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Photo by Yi Zhang/Washington University
Students mapping the root systems of the tree that will become the nurse log.
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Photo courtesy of the One Tree Project and Wash. U.
Students mapping the root systems of the tree that will become the nurse log.
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Courtesy of the One Tree Project and Wash. U.
Students mapping the root systems of the tree that will become the nurse log.
When sentiment and science lock horns like two determined old rams, the situation has dangerous potential in a civil society. If the situation foretells a major commotion—one that involves a sizable and prestigious institution, for example—the sounds and furies clatter, splitting ears and souls. In a free society, the racket is the sound of intellectual or political liberty. Depending on your point of view, these attitudes may be benighted or perhaps luminous—but three cheers for Constitution’s protection of these utterances.
The oak allée on the eastern end of the Danforth (or Hilltop) campus of Washington University in St. Louis is a case in point. This allée, which created a formal approach to Brookings Hall, and provided a stylistic, organic and historical connection with the hypostyle halls of ancient Greece and Rome, was to be removed.
The official word was circulated in 2015 in two separate announcements by Washington University and Forest Park Forever, the private planning and fund raising organization dedicated to park improvements. Both institutions stressed creating a connection of park and campus, and Wash. U.'s announcement included confirmation of a redesign of the east end of the campus. The plan made it clear that the university would remove the allée of pin oak trees through which one passed on the way to Brookings Hall. For me and others, it was disturbing; an attack, as it were, on a living monument, and our own higher educational heritage.
The reaction to the decision to remove the trees, however, was more whimper than bang, and spectators who jog or bicycle or drive by Lindell and Skinker today see earth moving equipment and construction workers and massive mounds of dirt preparing the new east campus development. The actual commencement of the trees’ removal was met with a sort of sober reverence rare on campuses nowadays, and the end of an arboreal era was hallowed with ceremonies.
While the pin oaks are gone—from campus anyway—one of the trees is being prepared for new life according to plans developed in the spring semester in a design studio taught by the university’s Jesse Vogler, who is assistant professor of landscape architecture in the Sam Fox School. The One Tree Project is its name. (Full disclosure: I teach in the Architecture College as an adjunct.)
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Image courtesy of the One Tree Project and Wash. U.
Rendering created by using 3D lasers to gather billions of data points along the allee. These data points were then compiled to create a highly detailed map, including images of individual trees.
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Image courtesy of the One Tree Project and Wash. U.
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Rendering created by using 3D lasers to gather billions of data points along the allee. These data points were then compiled to create a highly detailed map, including images of individual trees.
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Image courtesy of the One Tree Project and Wash. U.
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A collage of all the individual tree scans overlaid on top of one another to create a single image.
“Touching” was Liam Otten’s response to the students’ plan. Otten is an artist himself, and a degree recipient of the Sam Fox School’s BFA program. He also is senior news director for arts and humanities at Washington U., and has a special love for the trees and for work to be accomplished in the years to come.
While opinions based on sentiment, nostalgic recollection or rigorous, intelligently shaped visions and curated memory do endure, science can and does disturb and affect such opinions, although as we have seen recently, good demagoguery and fear of truth can roll over science like one of those bulldozers.
Following, however, is a persuasive presentation of data by Kent Theiling, Jr. regarding quercus palustris, the pin oak or swamp Spanish oak tree. These remarks were laid out by him in the Washington U publication, The Source, a little over a year ago in a story written by Diane Toroian Keaggy, a veteran journalist and writer for university publications.
Theiling is grounds manager and horticulturist for the university’s Danforth Campus, and has been at work for nine years on what amounts to be altogether a forest on the school grounds. The pin oaks had reached the end of their life cycle, he noted. “They are,” he said, “one of the fastest growing of the oak species and are in the red oak family.
“Pin oaks reach maturity around 70 years of age, and begin a slow decline in growth and vigor that may last for 10, 15, or more years before they need to be removed and replaced. As they decline they become more susceptible to disease and insect problems which weaken the canopy and root zone of the tree.”
