 Welcome everybody. Thank you for coming out today. My name is Hillary Bassett. I'm the executive director of Greater Portland Landmarks, and I'd like to welcome all of you. As you know, Greater Portland Landmarks mission is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. And we have had a very busy year this year. As you can see all over Greater Portland, there's so much construction and so much activity going on. And certainly in the area of historic preservation, we've been reviewing many, many projects, not only in Portland, but in South Portland and also in Westbrook. Before we start, I'd like to remind you of a couple of programs coming up that you might be interested in. The first is on Wednesday, April 26th, Julie Larry, who is our director of advocacy at Landmarks, will be giving a talk about the American Dream by Mail Kit Houses in Greater Portland. And that program is co-sponsored with the USM History Department and Tempo Arts and will be at the Talbot Lecture Hall at Luther Bonney Auditorium. On Saturday, May 6th, preservation in action is a chance for you to meet the experts to answer your questions about fixing up your old house. We'll have expert tradespeople there and other folks who can fill you in on how to research your house, how to fix your windows, what to invest in in your house if you're planning to buy one or to sell one. And of course we'll have the inimitable Herb Adams will be talking about the Mechanics Hall, which is where this program will be held on May 6th. And then on Saturday, May 27th, the Portland Observatory opens for the season. And every day is a new and amazing day at the top of the observatory, so I invite you to join us there. Now I also want to mention as you came in, you may have seen we had a book, Greater Portland Landmarks published a book on the park system in Portland called Bold Vision. We still have copies and we'd love for you to have one, so there is one at the table if you want to take advantage today, but be in touch with us if you'd like to have a copy of that book. And then also I'd like to take an opportunity to thank several individuals and organizations for making this lecture possible tonight. The Portland Public Library has been our wonderful co-sponsor of these lectures. Ocean Gate Realty is our sponsor and I think Ed Gardner is here in our audience. CTN Channel 5 has been filming these for viewing on community TV. And I'd also like to thank our landmark staff members, Alessa Wiley and Julie Larry, who are here tonight for their help in putting all these programs together. Now this is the last in our series of four lectures called The Evolving Landscape yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And we're very pleased today to have Dennis Collins with us, who's the Horticultural Curator at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dennis started out as a professional landscaper and then joined the staff at Mount Auburn as an arborist, where he worked for five years in that role. And then for the past 22 years, he's been a horticultural curator there and asked him, what does that mean? Do you just count all the plants? And he goes, no, it's really a role that involves many, many different talents. He calls himself a jack of all trades. But it also involves strategic planning for the landscape, figuring out what to do about the landscape. And every year he describes it every year is different. Some years are wild and crazy. Last year apparently was one of those wild and crazy years. And this one, Dennis is having a chance to not have something so intense with grants and projects to be working to improve and make one of the most beautiful cemeteries that's only two hours away. Keep it to its high level of beauty for all of us to enjoy. So I'd like to welcome Dennis Collins. Hello, everyone. Can you hear me in the back? Is that good? Okay. It's an honor to be here. And thank you all for coming. I've enjoyed meeting many of you today and reconnecting with a few who I've met before. And I keep saying this, it's been a constant theme of mine today. Portland is only two hours away. I have no excuse for going many, many years between visits. And I had the pleasure of visiting Evergreen Cemetery today. And even the Eastern Cemetery, is that what we call it? Yeah. Both, you know, I should have been visiting 20 years ago. And so I'm glad I did it. And thank you for inviting me. It's been fun thinking about how I might use this time. And I have a tendency to maybe try to go off on too many tangent. So if with any luck, I will stick to the script. On the other hand, if you have questions, you may you may instigate a detour of some sort. I am going to try to finish in time to allow for questions. But I understand the library wants us to be done by around seven. So I will do that. And in order to compromise between my tendency of trying to fit too much in and and try to be efficient, I plan to go through some slides quickly. Only because there's so many interesting plants to talk about. I couldn't leave some of them out. So bear with me. I will I will pause long enough to say something or at least let you read the name of the plant. In some of the photographs, I have put the name of the plant that is featured so that if you're interested, you can make a note of it. In