Good morning and welcome to the new York Botanical gardens. This is our special friday morning science conservation and humanity seminars. I also welcome you this morning very heartily from my cohost, brian and charles. My name is vanessa sellers. Im the coordinator of the humanities institute, a special Research Division in the library set up to stimulate Critical Thinking at the intersection of science and the humanities. And what better subject than urban forests to bring science and humanities together . To discuss science and society, to study the deeper relationship that people have always had with trees through the ages, as meeting points, as object of the light, as places of peace and wellbeing. And everyone here i am sure will have their own favorite tree. Think about your favorite tree for a minute. What better place than the new York Botanical garden to speak of urban forests, famous as this place is, for its unique 50 acres time forest, the old growth forest, the last remnant of the 17th century woodlands that once blanketed this whole area, this region along the east coast. Its the same words where the indians hunted with some of the very trees standing. This force is also the reason why the Botanical Garden was created here in the first place in the middle of the bronx. And what better person, what better person really to speak about the wideranging Natural History of the tree in American Cities than our speaker of the day, jill jonnes . Now living in baltimore, she lived in newark city and she went through the Columbia University school of journalism, and ever since she has been a journalist and also an author writing very extreme interesting and inspiring books. Im going to hold the new one ready. Among which conquering gotham, empires of light and south bronx rising. She was named the National Endowment for the humanities scholar, and of interest to us here at the new York Botanical garden especially as of course she is also the founder of the Baltimore Tree trust. Well, what more is there to say . Please help me in welcoming jill jonnes. [applause] and heres the book, by the way. Well, thank you so much, vanessa. Its such an honor to be here and also just to say thank you again to the many people here at the garden over and currently helpful to me as i was working on this book over many years. One other thing i would like to say about my background since i am amid so many scholars is also do have a phd and american history. And that has been really what informed many of my books. So one thing i realized i didnt find out is which way should i be pressing this to go forward . This y. . Okay. Spirit first you have to put it on. All right. So urban forests, many people say what is that . It seems like an oxymoron. And this is really the answer. Im guessing many of you here would know that but since most people have never heard of the concept of an armored force, and that is fille honestly what i we this book because i feel like its so important to our kind of future as citizens are largely living in cities. You see trees, park trees, private property. This really all got going, and again i would imagine many of you with Andrew Jackson downing. He was sort of americas original horticulturalist or public horticulturalist enduser acted before the civil war, the 1830s and 40s, extremely influential editor of the ultra cultural. So i will read you what he had to say. If our ancestors found an answer to cut down vast forests, it is all the more needful that their descendents should plant trees. The first duty of an inhabitant of forlorn neighborhoods is to use all possible influence to have the streets planted with trees. And for downing, and you can see this terrible looking straight in baltimore which i think is as the country began to organize, this was very much an issue. Such think were were having a bit of a problem with the mic. You want a closer, okay. Sorry about that. So for downing, Nothing Better epitomized what a town or city with the tree should look like then new england towns like new haven. This is after the civil war but you can see these trees have been in the ground for a long time. Unfortunately because downing was such a proselytizer for urban trees, he died at quite a young age, 36, in 1852. So before the civil war during a terrible steamboat accident on the hudson. After the civil war, a whole new group of tree evangelist emerged as a very famous charles sargent, the ultimate boston brahmin who created harvard auditorium in 1872 and was it very autocratic head for about 50 years. He wrote many important multivolume works about american tree species and taxonomy. Ill read you something you wrote that one of the sort of charms and a guest frustrations of being part of the tree world is how much things dont change drastically are. This is what he wrote in 1897, this lament about americans that they suffer quote and pigments with regard to the true beauty and value of native trees which appears to be peculiar to us as a nation. If you are looking at sergeant in this photo you notice is in front of most nonnative japanese ornamental cherry, and actually one of the big goals or omissions of the arboretum was to send plant explodes all over the world but especially to asia to bring back plants that could be introduced to american landscapes. Its sort of an odd lament but also very au courant here below is john davey. Any of you who know that davey tree expert company, this is the man who invented it and is one of my favorite people in my book. He was trained as a horticulturalist in england which did not include being taught how to read and write. He emigrated to canton ohio in 188282 and as a young man he taught himself to read and write. He was a really extraordinary person and very passionate. So he became superintendent of Standing Rock cemetery in cant what he so rejuvenated the trees that he became known as the tree doctor. And its on reaction