is no longer viewed as an unwanted result of drinking, but instead is seen as an expected condition.  Therefore, students may be committing vandalism in order to meet these expectations and produce a reputation among their peers.  When surrounded by a drinking culture, these expectations of aggression may fuel behavior that would not occur otherwise among these college students…While living in an environment where alcohol consumption on the weekends is common such as a dorm, a college student does not even need to consume alcohol to be subject to the aggressive thoughts and behaviors that may follow alcohol cues such as a beer bottle.  This revelation is instrumental in understanding the acts of tree vandalism that plague the Middlebury College campus.  After drinking, many students travel in groups to parties in other locations, and even if a person in this group had not been drinking, their behavior will still be subject to aggressiveness from exposure to alcohol cues.  They will be much less likely to interfere with or report senseless acts of vandalism in this heightened state of aggression.  Therefore, in an environment of alcohol consumption on a college campus, all students exposed to the environment may be suspect to increased aggression.”

I’ve written about the violence against the trees in the past, and we continue to see the same acts again this school year. The classic example would be an elm tree planted 2 years ago for the Atwater landscape project, rocked back and forth, and the 300 lb. root ball pulled up out of the ground and left on top for an entire weekend.

Elm Tree at Atwater

Sadly, this wasn’t the only tree torn from the ground this year-two more that were planted last spring were pulled during winter term.

As Will’s article alluded to, and Brian summarized well in his paper, the damage seems to be focused not necessarily around party locations (little damage is seen in Ridgeline, for example), but seems to be on pathways to and from these locations. I recently mapped the locations of the incidents for the last four years, and have included it below.

Tree Vandalism 2009-2013
Click for larger size

I continue to struggle with solutions. Some communities post signs next to the damage. I hestitate, thinking about how within the next year I’ll be going on school tours as a parent. Surely the article in the Campus is a great start, as will be our annual tree planting for Arbor Day (May 14, mark your calendars now). We’re a small community, we have to take care of each other, and that would include our campus forest as well.

We’ve certainly had our problems in the past (even have a tag for vandalism on the blog), but I was hoping the student (or students) had moved on, or at least come to see the error of their ways. I’d even heard through the grapevine that one of the perpetrators may have been caught.

‘Satomi’ Kousa Dogwood, a nice little pink flowering tree, was planted in Ross Commons near the plaza this spring. Someone tried their best to rip it up out of the ground last weekend.

You can see the broken branch on the ground, but the real issue here is the root system. Look at the root flare, where you can see the tree was repeatably pulled back and forth in an attempt to pull it out of the ground.

We had no choice but to dig the tree up and replant it. About 40-50% of the roots were broken in the process, all on one side. Hopefully youthful vigor will rally the tree and it will recover, but the outlook is grim with that much root loss.

More senselessly, two shrubs were pulled up out of the ground next to their holes at Battell South. They were Summersweet, a shrub so nice I wrote about it a little while back. We replanted those as well.

Let’s try and make this the one random incident this year, please.

The Burlington Free Press on Sunday wrote an excellent article entitled “Taking it out on Trees: Vandals go out on a Limb“. In it, Joel Baird writes of the problems with vandals in Burlington, and a student in my old dorm at UVM who spoke up. He called me as well, after reading of our travails here at Middlebury on the blog. He writes-

“Parsons said he believes a strategy of engaging more students in their landscape likely will pay higher dividends than highlighting the acts of a few misguided vandals. ”If you publicize it too much,” he said, “you risk getting more of it.”

I also enjoyed the comment section, where someone under the psuedonem Caberg posted a comment that got deleted (wished I’d read that one!) then re-posts and says

Huh? All I did was point out the ridiculousness of Tim Parsons’ personification of trees and the acts of “violence” against them: “This is an act of rage, of violence, well beyond wanton destruction of property, senseless passing violence against an animate object incapable of screaming or defending itself”

I’m all for punishing these vandals and I love trees and naute, but let’s not get carried away here. Trees are not people. Suggesting otherwise ust makes you look like a fool.

Heehee. Yeah, I’m a little foolish. I can live with that.