others, there are too many plants in the picture. So I didn't. We can we can talk if you throw up your hands. I will stop and address that. This isn't really necessary. But if we're taking the big picture and we want to ask a couple of questions, it does set the table for thinking broadly. Why does it matter, especially not not so much what is work culture, but a friend of mine, Peter Del Tredici offered a definition once which I've never forgotten. You know, he didn't elaborate on it and I should have asked him to, but he didn't. On the other hand, it does kind of explain what we do. What we do as gardeners, what we have done as a species for, I don't know, you know, thousands of years. This is, I guess, the the Aztecs. You're an art historian. Can you confirm that? People have been moving plants around ever since we discovered agriculture and what what we can do collectively with plants. And we've been learning ever since we have been moving in horticulture, very large trees sometimes these Japanese maples. I went too fast there. They came from the courtyard of the Boston Public Library. They had been planted by the Garden Club of the Back Bay and brought through the front doors at the time. And there was no way to get them out. We did some fundraising and hired a crane and took the four of them out. All four made it. Here they are in the landscape. And the point is moving plants around is just a sort of clever way of talking about horticulture. There's a lot to it. It's an art and a science. I hope to touch on both aspects tonight. And but more importantly, I'd like to talk about why it matters. Many years ago, I was at a conference in Chicago, and there was a presentation by a couple of professors from the University of Illinois at Urbana. The possibilities that horticulture can improve the quality of lives is something that we don't often talk about. When we talk about why it matters, but it's not just about building pleasant gardens to spend our leisure time. I believe horticulture can make a significant impact on our lives. We may not notice it always, but this conference that I went to these researchers at the University of Illinois actually showed by studying people in housing projects that either had vegetation or had no vegetation. Looking at the data proved very conclusively that even a little bit of plant material in the place where you live makes you a respect the place a little better. And it turns out do better in other areas of your life. They tested kids in their school performance. They tested crime rates, domestic violence, etc. And it proved very conclusively that landscape and horticulture make a difference. We are not we're not cut out for living in a concrete world. We I believe we need plants. We need vegetation. Think about this. What does this make you feel like? This is simply a house I visited once in a posh neighborhood in Washington DC. But I mean, we don't need to go too deep. But you feel welcome. You feel somewhat encouraged. You don't feel that here. Urban blight is a real problem in our world today. If you had to experience that. And now I understand this is Portland, not Boston, not Los Angeles. But you're going to need some therapeutic help after commuting if you're one of these cards. We I believe are hardwired to respond to the natural environment, which has plants as the dominant feature. Yeah, I know we came out of the oceans, perhaps. But we we have it in our brains, I think, to respond to this. This is a Meadow friend of mine, Larry Wiener, who's a noted expert on on meadow construction out of Philadelphia. It's one of his projects. You know, this feels to me like that garden in Washington DC. In a way, it feels welcoming. It feels it feels natural. I I don't recoil. I don't feel despair. Now I know if I had my dog running through there, she would be covered with ticks and I would despair. But anyway, anyway, so plants, plants can play an important role in our lives on many different levels and in different scales. They, you know, a garden does not have to be of say, longwood gardens in Philadelphia to to have an inspirational effect on us. In fact, our own gardens can accomplish that. If we explore and the deeper we get into horticulture, and the more plants we discover, and learn how to use effectively in combinations, I think the more inspiration we can get from it on a close up scale or on a landscape sale. This is the native Magnolia. And this is to remind me that it's the most normal thing in the world is for kids to show us how that works, how this human nature connection really works. The inquisitiveness of kids is one of the things that keeps me going. It keeps me hopeful for horticulture and, you know, for another day, make a note how horticulture can save the world. So the question tonight really is, are cemeteries appropriate places for delivering the goods? And I, I think it's, I think it's useful to make a very slight distinction here between gardens and parks. Parks tend to have other functions that we go there to run or walk or play Frisbee or football or something. Gardens we tend to visit and experience plants. And I'm talking here about public gardens specifically, but our own gardens are the same way, even if we do barbecue and so forth. But gardens tend to focus our attention