to what was going on in america, the city trees, was quote appalled at the census ways of trees. They retreated almost like an enemy that had to be destroyed. As for sick trees the attitude was all plants die, so whats different about a tree . And then his other big bugaboo if you look to the right, trees that were trimmed were made to look like hat racks by local butchers. This is all about utilities and this is a fight that goes on to this day where you drive down the road and people have just hacked at trees and invariably they been hired by the local utility. Davey was a visionary who invented the care of trees and he wrote this wonderful book called the tree doctor which is very blog like. He trained himself to be traffic photographer. He would go it and take a photo to make a point and write these very sort of comment. One of his big laments was just the failure to properly plant trees and care for them. One of his essays was a calamity of cleveland, which is all about how they just had messed up. And then the next person who was a significant force in making people think about trees and plant trees was j sterling morton. He invented arbor day in a basket 1872 as a as a treeplanting holiday really never went anywhere and tell 1882 in cincinnati when the local school superintendent, a man named john peasley, rebranded it as a School Childrens holiday at the first meeting of the American Force to congress which is trying to something about the clearcutting of all the sort of forest. What you see is eden park with 8000 schoolchildren planting trees. And they initiated it at the time something called the president ial growth which goes on to this day. I went to visit it, and interestingly the one the president whose trees they could never keep alive was richard nixon. [laughing] i think there on about the fourth tree. The rest of them, and asked when i last talked to the person, i said whats obama getting . He said we dont know yet. He has to let us know. So one of the things that was unique about arbor day, in mortons opinion, he said it was a very american holiday because arbor day looks forward, devoted to the happiness and prosperity of the future. So it was an optimistic way of looking at the world. So the other person i like to include is a liza sycamore was an amazing victorian author, a foreign correspondent, traveled widely and in 1885 her brother was assigned to yokohama as a u. S. Consul. So she to visit him just in time for the japanese Cherry Blossom festival. Which she had never seen. Remember, america doesnt have japanese ornamental cheers except for the rare want at a place like the arnold arboretum. Just give an idea of how she felt about cherry trees, ill read you a bit of what she had to write. In the april sunshine, better still by moonlight, and best of all by the poets pale. Light of dawn, the blooming cherry tree is the most ideally, wonderfully Beautiful Tree that nature has to show, and its shortlived glory makes the enjoyment more keen and poignant. So having experienced the bliss of cherry trees and the festivals, she returned to washington and the proposed that washington beautify a very raw stretch of land along the potomac by planting it with hundreds if not thousands of japanese cherry trees. So this happened to be the bailiwick of a federal superintendent of public buildings and grounds, this person was always a west point graduate and always a Civil Engineer appointed a new by each president. So she went first in 1885, armed with these photos that were painted, and was received with absolute indifference. So she got nowhere but youll see this did not stop her. So the whole treeplanting Movement Really was embraced. Cities really began planting trees. I would say that Teddy Roosevelt was far and away our most tree loving president , and everywhere he went he planted a tree. So this is him in fort worth in 1905 planting and arbor day tree. You can see kids are looking out. And two years later he actually issued and arbor day address to the schoolchildren of the United States in which he had to say, in small part, to exist as a nation, to prosper as a state and to live as a people, we must have trees. So i mean, part of the treeplanting was really part and parcel of the larger progressive era city beautiful movement. And you can see what it meant in cities suddenly have trees. The other part of this, why did people embrace this, why were city officials very enthused to be planting trees, because trees also reviewed serving a quite important aspect of Public Health. There was no airconditioning in the cities are hot and the trees are one of the few ways in which you can really bring down the temperature. The other thing is cities are full of horses and wandering pigs and chickens, and to all of the droppings are then drawing and going up into the air. The trees also really help you sort of absorbed and settle the dust, which is not a healthy thing to be inhaling or briefing. So trees, city health commissioners, doctors, i mean, they view to trees is something you want to have around as a way to kind of mitigate the environmental hazards. So you notice here that cherry trees have arrived in washington. If you look at the date, 1925. Look at the size of the trees, there may be te ten or 12 years old. Remember, Eliza Scidmore began in 1885 promoting this vision. And she got nowhere until 1909 wendy Taft Administration came in, and first lady had been in japan and became her ally. In fact, there was an original shipment of, by this time the japanese government was very on board and they had go to all these thousands of cherry trees and sent them, whereupon they became enmeshed in this political feud which i described in my book. The first 2000 trees that the trees were burned publicly on the grant of the washington monument. The japanese were very goodnatured about it. They said you have a history of destroying cherry trees. George washington, didnt