Hoyt Arboretum Friends hosted our 37th annual Arborists in the Arboretum event last month where 125 arborists from more than 35 companies in the Portland area volunteered to care for our global tree collection. Every year, Curator Martin Nicholson creates a work list with priority jobs that only professional arborists can complete, including removing deadwood, pruning, strapping, creating wildlife snags, and more.
This year, volunteer arborists completed projects in more than 20 sites across the collection, all in a single day! We rely on their contribution to keep Hoyt Arboretum a safe and accessible place for all, but we’re not the only ones who get something out of it.
“Myself and probably most other people here look forward to this event all year because there’s nothing like it,” says one arborist. “The trees are super old and it feels like the closest you can get to climbing in a forest without actually climbing in a forest. And, it’s isolated enough from the city that you can take a minute to enjoy the scenery and peace.”
The trees are unique, and so are the requests our volunteer arborists receive from our team. With trained climbers at her service, Plant Taxonomist and Herbarium Curator Mandy Tu is able to collect hard-to-reach plant materials for the herbarium.
A crew stationed in the Spruce and Fir Collections near the Fairy Forest gathered seed cones and other plant materials with defining features that sit high-up in the branches. Unhooking from a massive Nikko fir (Abies homolepis), one arborist carefully handed over a resinous cone and remarked, “Never collected specimens for an herbarium before. It’s a different consideration than normal work for a climber.”
Seed cones of the true firs like this one are especially difficult to catalog because they shatter upon maturity. Mandy will dry, verify, tag, and store these cones in environmentally-controlled bins as usual, but will also spray them with an acrylic spray to keep them intact for long-term storage. The herbarium’s primary focus is to document and verify the Arboretum’s internationally-renowned tree collection, and with help from climbers, like these volunteer arborists, we have added several specimens that were previously out-of-reach.