more on plants than parks do. So I think that cemeteries, if there is a role to play, it would be more akin to what botanic gardens and other public gardens offer than, than simply public parks. The putting stone, that is sort of about the same size. Yeah, I forgot it was so big. And here's the thing. When I came to Mount Arbor and I thought that the cemetery aspect of the place, the monumentation was more of a hindrance than a benefit. I have since come to realize that not only are the monuments important, but the combination of the art of sculpture and the art of horticulture are completely appropriate fit together. And you know, you can draw attention to both the monument, the sculpture, or the planting at the same time. And if we're doing a good job, then you won't really notice that there are two different art forms involved. But I'm hoping that the end result is sort of a synergy that, that, that feeds both and, and works together. This is a center taff of Nathaniel Bowditch who was an instrumental person in celestial navigation. This is a monument celebrating the end of slavery after the Civil War, the Sphinx carved by Martin Milmore. The unique things about cemeteries, of course, besides the monument include history. And in Mount Auburn's case, we have a very long history. And we have people visiting with people who come with different mindsets grief, certainly, and melancholy and sadness. But casual visitors come to people, you know, who want to walk who want to see nature because they're surrounded by an urban dense urban environment. And they come and they often start to think about mortality and the ephemeral nature of life and nature, which they normally wouldn't do just going to the mall or to the movie theater. It's, it's sometimes a very moving thing when people talk about how, how much they enjoyed or appreciated a visit to Mount Auburn. And I need to say that having an existing legacy of horticulture makes my job a whole lot easier. And I can appreciate what it must be like to start from from scratch to build that legacy. But we were founded in 1831 by the horticulture society in Massachusetts. And we've had generations of horticulturists involved. It makes it so much easier to build on something like that than to create it. So in 1825, they began discussing this novel idea. At the time, cemeteries were not pleasant places in Boston. They were dangerous and dark and grim and unsanitary. And the notion of taking it out of the city and into the country, even though Cambridge was only about six miles away, was was radical. And people needed to kind of get over that initial change, having their loved ones, their family members so far away from where they were. Nevertheless, Jacob Bigelow and a few other folks got the thing started. And even though the horticulture society and Mount Auburn split, technically their formal relationship after just a few years, they have maintained Mount Auburn has maintained the purposes and the goals and the vision of those founders way back when. The basic premise was that horticulture can change the way people feel about death. That's simple. Whether it's true or not, is for all of us to decide on all the generations before us who have been to Mount Auburn. By the way, some of the earliest art that depicts the landscape is probably not entirely accurate. I have often looked at some of the etchings and I think, you know what, I don't think it ever looked like this. You know, and this one, this one hangs in the president's office. I swear every plant in the painting looks like cryptomaria. Do you folks know that one? The Japanese cedar. Even the low ground cover around the perfectly sculpted pond looks like cryptomaria too. We know that artists take liberties and that's fine. What we do know is that Mount Auburn was the first of many, many cemeteries around the country to be open to the public. And that within 50 years, the public had enough of a taste that it was demanding more. And the public parks movement began, I think, just at the end of the Civil War, partly because people had the ability to experience places like this and like Mount Hope and a few others, the ones in Philadelphia and New York and Cincinnati, Evergreen in 1854. Long before, Central Park, Prospect Park, Arnold Arboretum, these all came later. And so regardless of, you know, we're not trying to steal the glory for all these gardens. But in a way, we had a significant role in horticulture almost 200 years ago. Today, we are still open to the public and some of the features, some of the attractions of the site are still there today. It was chosen by the way, the front gate here, the Egyptian style gate, still welcomes people. You drive in, of course, and it's, you know, paved roads. It has been updated. But there are still moments where you can experience in the landscape some of the sense of timelessness. This is a photo of what we call Consecration Dell, where remnants of the early rural cemetery landscape are still persisting. You can see the, you know, literal passing of time on features like monuments, entries, these two probably were installed at the same time. The sugar maple was nearby. Eventually it started crowding the marble. But, you know, the the draw of history is sometimes one of the primary drivers behind