he do that . [laughing] they sent another 3000 cherry trees and those did get planted in 1912. I mentioned this because i think anytime you want to do something, it has a really consequence. It often takes a very long time. In this case Eliza Scidmore, 27 years. So i just say that to encourage people to get involved in this. The other thing is that tree time is effective at the of the kinds of times as everyone here knows, very long. So again trees really were embraced, and after world war i, 117,000 Young Americans had died and so the american forest green association, the same group that you saw for 1882 and arbor day, with the proposed, it was these young men, two young women who had been lost to the war, that the honor with memorial Tree Plantings, and they were sort of stunned at the way this swept the nation. To a great extent, these memorials have been forgotten. But if you look back you will find that there are a lot of trees planted all over your city for this. And american forestry at this to say about that. The trees will mark the remaking of the cities just as those men marked the remaking of the world. So even as were having this are a successful treat evangelism, the cities were getting planted up, were also having our first great eco disaster which is the loss of the american chestnut. Since i garden i wanted to show this picture of William Alonso mural because he was here and he was the man who identified the chestnut blight and he became actually quite famous for that because he also was the very rare voice telling all these distressed politicians and tree lovers that essentially there was no point of spending any money trying to contain the chestnut blight because it was a winborn windborne fungus. You have a very healthy to jamaican chestnut, in fact on these grounds there were 2000 very mature american chestnuts, and they were gone within a few years. It was really extraordinary. You dont think of american chestnuts as city trees, but actually the parks in its range which was sort of really somewhat north of new york and then down into the appellations, all of these cities, philadelphia, new york, baltimore, washington, were filled with chestnuts. And so it was a really significant loss, especially in the woods. It was kind of a keystone species. Interesting fellow, he diagnose the blight in 1905. He continued to be quite a force or at the. He often ran the new York Botanical garden when Nathaniel Britton was off doing other things. And you see his affair with one of his many collections. He referred to himself as a naturalist in his memoir. Somehow after world war i he kind of went off the rails, got fired and disappeared down to florida, where he was kind of rediscovered by some of his fellow my colleges who put them in a Little CornerOffice Summer at the university of florida and he devoted his life to the mycology of florida. And then writing this memoir which was quite fascinating. In any case, again, American Cities were planted up but mainly planted up with american elms because theyre so much the perfect tree they could take any abuse. You see they come up really high so theyre not interfering with the traffic and everything else. But this, you also see how incredibly beautiful they are. I am proud, i took this photo, but i took it in sacramento with the blight arrived quite late and they were able to save a lot of the trees by injecting them. So just how do people think about the elms . When you came into any town, just a citizen writing, the landscape changed your you entered into this kind of forest with 100foot arches. The shadows change. Everything seemed very reverent. There was a certain serenity, a certain calmness. Then as the elms came down you would start to notice the severity of things. And actually before i vanished that i want to point out that many cities and villages had these elms that were historic and had all kinds of emotional historical residence for people. So this was considered the biggest elk in america after world war ii, dutch elm shows up in the 1930s and works its way west to the west coast. It arrives in california in the 70s. So you see there was a lot of monocle planting, and when it went, ill read you what people were saying. As the elms came down you start to notice the severity of things. The wires, the utility poles, the cracks in the hot pavement which no longer was based in shadows. Based. So this is unlike the american chestnut, which was largely confined to the southeast, i mean, chestnuts without street trees. The american elm really was the ultimate street tree, and there were loads of them in the parks, too. So their loss was just really significant. And it happened in many places even as the cities themselves were really having troubles, meaning that you would be getting to have everyone moved to the suburbs here cities just didnt have the financing that they needed, and so as you lost these trees and as the reason for trees, the historic reason for trees had kind of disappeared, meaning you now had air conditioning and you know that modern medicine, so what was it that you are going to say to city managers at a time of great financial stringency, like why should they plant trees . So theres this kind of nice circle of life which is 100 years after the first cincinnati Fourth Street conference. There is another one but this one is really devoted to urban forestry and this issue of how do we replant the cities and with what and how do we persuade people that want to do this . So this man, Rowan Rowntree, is a scientist with the u. S. Forest service, his site is or then embed it in universities. They kind of have a foot in both camps. He really realized that we actually knew nothing about urban forests. When you compare to what you knew about a force which is harvested for timber, and that were going to need to know many things about urban force in order to persuade this new generation of mayors and