From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. I wish that when I was a college freshman, a course like Harvard seminar called Tree had been part of the curriculum. Because since I learned about the class last year, I've never looked at a tree quite the same way again. It's not a botany course, nor one for aspiring arborists, despite its name. A sentence from the syllabus for tree hints at its core intention. Imagine a semester devoted to connecting two organisms, it reads, a person, you, and a tree, not you. And then it adds this. The goal of this freshman seminar will be to initiate a personal and life-long connection with the other, the vast and variant organisms, with which we share the planet. The creator of the class is the director of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, evolutionary biologist Ned Friedman, and he's here today to tell us more about it and about what we can each learn from making a connection to a tree, so more in a moment by first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends wholesale flower bulbs, a third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, colorblens.com. And by High Moeng Seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Urbel Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified on the web, HighMoingseeds.com and by white flower farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants on the web whiteflower farm.com Since 2011 Ned Friedman has been director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University a a 281-acre world-renowned collection of

William Plants founded some 150 years ago. In 2020, he created the curriculum for a new freshman seminar called Tree, and each fall, since about a dozen students joined him on the adventure it promises. I'm so glad to welcome him to the program today to learn more about some lessons the trees have to teach us. How are you, Ned? Oh, I'm doing very well. Sun's shining and the arboretum is right in front of me.

See you! the program today to learn more about some lessons the trees have to teach us how are you, Ned?

Oh, I'm doing very well. Suns signing and the arboretum is right in front of me. Seeing any good trees lately. You only have 16,000 right? Yeah, it's hard to narrow down, but the other day I had to do a little bit of a pilgrimage to our Chinese witch hazels. And there was one that was just glowing gold.

It was magnificent. So yes, I'm making my little steps and stops around the arboridum. Well, out my window, Paladau, which is an intermediate hybrid, I think, and is in one direction, and out the other window is, I don't know if you say Jelena or Yelena or what, J-E-E-L-N-A, which is the R-N-G-I-S kind of rusty colored one. So I have two blooming right now, two, yes. Yeah, they're just something wonderful. We have one of the hybrids, I think, Diane, which has much redder, and that one's having a phenomenal year. So, winter flowering is just just one of these things I think is so counterintuitive to so many people We have that winter sweet Khymananthus. Yes, and it was so cold this year that I thought all of the flower buds That were sitting out there shivering. We're gonna be frozen and and weren't gonna come out And then I got a tip off from the keeper of the living collections of Michael Doesman. Oh, it's it's on. So I made my pilgrimage over there. Yeah. Of course 20 feet away. You don't you can close your eyes and you can just smell your way into a point source of incredibly beautiful while you're known as. So so I'm a few years past freshman age, but it's never too late for sort of the life enriching and hard opening teachings in your seminar called Tree. I think having learned about it from you when we did a time story not long ago in your time story. You know I was so grateful to learn about it and I've thought a lot about it since and I wonder if you could just tell us sort of the brief version of the the premise of the class and how it works. It's not the stereotypical course where every session is held in a lecture hall or anything, exactly. Right. And actually these freshmen or first-year seminars at Harvard and I think many other universities and colleges have similar programs, they're really intended to get away from that lecture classroom sort of format and have a sort of a liberation from the standard pedagogical approaches. And so in a way, you can create anything you want for the, it's a pass-fail class. It's not for four credits, I think it's just one credit. And you meet once a week. And when I got to Harvard, I just thought, this just sounds like such an interesting thing to explore. And the first thing I did was I actually created a course that followed Charles Darwin's life through his writings. And I mean through his actual correspondence. And then we actually looked at his serial obsessions from earthworms to orchids to you name it and Part of what I was trying to do there was to use Darwin as an example of a life well-lived one that follows passions one that had a wonderful family and a close knit network of friends and correspondence and and allies and and in a way I just let his voice speak. And so I look at these opportunities, the first semester of a freshman, a first year student, as an opportunity to really insert some experience that allows the students to ponder in the big scheme of things, what it means to have a good life, a meaningful life, a connected life. And I