people's interest in horticulture and cemeteries. History and stories. You know, without the stories, it would not be half as interesting. But when you get to experience the lives of people, you know, something about their careers or their, this one is Longfellow, or, you know, the things that mattered the most to them, the sculpture of a dog, a family dog, for instance, or, you know, the record of their achievements as a physician or, or a civil war captain or a senator or a Supreme Court justice. So stories are important. And the built structures, the infrastructure, the, the hardscape of the landscape is important for horticulture. And what we're doing today at Mount Arman is capitalizing on a really intelligent choice that was made first to choose that site. It had a lot of interesting topography. It had three, three large ponds in a vernal pool. Yeah, they could have picked a bigger one, 175 acres, you know, we're, we're tight to keep accommodating people who want to be interred at Mount Arman. But we're taking advantage of a lot of the, the built structures. This is a green roof on top of the hillside tomb. We were talking today at Evergreen about the fact that many of the older vaulted ceilings in, in side hill tombs are, are perhaps questionable of their, and their strength and integrity. We've had brick ceilings collapse and cave in when mowing equipment ran across them. So we began removing tariff on the tops of these buildings. And in this case, it's a ground cover planting of lamea astrum. But we've used a number of other things as well. This is a butterfly garden around one of the ponds. We, we have multiple roles to play because our visitors come with multiple needs. We, we have a very large metropolitan urban population, four and a half million people. And you can see in the picture, although the trees do continue a bit, it's pretty abrupt when the built landscape starts to dominate. And our role as an urban green space is a fairly new one. A century ago, this wasn't relevant. The whole world was greenscape in a way. But we have others who come to watch birds, to study plants, to study history, to exercise people come to walk. We don't yet allow dog walkers or bicycles, which I know a lot of places do. And I guess it was it's a legacy that was trying to discourage recreation and encourage more of a contemplative experience. Though there was a 5k run in there about five years ago, our president runs in the Boston Marathon every year. He tried it. There were a few people who squawked, but in general it went okay. The landscape was designed, it was, it was not designed in the, in the typical Olmstead fashion, like Central Park and so many other places where there was no original planting plan. Instead, we recognize the genius was using topography to show off plants to their best advantage. They chose the site. They laid out the roads in the past. And, and then it was up to every generation of horticulturists after that to take advantage of it. But the intent, the design intent was simply to emphasize beauty and tranquility, to provide comfort and inspiration. Now, whether we succeeded or not, I guess you will have to judge. We like to think that, that we are succeeding. And yet my, my job forces me to see all of the things that we haven't done. I'm the, I'm not urban, the biggest critic. And all I can focus on is what's wrong with the landscape. That's why if you come and visit, you'll be doing me a great service because it's when I'm with visitors that I get to remember why it was that I fell in love with this place 27 years ago. First, strictly horticultural sense, we try to follow the, the guidance of many, many successful landscape designers in history. Not just the Olm says, but, but all of the garden, the famous landscape architects, the garden writers and people who have called attention to why certain things look good to us, why, why this landscape is particularly compelling or attractive. And we try not to make stupid mistakes. But we do anyway. And, and I, I learned long ago that, that it was not just a cliche to say, you never know a plant until you've killed it three times. It's true. But it's worth doing. It's worth doing. We are entered an interesting transition at a time when the public's appreciation of different types of landscape is evolving. And we are embracing, for example, a nearly 100, 100 percent organic approach to landscape maintenance, and also trying to do things like remove a lot of turf. The turf maintenance operations have been traditionally one of the biggest responsibilities and burdens, frankly, of Mount Auburn. And we recognize that our ecological sustainability would benefit from having less of it. So to the extent that we can do that and still provide an interesting landscape using, in this case, a palette of native woodland plants, the Christmas fern, and hookra, I believe, and a couple of the things that I can't quite see. The extent to which we can do this, I think is going to make a huge difference 20 years from now, when Mount Auburn's landscape maintenance has changed from turf dominant to gardening and horticulture dominant. We are also recognizing that climate is changing. And we have a sort of basic benchmark now for any new planting. Can it withstand a four month drought? We've had