Photo courtesy of the One Tree Project and Wash. U.
A crane bracing the oak, insuring it won't tip over as the roots were unearthed.
Theiling said the oldest of the Brookings allée trees are 100 years old, according to ring counts and historical reports. The oaks presented all the classic signs of pin oak deterioration, he told Keaggy. “Large branch loss from wind storms has become more numerous over the last few years,” he said. That is a hazard. Also “…other diseases of oaks such as oak wilt and hypoxolyn canker … can cause serious problems with oak tree species.”
Furthermore, when the trees in the Brookings approach were planted a century ago in plans created by the celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, consideration was not given to this species’ penchant for creating a monoculture when placed in the ground in proximity to their companion trees.
Thieling noted in his 2016 discussion that in a monoculture, roots grow in a shallow horizontal fashion, and create a massive tangle. As the term “monoculture” suggests, the binding of the roots creates a single system. Thus, it is difficult to replace one tree successfully. When a new tree was introduced into the existing exclusive culture, it never flourished successfully. For one thing, Theiling told me, the dense canopy of the old trees blocked the sunshine from the new, stunting their growth.
With pin oaks, when such a monoculture is created, all the trees began to fail at roughly the same time. And rather like putting down a beloved but sick and exhausted animal that would not recover its vitality, the oak trees were removed, and thus a vista of beauty crowned with sentimental memories was destroyed. And yet, thanks to a studio class in the College of Architecture, remains of the trees serve a dynamic purpose.
The project fundamentally is a wedding of old and new, of contemporary ecological thinking and active building along with a dedication to finding ways to thwart rampant and mindless destruction of plant material, often for the purposes of avarice.
Photo courtesy of the One Tree Project and Wash. U.
A section of the unearthed roots.
Here’s part of the mission statement for the current home for pin oaks from campus, the Tyson Research Center in Eureka. It is germane to the recycling of the pin oak trees moved to the center from Washington U.
[The] Center and surrounding natural areas focuses on integrating basic scientific approaches with applied problems that result from the ever-increasing footprint of human activities on the planet. Our primary research focus is on ecosystem degradation, restoration, and sustainability as part of Washington University's International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (InCEES).
With the pin oak project, kiln drying and milling of the wood are central, practical elements. What will take shape and form from this lumber is still to be decided. Otten says no plans are set—doors and table tops that would allow the wood to expand and to contract are possibilities, but just that—possibilities.
“This it is respectful connecting of old and new,” Otten said. And here is a fascinating addition to the story. One of the pin oaks is destined for an exceptional but bittersweet new existence. “The big trunk of one of the trees will not be milled but will be taken back to campus as a nurse log. A nurse log in a forest is one that has fallen over, and as it decays provides nutrients for the soil, habitats for insects and small animals.”
Peter Raven, director emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden, is enthusiastic about all this.
Raven’s spent many years of his life fighting haphazard and reckless development of the natural environment all over the world, and has been recognized as a hero for his work in protecting and sustaining the ever more delicate and threatened environment.
He said in an email from Washington D.C. that Washington University’s plans for the trees is solid and inspired. I asked about the life span and the health of the Brookings allée trees.
“Yes,” he wrote me in an email, “pin oaks naturally live less than 100 years, like all oaks around here except burr oaks (they can go to several centuries), and so the pin oaks would have started dying about now anyway.
“Using them as fine lumber will keep the carbon tied up and thus be the best thing to do about climate change. So I think all is well,” he concluded, adding that his scientist-journalist wife Pat Raven agrees.
An Arboreal Inventory for Washington University’s Danforth Campus:
· There are approximately 4000 trees in residence on the Danforth Campus
· Trees within the East Campus construction zone number 251
· 41 trees have been relocated to other campus areas
· Trees harvested for milling number ddw25
· Lumber harvested for future use: Approximately 10,000 board feet
· Approximately 350 trees are currently being cultivated for the finished East Campus landscape
For more information on The One Tree Project, go to theonetreeproject.org.