had done that at Darwin seminar for almost a decade. And I just thought, what if I could get some of the essence of the arboridim and what I feel when I was just describing to you how it feels to be, you know, standing next to this gold cloud of witch hazels and the snow. So I know I feel feel that these connections and I know that the arboretum and the sort of presence of of trees has changed my life. And so I thought, what if I could flip that around and create an experience for first year students that might have a lasting effect on their sense of being connected to the natural world and sensitive and aware and awake to it. And my thought was that in creating connections to the other, if you can do that and you do it as a practice, you're probably going to be a more empathic kind of a person, a more rooted kind of a person. And so that was my goal, truly, to do those things. So you start the first class, I believe you take a walk, the group takes a walk through across sort of the arboretum. And again, there's like 16,000 or something, Woody plants there. And I think you explained to them that they're each going to choose a tree that will be kind of their partner for this course. Yes. Exactly right. So it's about a mile long the Arbor Reed them and they Uber out and I meet them a mile from where we're going to actually have our conversation and discussions about the readings each week and Rainer Shine we just march and and it's either day one of the semester or it's day six of the semester, depending on where the calendars fall. But they barely arrived. And we just have this joyful walk. They're getting to know each other. I'm unpacking a little of the Arboretum and Olmsted's design history and the collections. And we look at this thing and then and in the background I'm telling them that look around carefully because you're going to come back and you're going to wander this place without me and you're going to have to find one of these woody plants that you're going to actually visit with every week and journal and photograph and annotate photographs, write poetry about whatever you want to take what you see and put it into some form that I can experience too. And you'll do that every week. And what I think, as you may know from our previous conversation, I know you do, it's always interesting to see how each student picks a tree. And that's really one of the wonderful surprises for me each year. I remember you told me that some, what speaks to them is maybe that there's a shared ancestry that because you have a renowned collection of plants of Asia, for example, and some students with Asian backgrounds in their family history may have said, oh, wow, that's from the same place as my grandmother or great-grandmother, whatever, and things like that. And others look at them, the physical stature or lack of stature, some of them are oddball shapes, and some of them are giants, and so lots of different attractions. Yeah, that's exactly right. I'm actually writing these days about what I call plant embezzeterhood, and the idea that if you have provenance on your plants, plants in our collections can be these connectors to culture, cultures around the world that you may have heritage with. And so it's been a very interesting journey for me to see that. And often students may pick, for example, a Native American student might pick a sugar maple because that's a really important tree in her cultural history and continuing cultural history. Or a Korean or a Korean American student might pick a tree that whose seed was collected in Korea. So these become, I think, really interesting ways in which the tree isn't just a tree, it becomes emblematic of something. And so it goes beyond just the tree. But then you have people like you mentioned stature who want something intimate. They want a small tree that they can just sort of the scale is almost human. And then I have people who just are overwhelmed by an old dawn red wood. And they just can't imagine something. And so it's a very personal thing, but each will be able to articulate why they picked that tree, which I think is wonderful. And then the other, one of the other elements, and in terms of, let's, if we sort of transition to like, okay, so I'm not a first year student at Harvard, and I'm not going to take unfortunately, going to come and take your seminar. But if we were translating some of the elements of it, of a sort of do it yourself at home kind of thing, or for that matter in your local arboretum, wherever you are or in the park or down the street or whatever, in the forest nearby, there's also these readings. So it's not like there's a botany textbook and you reach chapter one, the first week and chapter two, the second week and whatever and have a quiz. It's like you have this diversity of readings that further illuminate the subject, you know, both the tree and the connection, the idea of, you know, building empathy and the other knowing the other and I think as you said to me when we did the time story, you're sort of learning to love something that can't necessarily love you back, yeah? Exactly right. And I think that's where reading literature, reading the first chapter of Richard Powers, the over story about the immigrant family and chestnuts. And it's a beautiful, beautiful sort of examination of a family over generations and just an individual tree

or Robin Wall Kimmer and the Council of Peacons and her braiding sweet grass. And you get these opportunities to read about trees. We also have poetry that we read about, for example, abscision in the following, when leaves fall off or one of my favorite phenomena, which