two in the last two years. I don't know that this year is going to be the same, but they do seem to be coming with more regularity and they're longer. Did Portland also get the same drought last summer? Yeah, it was really, really long. And the effects are going to show up this year. At the same time, everyone keeps saying, well, we need to start planting things that are from south, from zone six and zone seven. And yes, we are doing that. And then we sort of lose them in a winter when the temperatures dropped to minus 11, which they did last year. But we have to keep trying. And we're lucky. A lot of gardens have a very strict policy about honoring the original planting plan. And once something dies, the same thing goes back in. We are very lucky because we can respond in time to things like Dutch Elm disease or hemlock woolly adelgid, which both had significant impacts on our landscape. And it forced us to find alternatives. And of course, the droughts and the increasing temperatures and so forth. So what can we do? We can feature the plants. That's almost the easy part. But providing an example isn't all there is to it. We need to involve the public, especially over the course of the year, we want about our to look good 12 12 months all seasons. You know, but if you come in January, it just won't be the same. Come in May, as I told you earlier, April is nice too. So providing a place to feature the plants, as I was saying, is the easy part in a way. And if you make those plantings accessible to the public, if you can get them inspired or get them interested enough to want to learn what what is that plant what, and happens to be growing at the base of this nice tribute to an abolitionists at the end of the Civil War. All the more that that you know that they can remember. I mentioned earlier how important stories are. People people find a plant and it happens to be next to a monument with an interesting story about someone's life. They're going to remember the plant and probably the story too. By getting the public on board seems to me the most significant thing that we can do now going forward. I keep flipping through these slides quickly. But here's a good clue on that. A friend of mine took. There are moments if you walk through the landscape, it doesn't all look like this, but there are moments when you pause and say, oh my God, this is this is really, really cool. And this is the Siberian Squill, Sila Sibirica, in front of some antique marble monuments. I've always enjoyed that that particular combination. So the public getting through the landscape is the first challenge. If you build it, what's the expression? If you build it, they'll come. All right, so we've already built it and we want people to come. But we also have to manage the site. And we do this at Mount Arborne in a way that is like, I suppose, most botanic gardens. There are very few cemeteries that have a position like mine. A curator is something, you know, is foreign to most cemeteries. But in the botanic garden world, curators manage the collections. We use a database that's standard state of the art for botanic gardens. And we track a lot of plants in the landscape, roughly 18,000 different plants or masses of plants. And with a lot of diversity, trying to get more and more, we have display labels so that the public can learn the names of plants, or in some cases, how old something is, where it comes from, what part of the world. We have curious things as well as sort of standard run of the mill bread bud. This one or the white form of the bread bud, a cultivar called Alba. We have tree paintings. This one is older than I am, even though it's about three feet tall. Been around for a long, long time. Most, you know, people would walk by it and never give it a second thought. But when you teach them, when you explain this thing is about 75 years old, people are going to stop and think, wait, something going on here. It's those moments when someone is experiencing horticulture and responding to it. If you can capture that, if you can engage them, whether it is through plant labels or maps that are given out, or increasingly, a lot of public programming that we do, classes and lectures about different types of plants, and a lot of topics, natural as well as historical and cultural. It works to get people lined up as supporters. And without supporters, any public garden is going to fail at reaching its full potential. But with supporters, anything is possible. I mentioned earlier that sometimes we had used central monuments in places where we didn't want a lot of new monuments to kind of clutter the landscape, for lack of a better word. And when we do, we provide, in this case, it's a sculpture by an artist named Richard Dukas. And when we do, we have another way of commemorating names and dates and things. It's a low wall that you can't see. It's sort of behind the grasses, the Heconocloa grass here. But we have basically run out of room in a landscape that is limited to 175 acres. So we have to find ways, preserving what we have, and also providing opportunities to continue accommodating people. I know I'm going fast. You're trying to read the names, aren't you? Globe master. There's a Miss Canthus with that Heconocloa grass, and it makes a nice combination in