A Leafy Legacy (Page 2)

Class Planting, Campus Pruning

	A magnolia tree in the garden beside Morrice Hall. PHOTO: Jack Goldsmith

A tree that has only one species in North America, and one in China, the Kentucky coffee tree, figures among Lechowicz's favourites on campus. He planted a half-metre-high sapling five years ago, just west of the sculpture of the two rams in front of the Stewart Biological Sciences Building.

But before Lechowicz's time, in 1952, a coffee tree was planted by the graduating class of that year. Writing on "The University's Lovely Campus" in a 1952 issue of this magazine, Darnley Gibbs, a botany professor and University "gardenmaster," described the recent class plantings. A few of them, like the burr oak planted by the Class of '45 east of the Roddick Gates, and the tulip tree (Class of '49) in the Redpath hollow, may still be found. But the coffee tree had the misfortune to be planted at the foot of the steps leading to the old McGill Observatory. Eleven years later, the structure would come down to make way for the Leacock Building: the tree was lost in the process.

Many of the old trees described by Gibbs and, earlier, by botany professor Carrie Derick in a 1929 McGill News article, "The Trees of McGill University," met similar fates with the expansion of the University in the '60s and '70s. Derick, for instance, describes elms and maples planted by Dawson, which like the coffee tree were removed in the construction of the Leacock Building in 1963. Similarly, the construction of the Otto Maass Chemistry Building and Burnside Hall in the same decade put an end to a row of columnar poplars. The "McGill Tree Movement" protested the "sacrifice" of the trees and later held a funeral for the 14 lives lost.

A walnut tree on the lower campus near the Roddick Gates. PHOTO: Nicolas Morin

"No one has ever told me I will have to be removed," a stately poplar allegedly informed the McGill Reporter in 1969, "and I do not intend to be, so there."

Sam Kingdon's Garden

Those poplars and the rare cottonwood described by Derick to the Montreal Gazette in 1926 -- "Care being taken to preserve trees" ran the headline relating to the construction of the "new" Arts Building -- were never replaced. But the theme of a row of columnar trees was later picked up by Sam Kingdon, when he planted a row of columnar oaks in front of the McConnell Engineering Building. These were untried trees on campus, and many were skeptical, he notes. But they have thrived. In winter, the snow on their brown leaves (which don't drop until the new leaves begin in spring) lends warmth to the cool concrete of the 1959 building.

Kingdon, who started at McGill in 1969 and was associate vice-principal (planning and physical resources) for 10 years until his retirement in 1996, would pick up another dropped stitch when he planted what appeared to be the University's first magnolia, its generous pink petals among the first to respond to the advent of spring, in the garden he designed on the south side of Morrice Hall, which is now known around campus as Sam Kingdon's garden. Little did he know that before the Otto Maass Building went up, there was a cluster of eight magnolias that had been planted in 1951.

Blossom Corner at the Macdonald Campus Morgan Arboretum PHOTO: Owen Egan

In recent McGill history, Kingdon is one of the big names in trees. We have him to thank, in large part, for overseeing the planting of roughly 300 trees following the loss of campus elms, including establishing the crabapple as a McGill-associated tree. But Kingdon might well thank Dawson for establishing the broad lines of the McGill landscape that so impressed him as a nine-year-old visiting Montreal.

Staying with his aunt in her apartment on Sherbrooke Street, the boy from Peterborough had a bird's eye view of the campus of the late '40s. "I have a memory of a wonderful playing field and lots of trees. When I began at McGill, I wanted to keep it as wonderful as that," says Kingdon.

The Enchanted Forest

Some of McGill's most important trees, however, are not to be found downtown at all. On the western tip of Montreal island, at the Macdonald Campus, the dedicated tree enthusiast will encounter more trees than he can shake a stick at, so to speak, for it is here that one finds the Morgan Arboretum. Canada's largest arboretum, the 245-hectare (680-acre) forest -- occasionally referred to as the Enchanted Forest -- serves as an enormous natural laboratory for McGill, as well as a grand educational tool for other local schools and colleges. The land was originally owned by the Morgan family and turned over to McGill in 1945, and it is now home to over 150 species of trees: birches, lindens, spruce, pine, fir and balsam; exotic species like the pear trees at Blossom Corner, the briefly blooming magnolias, and yes, ginkgos; as well as one of the oldest maple stands on the island, dating back nearly 200 years.

	In the courtyard of the Stewart Biology Building PHOTO: Nicolas Morin

As one might expect, some of those trees are available for transplanting to the downtown campus. John Watson, DipAgr'73, has some likely candidates in mind. Watson is the arboretum's manager of operations and a born woodsman whose father oversaw the arboretum before him. He says, "The arboretum is McGill, and we have our own nursery. I've got a whole row of Kentucky coffee trees sitting there that are overmature. At 12 to 13 feet, they're perfect for the campus."

There is more to Mac than the arboretum, of course: the campus has important orchards used for agricultural education and research, and those trees limited to landscape roles are still very fine specimens for the budding naturalist. On a tour of the campus for an interview with the McGill Reporter, senior groundskeeper Bob Parkinson, DipAgr'63, points out the pin oak with the massive trunk near the playing field by the Raymond Building, one of the 44 planted after the First World War in memory of the Macdonald men who died in service. "The Horticultural Society of Quebec stops here," he says, "because of the tree's incredible girth."

"Over there in front of Laird Hall," he says later, "is the Norway spruce I planted in 1965." The tree, which Parkinson started from seed, nearly towers over the building now.