is marcescence, which is when deciduous woody plants don't drop their leaves in the fall, but they hold them shivering through the winds in the snow, like beach trees and young oaks and and other things. And we also read some pretty serious science. We actually go back in time to imagine a world that didn't have trees and what would it have been like? And then what were the first forests like back 385 million years ago? But interestingly, I can pair that paper and that science with some writings of Lucretius. On the nature of things, he writes about this great race of herbaceous plants to race to the sky to be the first one there. And amazingly, that little passage from Lucretius is a perfect encapsulation of the Devonian. Obviously, he was speculating, but I think that that means that there are so many different ways that people can interact with, read about, and then engage with trees that I actually really enjoy the fact that it isn't a science class. It has some science in it, and there's no question that that can be a lot of fun about the science of fall colors. Why some leaves are red, why some are yellow, why there are more red colored fall, woody plants in New England than there are in Europe. Well, we can do those things, but it's kind of a fun thing. And then what do we do after we've had our discussion? We march out there and look at fall colors. And that's great. Right. Right. And so here from the ancient Roman poet, like you said, Lucretius, to contemporary literature, it's a real, the syllabus. What I'll do is I'll give with the transcript transcript of the show over on away to guard.com. I'll give some of where I can find a link to either the whole piece of literature or or how to get it or whatever. I'll give some links so the people can find what we're talking about. Oh please do. So as the New York Times piece that you so wonderfully, you know, really captured the bottled essence of the class, we have posted my syllabus on the Arbor Readham website and there's, I would love anyone who wishes to engage with this material. If you want a self-assemble, a group of friends in your neighborhood or town that love the woods and trees and so forth, You can do it or you can get together on Zoom with friends and pick your tree and meet weekly. But this is all meant to be shared with anyone in the world you'd like to engage. Well, that's great. That's that the syllabus is online. That's great. One of the stories that you have people read as by Carson McCullers, a tree a rock of cloud, and that kind of blew me away. I don't know if I'd ever read it, but when I did, and I don't know if you want to give the short version up it or what, but wow, it was like what an unexpected, and again, juxtaposed against, you know, in the syllabus, also some scientific papers and some history papers and some other kinds of literature. It was really startling, really a beautiful piece. Yeah, that piece, that short story, which really, I mean, it's just a very short story. I think it's become something so central to sort of the giving voice to the way I think about what nature can do. And it actually came, I was introduced to it from a session called Should Trees Have Legal Standing in which we read what is a really classic piece of writing by a law professor, Christopher Stone, who was at the University of Southern California, from a case in which there was an attempt to prevent a big development in the mountains in Southern California that would have been, I think, a Disney operation. And the question was, who could sue on behalf of this ecosystem of these trees? And in the end, it went to the Supreme Court and the trees trees did not win. But what's interesting is Stone wrote this very powerful thing. Should trees have legal standing? And he was actually a philosophy concentrator at Harvard, so he was very well and widely read. And in this piece, he references Carson McCullors. And that was my introduction. And in this short story, I immediately connected. It's a, it's 1950s piece of a diner in the morning. They're men in it on their way to work, having their coffee and there's a boy who's, you know, a paper boy who comes in for his coffee. And there's a sort of vagrant man who's in there who starts to talk to this boy and the boy doesn't quite know what's going on. But he begins to tell a story of how he fell in love years ago with a woman who he married and and then eventually and not you know and after a few years she leaves him and he spends years trying to find her but to no avail. And then he realizes it's sort of an interesting insight which is maybe he wasn't ready for human love. And that there's a science to going about how to be able to love. And he talks about building up his practice. He says to the boy, I think at one point, I can love anything. And this comes back to what I think of as unreciprocated love. And he talks about, I can love a cloud, I can love a tree, I can love a rock. And he really is in this process of saying, I, you know, don't start at the deep end with human love, but build your practice up so that you can love anything and be ready for that. And he turns to the natural world. And of course, this boy is taking it in, not quite sure what to make of it. But of course, the essence of that story is that humans should and can become more loving, more capable of empathy by turning to the natural world. And I just think it's beautiful to read that story in Pine. Yeah, it's really, and that one I was able to find online and so forth even, it's really, it's, it just gives me the shiver. I love it. In the opening scene, the man,, I think he's hunched over his beer and one corn rope of the diner and as the boy calls out to the boy, I love you. And that's how the exchange begins and it's like exactly what he said, right? he's learned that even a stranger to open up our hearts like that and see what happens, right? Right, and I think, you know, and that, the short stories, if you can't find it online, you can order from Amazon, but or go to your local bookstore, hopefully. And, but I think this business of learning to love without sort of assuming you'll be loved back is a powerful sort of way of thinking, especially in the world now, where so much of what we're surrounded by is sort of an initial take, which is to hate, or to suspect, or to oppose. And it never lets anything in. And I think one of the things that I think you and I connected very much on in our conversations and for the New York Times pieces, I want this course to be a hopeful course, a way of thinking that we all in our own small ways can go about a practice that will help us make the world in our own little corners collectively better and more loving, more sympathetic, empathetic, more capable of not having an initial reaction like, you're not like me, therefore there's something wrong. Right. Not finger pointing at the other. Like, I'm good, you're bad, you know, because you're the other. Not that kind, which we see in everything today, it seems like. Right. So we have maybe four, four, five minutes, something left. And so if I want to do this myself, I've got to go out and pick a tree. You do. And that's really, really hard. We talked about some of the ways that the students, you know, what influences them or whatever. And so each week then they write something about it or draw something about it or all of the above, take pictures of it, whatever they, they sort of learn about it by interacting with it in those sort of creative ways or documenting it in those ways. Yeah. And this really can be, if you're living in New York City, it can be a tree you walk by every day and may not have even given a second thought to. And all of a sudden, if you pick that tree and you say, every week, I'm just going to be looking at this tree for half an hour, be thinking about it, you've begun the journey. All of a sudden, you're looking at bark before you know it. If it's if you pick it, depending on the season, you're seeing buds flush as we will. And maybe you've never looked at what does a winter bud look like or an, you know, a dormant bud look like on this tree next to you. Maybe then, oh, I see there's scars on this. The twigs, that must be where the leaves were attached last year. And then the buds flush. And to me, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing leaf out in the spring. It's just, it's such an ephemeral