So I thought I was done, finished writing, whining, wailing, lamenting a priviliged student’s acts every weekend, stopping count at 10 weekends in a row. On to writing about happier things. Then Friday night, another branch on my favorite Katsura tree on campus.

Katsura in Front of Carr Hall

And it begins anew.

Not a fertilizer label, but an accounting of the fall semester at Middlebury. Seven-the  number of weekends in a row we’ve seen vandalism against trees. 18-the total number of trees affected. And 6-trees killed outright.

We come into work Monday morning, and, in addition to picking up the inevitable and ubiquitous litter and detritus from the weekend, now survey the damage as well. I was not writing of it, hoping to sweep our problem under the rug, hoping that these acts were random, solitary, maybe just an aberrant mutation on an otherwise pristine campus, a passing social deviation that would go away on its own.

And I’m preaching to the choir, here, after all. I’ve discussed vandalism in the past on Middland, and am quite frankly a little sick of telling the tale. I’ve reported this problem to my superiors, and they’ve approached community council. And I was going to get on with life, and write posts on annuals, the Sustainable Sites Initiative, and put some more work into Turf Battle.

Last night, Dean Shirley Collado wrote a piece on One Dean’s View called Plates and Privilege. We’ve all heard about the missing plate problem, thanks to Aunt Des and the great communications department. But Shirley’s take is different, and had me thinking all night (well, until 9:30 or so, I can’t seem to stay up like I used to) about privilege. Let’s let her say it best:

I would like to call students to action to think more critically about the human face behind the dish problem. Think about what it says about us as a community when these small acts of thoughtlessness create a collective problem that impacts all of us in a negative way. This thoughtlessness speaks volumes about what kind of people our students are going to be when they leave this institution.

So, I thought, our tree vandalism is a problem of privilege, like the many beer cans scattered around on a Monday. It’s easy to take trees for granted, and yes, sometimes they do get in the way (I’ve wondered on one or two broken branches if the offender was tall-sick of running into the same branch every day).  But then I cleaned up some of the damage today, and came to a different conclusion.

We have a problem of violence.

Pictures won’t even do it justice, and even my words won’t. In the service building? Come by my office, I’ve saved a couple pieces of broken limbs. But let me try to explain what’s going on here.

The offender (I hesitate to use the word ‘student’, as surely this individual isn’t really learning anything here) is breaking limbs off of trees. Serious limbs. I climb trees, and, while I still resemble the pasty geek I was in high school, I’ve jumped a couple of weight classes. Limbs broken would hold me and my chainsaw with room to spare. Limbs that are not just snapping off, but need to be bent, wrenched, moved back and forth hoping to break 3” of bark and wood to separate it from the tree. Entire small trunks of immature trees not only bent to the ground, but shaken, trampled, twisted and torn, sometimes breaking completely, sometimes left hanging , or lying in ground, waiting for a chalk outline to surround it. This is an act of rage, of violence, well beyond wanton destruction of property, senseless passing violence against an animate object incapable of screaming or defending itself.

A 3” limb, counting rings, is probably very well older than the person breaking it off.

Monday will come again, and again we’ll go out, willingly pick up the remnants of a privileged life, but hope and pray that no more violence has befallen our silent friends.

Since the school year started, our landscape department has seen an additional 4 incidents of tree vandalism. One, a newly planted tree was broken in what appeared to be a climbing attempt (no, we’re sure it wasn’t a squirrel of exceptional size). An arborvitae was snapped in half in front of a dorm, and a random branch broken off a a large sugar maple in front of Johnson.

This is only half the tree!

The final straw, though, and the reason for the quick post on a lunch hour, was the near total destruction of a little red oak by the Davis Family Library. Nearly every single branch on this street tree was broken or bent downward, leaving only the very top branches. This wasn’t just a random “lets grab a branch and break as we walk by”, this was intentionally standing in front of a tree, breaking as many branches as you can reach. Cruel, senseless, disheartening, and more than a little bewildering. What can we do as  a community?

Just the other day a crew chief and I were interrupted by a student walking to class, and he’d mentioned how he had joined us tree planting on Arbor Day. He pointed to the tree he did, and said he can’t wait to bring his kids to see it in 30 years. So we keep planting, and keep pruning broken branches.