September. You know, Ruse Aromatica, the low growing sumac, was never an all star in the horticulture world. Ecologists loved it. But you know what? We're finding that we have ways of using plants like this. This one is covering a tomb built into the side of a hill, a small hill, used to have to run mowers across the top of it. It looks perfectly nice, especially with the grass allowed to grow a little tall there. Our master plan in 1993 identified lots of ways that we can move forward providing stewardship for an historic landscape, not just preserving but exploring through innovation ways of improving the landscape, not just keeping it. That's the interesting part for me. Yes, we have a Victorian zone where we're trying to see if we can execute the style without committing to the ridiculous amount of labor that's required. We are not against using cultivars, modern versions of the plant palette that was in play in the late 1800s. If something can resist drought or disease or insect problems, but still represent what that species had to offer, then we will try it. We've got the early rustic landscape of the consecration dell that I mentioned. We've got preservation of structures, fences included. We've got a couple of dozen of these left. A lot of them were taken down in the 1940s during the war. Part of the scrap iron initiative. When we do restore or repaint or do some repairs on fences, we almost always make sure that we follow up by not putting grass back in the center of it. Mowing invites equipment, damage to monuments and structures. It looks good if you can provide some color and some different textures in the landscape. This particular one is a geranium and this one is a ladies mantle. I like it. Here we've got the Canadian ginger with maiden hair for a nice combination. Back to the people. We do Arbor Day events. We get school groups to come through. We offer tours throughout the spring, really throughout the whole year, though in the spring, there seems to be a lot more. School groups and the general public, a range of topics. In a way, it doesn't matter what you use to get people to come in. But once they come, if they can accidentally discover that something about this place really resonates, we've accomplished our job. As I mentioned earlier, young people especially. By the way, nobody is going into a career in horticulture these days. We're having a hard time attracting the next generation of horticulturists. There was a time when all the students wanted to study golf course management because that's where the money was. Now, everyone's gone into organic farming and nobody is paying horticulture any attention. Suddenly, we can't feel, you know, we have positions that are entry level positions that we can't feel from one ear to the next. But nevertheless, the public and Mount Arbor have had a pretty good run in the last 20 years. Partly, it's an effort. It's a concerted effort to provide print materials, a website, audio tours, which in the beginning were the cassettes that you stick in your car, cassette player. Now you put them on your phone and you download an app. We're exploring ways to do plant labeling using the same phone app technology. We're getting there. It's hard to keep up with technology. But we have, fortunately, we have younger staff than me who are guiding those efforts. But you have to. This is the way to engage the public. We also, like Evergreen Cemetery, have a very small section where a community garden was built. This is on land that had been used as our dump for 100 years. Then we leased out most of that land to Mount Arbor Hospital, which is down the road, and they built a parking lot on it. But we also had a community garden built, too. We have events, believe it or not, we have weddings as well as funerals. We had the governor attending the dedication of a restoration of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, which was about six years ago, I think. We have a decent amount of good publicity. This particular one is about our membership in a national germplasm conservation program. In this case, it's for the genus Quercus Oaks. Mount Arbor had joined with 15 other Botanic Gardens in Arboretta and conserving as many possible species of oak as possible. It was good publicity. We get bad publicity, too. We had a major turkey population problem. We had two dozen at the worst height of it, and one in particular was really aggressive. My wife had a yellow mini that she drove in there one day, and this one turkey attacked it. But the worst was he attacked one of our gardeners and caused a lot of damage. And so we called the state officers and they came and euthanized the turkey. Well, don't you know, it made front page, you know, evening news, lead story, Mount Arbor cemetery executes. I don't remember what the words were, but they say any publicity is good, but that's not true. We also got a certification accreditation, I should say, as an arboretum through a new program, the Morton Arboretum, organized a few years ago. We are known as a birding destination. If you are a birder, you might have heard that you should go to Mount Arbor, even if it is two hours away. But you know, you have your own sights, too. But Mount Arbor has been a significant place for birding for a long time, which has been