James Biddle was taking notes on American University’s arboretum before he even became its arboretum manager.
Walking across campus to interview for the job last October, he admired how plants added depth and prevented runoff on the field between the McKinley Building and the Hall of Science. The trees also looked healthy despite being vulnerable to diseases and pests, he said.
“‘Okay, this place has people looking after it,’” he recalled thinking.
Four months after his interview, Biddle joined the team of people looking after AU’s arboretum. As AU’s second-ever arboretum manager, he said he coordinates with AU’s groundskeepers to maintain the arboretum. He said he has continued walking through AU’s nature, taking notes on the more than 5,000 trees that make the campus an arboretum after Mike Mastrota, AU’s first arboretum manager, retired in May.
As Biddle walks the campus grounds, he doesn’t just observe, he said. He looks out for problems, like gaps in leaves and issues with the shapes of tree trunks. He stops to inspect any issues he thinks need attention, too.
His upkeep includes the outer edges of campus, like the patch of forestry behind the Don Myers Technology and Innovation Building, he said. He makes sure those trees and plants are healthy because they’re visible to people off-campus, too.
“We have to really watch out for the health of those trees and shrubs, because the outside community? That’s what they’re looking at every single day,” he said.
Those trees and shrubs are part of AU’s arboretum. Mastrota, the former arboretum manager, said everything on campus is, from the School of International Service building, to AU President Jonathan Alger’s house, to the new Meltzer Center, to the fountain outside the Kreeger building.
An arboretum is a collection of trees and woody plants that an organization grows and maintains, according to the “About ArbNet” web page of ArbNet, an organization that accredits and supports arboreta.
Biddle said he knows his predecessors have maintained the arboretum well because of how healthy the trees and plants are.
“It’s very clear that a ton of care and effort was spent on every inch of campus; all the way from property line to property line,” he said. “So for me, that’s saying, ‘Okay I have a big legacy to pick up on, and how can I do that in the best way?’”
Jerry Gager, the university architect, planted the seeds of the arboretum when he hired Mastrota as a landscape architect in 1996, Mastrota wrote in a message to AWOL. Back then, the campus wasn’t an arboretum — it didn’t have as much greenery, and the buildings’ exteriors needed to be replaced. His job was to improve the aesthetics.
“And so we kind of started from scratch, just trying to make it look better,” Mastrota said.
Mastrota said he started small planting enhancement projects around campus along with David Wilson, the grounds zone supervisor; Stephanie DeStefano, the grounds operations manager; Paul Davis, a landscape architect and Mark Feist, who was the assistant director of facilities operations until January 2022, according to his LinkedIn page. They also added seating areas near the Kay Spiritual Life Center and made existing benches more comfortable, Mastrota said.
Mastrota wrote in a follow-up message to AWOL that he and Davis were responsible for the design work but always got input from Feist, Wilson, DeStefano and other groundskeepers.
In 2000, then-AU President Ben Ladner hosted a competition where community members submitted ideas to improve campus life. A Nov. 28, 2000, issue of AU’s staff-run newspaper, American Weekly, encouraged people to submit their ideas, according to an archive of the issue in AU’s Archives and Special Collections. Mastrota said he and three other people in the facilities management department pitched turning the campus into an arboretum.
AU accepted the pitch, according to an article in the archived April 24, 2001, issue of American Weekly. But then Mastrota and his peers had to figure out how to turn the idea into a reality, he said.
Mastrota said they wanted ArbNet to accredit the arboretum. So they took steps to earn that recognition. ArbNet is the only organization to accredit arboreta internationally, according to its accreditation web page.
Today, AU is a level two arboretum, according to ArbNet’s web page for the university. Level two accreditation requires having an arboretum plan, a governing group, a collections policy, public education programs, at least one public tree-related event per year, at least 100 species of trees or other woody plants and an arboretum manager, according to Arbnet’s web page for level two accreditation.
AU has 500 species and varieties of woody plants, according to the arboretum’s web page, meeting one of those requirements. The university meets the education requirement by hosting events like Campus Beautification Day and having classes engage with the arboretum, Mastrota said.
Campus Beautification Day, where community members tend to AU’s nature together, was originally a day for community building, Mastrota said. It gives students, faculty, neighbors and alumni an opportunity to work together and beautify the campus.
Campus groups like the Beekeeping Society at AU and the Community Garden at AU, along with athletics teams and university presidents, have participated inCampus Beautification Day, Mastrota said. Biddle said it’s a day where people can engage with the arboretum so they can recognize the importance of it.
“I think there’s a sense of shared ownership and a sense of connection to the land, which is something that I think a lot of people are craving, whether or not they’re studying plants or natural sciences,” Biddle said.
AU also meets the level two criteria by hosting tours and presentations of the arboretum and by publishing a database of every tree on AU’s arboretum web page, Mastrota said.
Biddle said trees that people recently planted, like those around the Meltzer Center, aren’t yet included in the database. But he’s working on updating that database by recounting and remeasuring each tree.
To meet the last requirement before becoming an official arboretum, Mastrota became an arboretum manager.
In his new position, Mastrota helped people learn about the arboretum and worked with AU’s Office of Development to foster donations through the arboretum, he said. Fundraising, he said, has been a goal of the arboretum since its conception.
The labyrinth near the Kay Spiritual Life Center, the Marabar sculpture near the Kogod School of Business, the cherry trees dotted around campus and the university president’s house are all gifts that AU got through the arboretum, Mastrota said.
Off-campus, the Airlie Foundation gifted its Virginia farm to AU because of the arboretum, Mastrota said. The nature around AU showed the foundation that AU is sustainable.
“They liked the fact that AU was green,” he said.
Mastrota said he and others also wanted the arboretum to attract students.
Parents, neighbors and prospective students told Mastrota they like how much nature AU has, he said. People from the admissions and human resources offices also told him they like the nature because it attracts people to the school.
But the feedback wasn’t always positive. Mastrota said he remembers people initially complaining that the university was spending money on trees.
“They didn’t see the long-term vision of what this is going to do once we got done, and that’s changed over time,” he said.
Before long, people started calling Mastrota to suggest adding more nature to different parts of campus, he said.
“‘Oh, this used to look so bad before,’” Mastrota said, referring to how he saw campus. “Now, I see all these students enjoying it. That’s cool.”
Today, students show their appreciation for the arboretum on the social media platform YikYak, Biddle said. He said he’s seen appreciation posts for the groundskeeping staff on the platform. Some students post photos of their favorite trees on campus, too, he said.
Biddle wants to continue engaging community members in the arboretum, he said. He’s talked with Mike Alonzo, an environmental science associate professor at AU researching how trees can cool off urban areas, and said AU’s campus might be able to help with Alonzo’s research.
Biddle is also interested in collaborating with the Urban Forestry Division of the district’s Department of Transportation, he said. He said the department’s staff members research different topics like pest monitoring and urban tree survival.
Students may not know how relevant the landscaping is to their studies, Biddle said, but they know what a beautiful day on campus looks and feels like.
This article was originally published in Issue 38 of AWOL’s magazine as “Community Profile: Arboretum Managers” on April 15. Read the issue here.
Edited by Ben Austin, Kate Kessler, Ava Ramsdale, Clair Sapilewski and Will Sytsma.