kind of a thing for each, each tree. And so I, I think

there is no one way to pick a tree and it doesn't really matter. You just, you create your own reasons.

This is why I think it's a, it's very empowering that an important that I not sort of tell people what to do.

It, because it doesn't matter. It's the journey you and a tree will have. And over weeks and weeks and weeks, that tree will become something quite different than it was in ways where you will feel I think a strong attachment to that tree. But one that's grounded in what I think of as giving that tree standing. Actually saying this is a one-to-one relationship. That tree has a life journey just as I do. It's not just an anonymous background and piece of green. And then anyone can do this. And I think what's exciting is when you have a group of people that are doing it, you can actually talk to each other about it through your photographs, through, as I said, I've had students who've written poetry about their trees. Did you have like a craft project or two? I had a student who crocheted a dawn redwood. Oh. So, yeah, again, this is the important thing here is not to be prescriptive, but to open through this clorice and through the syllabus and through these practices that I encourage to let everyone make it their own and to make it their own journey. And I think if you do that alone, which I think is a wonderful thing or you do it with a partner or spouse or with your children or with friends, there's just no one way to do it. But part of it is you have this conversation in a sense, this back and forth with the tree, the tree is there, but now your eyes can see it and take it in, and you can do anything you want to sort of document and ponder. I'm just going to have to pick. It's really going to be really, really hard because I'm in love with the number of the trees here. Well, and I will tell you, you can pick one tree, and then maybe you say, I'm going to try that practice on another tree. And I don't know that I would, you know, I have a lot of trees. I'd pick. Well, again, you have 16,000 new plants there to look at. I might actually, if I was to ask to pick now, I might say, there's certain things, there's certain trees here. I have to return to all the time every year. But maybe it would be, if I was going to say what would I do, maybe I'd want to find a tree I'd never really noticed. As, and then I, you know, it's funny. We had a wonderful talk about our expedition to Bosnia, Herzegovina this fall to collect the Bosnian spruce, which is this magnificent skinny spruce, but quite endangered and we have the seeds and we have some of them on the ground. But all of a sudden after this talk, I walked out the door of the building and I knew there were two of them, just 150 feet from that front door. But I had never really looked at them carefully. Yes, I know. It was just modified. But so I want to give I want to give me the portal. Yeah, what would be more fun?

What could be more fun than maybe those are the trees I'd pick because I had been not observing them. Yes

Well, I'm always glad to talk to you Ned and and always glad to think about the Arnold Arboretum And I'll include information about visiting of course with the transcript of the show show over on Weightagarden.com. The link to our time story together and things like that. Obviously, the Arnold website, which is so full of information about so many incredible Woody plans. Thank you. Thank you for making time today. Oh, thank you, Margaret. It is always such a wonderful thing to have a conversation with you. Thank you. Okay. And I hope I'll again soon. And I hope I'll talk to all the rest of you again soon to now don't miss an episode. You can subscribe free to the podcast version of the show on Spotify or on Apple podcasts. And you can find me anytime at awaytogarden.com and on Facebook and on Instagram as at a way to garden. And happy gardening meantime. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs, a third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by high-moving seeds, Wolcott Vermont professional quality vegetable, and Urbal Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMohingSeeds.com and by White Flower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, WhiteFlowerFarm.com. A way to garden with Margaret Roach is a joint production of a way to garden.com and RobinhoodWidio.com.