frankly a catalyst for us to get serious about going to Mount Arbor. We have been very organic about dealing with changing the landscape in ways that are more conducive to habitat. In this case, an aquatic shelf, a biofiltration of stormwater. We have pipes that take all the water that comes in through the roads, down into catch basins and through pipes, ultimately ending up in the ponds. And this biofiltration system allows vegetation to do some cleaning of the water before it actually goes into the pond. And we have residents like the Blue Heron who really enjoy that because they can sit there all day and wait for lunch to swim by. We have a woodland restoration in the DEL caused by a Norway Maple problem, a completely out-of-control problem. It took us 20 years. We are finally just about at the end of that. It has a vernal pool around it. And this is where we have limited ourselves to a strictly native New England woodland plant species pallet. That's the longest sentence I've ever tried to say in one time. We restored paths that successfully controlled rainwater that ran down some very steep slopes. We had planted I don't even know how many, thousands of trees and shrubs and ground covers together. Each year taking another section in a step-by-step way. And the DEL is one of the most popular places for the bird watchers to go. And we have resident and migratory species, the warblers in particular. But the owl, the great horned owls, I have to say, are rock stars at Mount Arbor. When they had babies. They had babies five years ago and the crowds were so big we had to rope off a buffer of 100 foot diameter to keep people away. There were webcams running day and night and anyway. I know I'm going fast here but if you want time for questions you have to put up with that. We built a wildflower meadow at the base of Washington Tower which overlooks the city. If you come to visit you have to climb up their stairs to the top with an observation deck. To the extent that we can use the naturalistic potential of turf grass and sedges in the landscape. We think it's a win-win. It looks historically appropriate. It reduces the amount of mowing and our carbon footprint which is important to us. And there are opportunities to do a lot more than just have grass. The meadow effect of mixing wildflowers with these grasses I think has great potential. Frankly, 20 years from now this is commonplace at Mount Arbor. I will be really happy. We learned that this one is from Longwood Gardens in Philadelphia. There's now a fescue sod. Most sod has been bluegrass which is fine if you want to have a lawn that you have to irrigate a lot and fertilize. But fescus came along because golf courses needed turf on the rough, non-fairway sections where they wanted it to grow tall. We get lawn naturalistic meadow-like turf grass without having to worry about weed management during the first few years. We do a lot of composting on site. We produce about 150 cubic yards in a year. We recycle a lot of material though we leave most of the leaves out on the grounds in place. We chop them with mowers. We brew a little compost tea. We've got a brewer with about 150 gallon capacity. We use this little homemade device to actually apply the tea. We used to collect rainwater off the old greenhouses. Now we have new ones. These were just four years ago. Part of the project was to bury this it looks like a submarine but it's an underground rainwater cistern. We moved our nursery because of that project and our nursery, look if you have a nursery it's never going to be big enough but we are using it and we fill it every year to the brim. Part of it is growing a lot of conifers to replace hemlocks. When the Adelgid problem first hit we had something like 390 Canadian hemlocks. It was way too many for us to maintain and so we're trying to diversify. We're actively testing a lot of different especially spurs and spruce. With some luck, we've been doing this for 10 years and the oldest ones have finally matured enough to go out on the grounds a couple of years ago. The problem is you can't find most of these out in the nursery so you have to grow them from seed and get them from your other gardens around the world. Right, 5 minutes. I maybe should just stop it right here and see if any of you have questions. This one slide I think I put in because near that meadow at the tower we're trying to see if some unconventional non-traditional plants in the horticulture trade can perform the same role where instead of a book-end planting of views you've got, if I went back you could see Rosa Virginiana on one side and a little blue stem cultivar called the blues on the other. We have woodland gardens for interment cremation only. We have commemoration in a way that is less conspicuous in the landscape. We have used stone walls to engrave names. This one was built for that purpose. There's another one in the distance, a big granite wall, more formal looking but nevertheless it's on our perimeter and it's so much better than adding 200 monuments and it works on a lot of levels. So let me stop it there and see if you have any questions from me. I apologize that I came close to finishing. Just a few slides left but I've talked enough. Go ahead. You must have a lot of volunteers to maintain this if you