Wednesday evening I attended a guided tour of La Crosse’s Myrick Park Arboretum. By most arboretum standards our tree museum is unimpressive, but if a variety of tree species with identification plaques at the base of each tree makes for an arboretum, then the La Crosse version qualifies. It is basically a three-acre plot where the municipal parks and recreation department, along with a local garden club, planted a bunch of trees in a largely unused part of a city park. I don’t know whether trees have to reach a certain size before a place can be called an arboretum, but our collection of trees only just recently received its official Level I arboretum designation. Level I is the lowest level of accreditation, generally given to spots where the display of trees is not the primary purpose of the site (e.g., cemeteries, golf courses, city parks). The tour was a celebration of the designation.
I had to smile when I first walked up to the archway where the tour was to begin. The attendees were a cross-section of La Crosse’s senior citizen environmental community. Of the people I recognized, and I recognized three fourths of the twenty people there, all were in their sixties or seventies. All, at one time or another, had served on the board of a local environmental organization. Friends of the Marsh, Mississippi Valley Conservancy, Wisconsin Conservation Corps, and the La Crosse Park Board were all represented. These people were serious amateur naturalists; none of them were tree novices.
Within the first ten minutes of the tour, it degenerated into small groups of three-to-five people moving about on their own. Each time Jay, our tour guide, finished talking about one tree and moved on to another, a small group remained behind to study the first tree more carefully. Soon Jay was talking to no more than five people, with everyone else strung out behind.
At one point three of us questioned the accuracy of one of the plaques. The plaque identified the tree as a pin oak, but we didn’t think that the indentations between the lobes of the leaves were deep enough to be a pin oak. Sue, a local graphic artist known to be a soft touch by any environmental group in need of her talents, had a tree identification app on her phone. The app confirmed that the tree was a pin oak, but it gave a genus and species name that I knew could not be correct. All oaks are of the Quercus genus, and her app gave a genus name that I’d never heard of. She fiddled with the app for a while and discovered that the tree was sick, and the listed genus and species name was not for the tree, but for the fungus that was infecting the tree. That is a sophisticated app.
My chance to shine came when several of us encountered a tree that stumped everyone except me. There was no plaque, and no one in the group other than me had ever seen the species before. I, to my surprise, flashed back to my dendrology class of fifty years ago and immediately knew the tree to be a dawn redwood. I explained that the tree was once thought to be extinct, but then was discovered growing inside the grounds of a Chinese monastery. Because of its unique history, it has become a popular tree in arboretums. I did not tell the group that of all of the genus and species names that I had memorized for my dendrology class, the one I remember best is the one for the dawn redwood. Metasequoia glyptostroboides. I remember it not because it was easy to remember, but because it was so difficult. In working hard to remember the name, I must have seared it onto my brain.
Back in my professional naturalist days, a popular debate was whether nature-based environmental education should focus on ecological concepts or on the names of plants and animals. Because of my dendrology course, which was entirely the memorization of names, I always thought that the debate was a false one. Concepts and names are both important, and a full understanding of a concept is impossible without knowing the names of the creatures that best illustrate the concept.
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