Scene of the crime

I read with interest the recent article in the Middlebury Campus on the increase in vandalism this year, as I completely agree. We’ve recently lost another tree to senseless idiocy, this one a rare Silverbell. We’d only planted this tree about a year and a half ago, and it was ripped up out of the ground about 2 weeks before it was due to flower. I could see the little flower buds shriveling up and dying right before my eyes. Not only was this tree ripped up out of the ground, but it was snapped in half at the base as well, I guess in case the first injustice wasn’t enough. This was outside of Allen Hall.

Close up of root system

That same weekend, someone felt the need to do a little pruning on a paper birch outside of Battell.

The branch as found outside Battell The tree

Maybe what concerns me the most is the possibility that, because most of the plant vandalism seems to be taking place outside of freshman dorms, we may be in for 3 more years of this. Once again, any ideas are welcome on how to fix this as a community.

Nancy my (wonderfullypatientforputtingupwithme) wife, is a night cook at the Grille. While she was crawling into bed after work, she must have thought I was awake, so she said, “Tonight I saw a student carrying a tree into the Grille.”

Even if I wasn’t awake, now I was. Credit goes to her, and her supervisor Michael Glidden, who went up to the student to attempt to get the story of the incredibly large walking stick first hand. They had seen ripped bark at the top, and thought it to be an errant limb pulled down. It was a found object, the student said, and as near as I can tell, didn’t come from a landscape tree. Not a guess, but, yes, on my way grocery shopping the next day I’d checked the area around where the tree/stick was found. Quite the family, huh? I’m the daytime Lorax, and she’s stepping into the nighttime Lorax role well.

So this got me thinking, er, stewing, all weekend. Horticulturally, it’s been a good year to be a tree. Nice average growing season last year, no cyclical pests attacking, and a great, mild winter followed by a relaxing early spring. Being a tree on campus, though, has been stressful. The amount and severity of incidents against the landscape is rising, and I’m at a loss as to what to do.

I don’t mean to sound terribly mean and ugly. Heck, we don’t even know if it is members of our community, or outsiders. Very rarely does our department hear of the end result of any investigations, judicial committee outcomes, or anything else. We clean up the mess, replant when possible, and move on. Most years it is only one or two incidents a year-a large broken branch here, stripped bark of the trunk of tree somewhere else. We are seeing an increase this year, though. By my count, 5 seperate acts of vandalism this year.

Most of the time it is tops of trees or whole broken branches off of trees and shrubs. A Columnar Fir in front of Old Chapel, Arbs on Old Chapel Road and down at the Mods, a young Weeping Copper Beech in front of the Center for the Arts. Most of these incidents happen over a weekend. A couple of unusual incidents can illucidate some of the most egrarious examples, though.

 Two winters ago, a Dwarf Japanese White Pine was cut down by saw in a planted bed in front of the Main Library. Imagine my surprise seeing a tiny 1″ stump with the littlest pile of sawdust ever seen where a rare dwarf was perfectly situated.  (I’d actually heard from an “informant” that the perpetrator thought it was a full size pine, and was fixated on how this “tree” was planted in the wrong spot, and would outgrow the space. She thought she would fix my error in landscape by removal. Correct theory, wrong plant, o ye of little faith…)

This year, though, has been seen an increase the amount of damage. Last fall, someone with an axe cut down or mutilated 7 or so trees near Porter Field Road. Then, a couple of weeks ago, a young (3-4″ at the base) Crabapple was pulled up out of the ground from a parking lot island, and brought into a dormitory. Ripped up and out. By hand, it looked like. Perhaps they went through the effort to rope it off to a car, and used that to pull. Either way, quite a bit of work. The list can go on, but I’m getting a little depressed. Below are some pictures of vandalism in the past, including the axed trees and the crabapple-click on a picture to start an image browser with some explanations.

[Show as slideshow]

 I prefer planting trees that aren’t replacements, and would like to keep planting shrubs that will will stand the test of time. Some students are planning an Arbor Day celebration, stay tuned and plan to come join the fun. Hopefully a little awareness will go a long ways. If you have any ideas to stop the rising trend, please comment. The trees and I need the help.