wanted to step. So volunteers, excellent question. We do get a lot of volunteers but they have so far been mostly serving as docents, working in the visitor center and at the greenhouse. We've had a lot, let's see, 30 years of having people at the greenhouse. We haven't yet got them out on the grounds. I know a lot of gardens that do use volunteers effectively out there. We have a semi-paranoid approach to liability. It's changing but there was a lot of resistance 20 years ago and I think the time is coming back when we can maybe push a little harder and get that to happen. But you do need to have dedicated staff to supervise volunteers and you need more vehicles and equipment than we presently have to get them to move around the grounds. Yep. What type of material was there when they developed the cemetery? Ah, so the topography was such it was hilly enough that it had not been clear cut the way most of metropolitan Boston had been. Cambridge and Watertown were mostly fields of agriculture. The site where Mount Arboniz straddles both of those towns and because it was hilly, it was harder to get logs out. So they left it. What we think is left today from pre-1831. A couple of dozen oaks, the Native Oaks, the whites, the red, the black, the scarlet. We know this because occasionally in a hurricane we lose one of these and we can count the rings and so forth. They're so well adapted to Boston that if you have droughts, they laugh it off. They've never asked anything of us. They are so well adapted to the site that we really have to do nothing. Although we are now recognizing that we can't take them for granted, we've removed turf from the base around them. We don't want mowers to bump the trunks and so we're doing something. But for the 170 years before that, we were doing nothing. How do you deal with stumps when you take down stumps? We have a stump grinder now. We didn't always. Before 20 years ago, we simply flush cut and let the thing rot in place. We didn't have to replant something in the same spot. If we needed a tree in the area, we could go 5 to 10 feet away and find a suitable location. We do have a grinder now and yet even that isn't up to the task of a really big tree. Sometimes we'll subcontract out a commercial arborist to come in with their equipment. We do have our own aerial lift truck. We have chippers and we have this grinder. But sometimes, especially after a storm, a hurricane and so forth, we need to get help from outside. So they may come and grind a very large stump. If we need somehow, need that space to be available sooner than the truck would rot. Geese. Yes. Geese It got pretty bad. We had a section where the monumentation restriction was such that all monuments had to be flush to the ground. It was a lawn cemetery section. And the geese were, it was around one of the ponds and the geese were pooping all over the place. We got a dog. It was a black lab trained up here in Maine. Doesn't catch the geese, but it harasses them to the point where they say look, let's just get out of the Charles River. There's plenty of grass. It's half a mile away. And so we had a dog. And the dog was taken home at night by one of our staff. Then we got a second dog, same trainer breeder. And then when that dog passed away, we didn't get another dog. But the geese really didn't come back. But we learned that it worked. And when the turkey problem emerged, we found that a specialist who has a couple of border collies was willing to come in twice a day. Never catches the turkeys, but harasses them enough that they're not feeling so comfortable. And sure enough, where we had maybe upwards of 30 turkeys running around, there's only a couple you'll see now. Well, yes and no. We don't want to obscure the views of the ponds by creating a barrier of vegetation. And I know that the logic is if you prevent them from being able to walk up, they're kind of lazy. They could fly, but they like to walk into the water and out of the water. The geese. But we, in general, thought make them uncomfortable. And they're happy down at the Charles River. They have everything they want. People throw them food, the breadcrumbs, etc. way in the back. Mowing, other mechanized sort of things. Do you have a schedule for that so that you can become on a day where there is... Oh, mowing? No, no. There should be days when you can walk through Mount Arbon and not listen to the din of equipment in the distance. But certain times of the year, you can walk for 100 acres and not hear much. The mowing slows down a lot in the summer. We don't do irrigation. We don't fertilize grass. We do mow a lot in the spring and then again in the fall. But I know we still... You know what, if we could let the turf grow naturally, which, you know, we had an experiment 15 years ago, it almost worked. We had people complain that they understood what we were trying to do, but could we mow their particular family lot in the middle? A square in this meadow, it looked ridiculous. Especially when two or three asked for that. So we canceled it. We're going to restart it. We've already started trying. We're using not just grasses, but sedges as well. So as you go towards, you know, less turf and more... Would you consider a schedule? Yeah, it's going to be quieter for sure. Yeah. Thank you so much.