Hofstra University Arboretum

Transcription

Hofstra Arboretum is part and parcel of the whole campus and its 250 acres, so that is the size square footage-wise, but it also takes in all of the highways and streets and everything that you see. What quilfies us as an arboretum is the fact that we've been a member in good standing for about 25 years now with the American Public Garden Association and his is a pretty prestigious group that was created many years ago. There are 625 taxa of trees, and now an arboretum is a collection of trees as opposed to a botanical garden which is a collection of all plants. They could be anything from tropicals and the annuals and the display beds that you have with herbacious perennials and stuff, but Hofstra is an arboretum because we're trying to follow the original William Hofstra who was a lumberman and that's how he made his living and he collected trees here at his summer home at Hofstra, so we thought an arboretum would be more fitting rather than just being a botanical garden. And so we have a collection of trees that number in the thousands, there's probably close to twelve thousand trees, but there are 625 distinctly different ones out of those twelve thousand. That's hard to say, it's like asking which is your favorite child or something like that, you know. Planting, I probably have a favoite tree which is the katsura in the pinetum close to Heger Hall on the south side of Heger Hall. It's the oldest tree, it's from Japan, it's Cercidiphyllum japonicum, it's 120-125 years old so it's pretty magnificent when you go up to it and you see it's 13 feet around, it's got quite a stature to it. But as far as plantings go, there's a lot of little niche plantings on campus, and things that, little venues we've kind of created around campus that are just for comfort but also asthetically pleasing. I think of things like the horse on West Circle Road and the planting of the native blue stem grasses that grow in the Hempstead Plains, which is what Hofstra was built on, so this is one of the native grasses, and the horse is kind of grazing in the grass, it's made out of hofseshoes, a thousand horseshoes that make up this piece of sculpture, and that's also a good part of the arboretum as well is the sculpture. Man and women's art work as well as mother nature's. The best time to plant is probably the fall for woody plants, trees and shrubs. Spring is also good for a little bit more tender things, things that you wanna get a jump on and have them make a good set of roots before they go into the winter. Now we're looking at today where it could get down into the 20's. You probably don't want to be planting when the ground starts getting hard, so fall is a good time as I said for the woody plants, and mostly for here on campus when you're looking to fill a spot with a plant, whether it be for a building and you need a lot of plants or you just need a replacement plant for something that has died or you want to replace or redo the specific landscape, anytime you can get that plant is really the right time to plant it. Plants these days come in pots as opposed to the old days they used to be in fields and you had to ball and bulap them, and it could only be done at a certain time of the year. Nowadays we have everything from trees and shrubs down to small perennials and grasses and all, they're all in plastic pots, so if you can find them, you can plant them. As long as the ground isn't frozen you're all right. The conifers on campus probably come to life in the winter time, particularly when it's snowing out. And our pinetum which is a collection of 110 different kinds of conifers, and when I say conifers I mean the angiosperms, it's the pines, the spruces, the larches and the firs, you know the Christmas trees and the everygreens. But that is probably one of the biggest attraction. Another thing in the coming months is the Witchhazels which bloom at an odd time of year, most people would think you walk it by in February, and we have dozens of them on campus now. They come out in full bloom in February, you get a mild week or two in February, and they come into bloom. They have a good fragrance to them as well, so those are really nice. There's a couple of edgeworthia plants that also, very fragrant, yellow flowers, they bloom late Februarly early March. There helebores are also called Christmas rose or Lenten rose because they bloom between Christmas and Easter and so these things come out in the middle of the snow they're in full bloom, so it's pretty cool. One of the big features at Hofstra, because we are Dutch, we do a lot of tulips, I thnk that's something that we look forward to every spring. In April come out the daffodils and we probably have 250-300,000 daffodils that over the years we've planted. We might plant 8-10,000 a year, but the daffodils come back year to year so these things in April, even in late March sometimes you can look forward to thousands of daffodils. But then the tulips come into bloom, and there's so many different colors and so many different varieties and they're in little pockets thoughout campus, that that's certainly something to look forward to. Sampler garden, which is our collection of the tulips, there's about 150 different varieties that'll all be labeled, there'll be a brochure and a sign for them, and it's between the south side of Dempster and the north side of the Dean Law Library. They're planted out this time of year and then in the spring they come up, so last week in April first week in May, you can go there with the brochure and mark off the red one that you like or the parrot tulip that you like or the French tulip or the lily-flowering tulip. So it's an education in all the different kinds of tulips from species and the early ones right up until the late blooming Mayflowering tulips. So you can see what you like and it's something to consider planting yourself in your own home and you would know the names of what you like and then you'd be a little more educated on what to ask for and what to look for when you go shopping the following fall.