The Brenton Arboretum: A Personal Story

corporation, whereby we could use about one half acre to plant these trees in rows. The agreement
with Iowa State University and LPDC specified that we would plant and maintain the trees, which
they would help us select and evaluate over a ten-year period. Jeff Iles, our board member, and
Harold Pellett, founder and head of LPDC, were our partners. My brother Bob and his son Bill,
officers of Brenton Brothers, Inc., graciously let us use their land for this evaluation.
Why did the arboretum enter the conifer research project? The answer is simple. Early on, it
seemed that the public might benefit from some sort of research or evaluation project at the
arboretum. The board agreed with the concept. I felt that tree evaluation and research could lead to
a public service (research is in our mission statement). It also could lead to our becoming a more
serious member of the larger botanical garden and arboretum community. We, in short, needed to
do serious evaluation that could be scientifically conducted with careful record keeping as to
provenance and growth characteristics. We could set ourselves apart in a tangible way from many
institutions if we carefully recorded and published what we found. With ISU and the LPDC as our
partners, we would (and did) maintain thorough records with careful evaluation and were able to
publish some of our findings. This is why we got into the research business: to be taken seriously as
an institution by our peers as well as to perform a public service.
Our board felt that conifer research was a good fit because of the scarcity of conifers
growing as natives in central Iowa, the health problems with some commonly used species (scotch
and red pine for example), and, in our opinion, the over reliance on several very common species
such as eastern white pine.
The ideas was that if we could
demonstrate over ten years the livability,
under harsh conditions, of certain littleused
conifer species, they might find their
way into general use. If we could publicize
this information, we could increase the
variety of conifers planted and decrease the
vulnerability of reliance on just a very few
species.
We decided to focus our conifer
research on the species in the table to the
right, which were the recommendations of
Jeff Iles and Harold Pellett.
The third significant change began
in the spring of 2002, when our educational
program began to take root. Education
about trees, the natural world, and its interconnectedness is part of our mission and central to what
we want to do. Nowhere is this more important than with young schoolchildren. With Anne
60