Arboretum

History

An arboretum was a botanic garden of trees, shrubs, and woody vines. Organized according to scientific or aesthetic principles, or a combination of these, arboreta were founded for public, private, and institutional purposes in America during the colonial and early national period. Some arboreta comprised collections of all indigenous trees while others were composed of a particular genus, such as pines (this type of arboretum was also called a pinetum). For example, the Pierce Brothers Arboretum in East Marlborough, Pa., was primarily an evergreen collection. Jane Loudon offered several organizing principles for both public and private gardens in Gardening for Ladies (1845). After the turn of the nineteenth century, when public gardens and civic beautification campaigns flourished, arboreta became increasingly popular. Planting and preserving trees were seen as a part of America’s need to plan for future generations, as George William Johnson discussed in A Dictionary of Modern Gardening (1847).

The White House arboretum [Fig. 1] was established during the administration of John Quincy Adams (1825–28), an ardent conservationist, exemplifying how political and economic motivations dovetailed with scientific ones. Adams was particularly interested in hardwood trees needed for shipbuilding; the economic necessity of safeguarding American trade and military interests made the preservation of hardwood forests a compelling political platform.

In his 1851 plan for the national Mall in Washington, D.C., A. J. Downing called the area a “public museum of Trees” rather than an arboretum. The description of his design, however, concurred exactly with the content of his other writings on arboreta. He planned to convert the whole Mall “into an extended landscape garden, to be . . . planted with specimens properly labelled, of all the varieties of trees and shrubs that flourish in this climate” [Fig. 2]. The parallel of the museum and the arboretum also was expressed in a statement in 1847 by J. Jay Smith, who was a frequent correspondent in Downing’s Horticulturist. Scientific institutions were motivated to collect and study woody plants not only to add to the knowledge of the natural world, but also to classify and claim them as an American resource. Often associated with departments of botanical studies or schools of medicine, arboreta were founded at several of the early American schools and colleges, such as Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges in Pennsylvania, and Transylvania College in Lexington, Mass. The medicinal properties of native and imported plants remained an essential part of medical training into the twentieth century (see Botanic garden).

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia were both planned to be tree and shrub collections under the supervision of local horticultural societies. Although Mount Auburn was not carried out as planned, Downing reported that Laurel Hill was laid out successfully by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society as an arboretum.

In addition to public and institutional arboreta, private arboreta ornamented the grounds of many estates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where the wealthy displayed their collecting prowess and acumen. Collections of rare trees and shrubs were valuable not only for their scientific and ornamental interest but also for economic reasons. Although America’s forests seemed inexhaustible to many, plantations of trees were highly valued during the colonial period. In the early republican period when people began to think of themselves as Americans and not simply as English living abroad, figures such as Thomas Jefferson and later Downing championed American trees as a great source of pride and wealth for the young nation. Several years later, Jefferson decried the “unnecessary felling of a tree,” as a criminal act, “little short of murder.”1 As Downing wrote, “Not to wish to know something of the character and history of trees, is as incomprehensible to us; as not to desire a knowledge of Niagara.”2

--"Therese O'Malley"