Over the last few weeks of the semester, a gradual change comes over the campus. As the stress levels of students rise with looming final exams, the weather warms, the flowers bloom, and spring returns to Tufts.
This year, spring decided to come early, giving the members of the Class of 2010 a spectacular display of showy blooms to offset their black caps and gowns. The flowers and greenery festooned the campus early, allowing all students the opportunity to enjoy their color.
George Ellmore, associate professor of biology and director of the Environmental Studies program at Tufts, joined the Daily for a walk around campus to talk about the plants and trees that grow here.
Heat wave
"From [Feb.] 8 to April 15, every single day was above normal temperatures." Ellmore said. "That's six weeks of above-normal temperatures unbroken by any cold." This warm weather allowed the trees and shrubs around campus to bloom early.
The weather gave an advance on the growing season to many of the plants around campus but also caused others' time to be cut short. The mild heat wave that arrived around Spring Fling spelled the end for daffodils and other flowers trapped in particularly sunny areas.
"There's a bush on the other side of Ballou that has flowers that are dried on the bush," Ellmore said. "They look like a dried flower arrangement; they're crispy. That's how fast they dried in 85 degrees."
Sights and smells
Other flowers bloomed just long enough for their sweetness to permeate the air. Bushes called viburnum, which have a "popcorn ball" look due to their clusters of white flowers, released a fragrance which overwhelmed students passing by Tisch Library, where a cluster of these shrubs grow along the back wall closest to Eaton Hall.
Not all scents are created equal. Weeks before the viburnum bloomed, trees with blossoms that are also white flourished and emitted a foul stench. The culprit is known as a Bradford pear tree, innocuous looking now, with a fairly small stature and deep green leaves. Their appearance is why each spring, students and faculty alike must endure their odor.
"There's an epidemic of Bradford pears on campus," Ellmore said. "That is a favorite of landscapers because the crown shape is kind of narrow, so you can grow it next to a building. Also, Bradford pears tend not to break in the snow because the branches are angled … so the snow doesn't sit on them."
Although not all flowering trees are so pungent, many others are still chosen for their appearances, such as the redbud tree in front of Goddard Chapel, which has delicate branches and deep purple flowers.
"They planted this intentionally in front of Goddard, because they wanted the purple flowers to be offset against the grey flagstone of Goddard Chapel," Ellmore said.
Stoic trunks
The flowers around Tufts have mostly come and gone long before Commencement, but the large trees that make up most of the landscape are certainly here to stay. Elms, whose distinctive, broccoli-like shapes mark many spots uphill, are one of the trees that makes the landscape at Tufts so unique.
"Tufts is unusual in having a lot of big elm trees, most of which are extinct in Massachusetts because of the Dutch elm disease," Ellmore said. Dutch elm disease is a fungus that came to the United States in the 1900s and devastated the elm population across the country.
"It's the only tree on campus that looks as if someone hit it with a machine gun," Ellmore said. There are holes on the sides of all the elms on campus, and they do indeed look as though they were targets for a shooting range, but the holes have a purpose. It was Ellmore's laboratory here at Tufts that developed a kind of "cure" for the Dutch elm disease in the 1980s.
The holes are places where the trees have been injected with 80 gallons of a fungicide into their trunks, inoculating them just as a doctor would provide a vaccination. The "shot" for the elm trees takes about an hour and is renewed, like a booster shot, every few years.
The massive tree in the middle of the President's Lawn has long been a favorite spot for students to study or climb. Estimated to be over 100 years old, it is known commonly as a copper beech. "It's a European variety, but it's one that has that copper color to the leaves, and the trunk is very smooth and looks like an elephant's leg," Ellmore said.
While the large tree is a favorite among the students for its utility as a seat, it is a different tree that attracts the most questions. Next to Goddard Chapel is one of the trees that Ellmore claims gets some of the most attention on campus. It is gnarled and pitted with cave-like holes in its trunk and covered with an almost fuzzy orange bark.
"The common name for it is dawn redwood. It was believed to be extinct until it was re-discovered by Western science in the 1940s in China," Ellmore said.
Food for thought
There are many other plants far less rare and far more delicious that go utterly unnoticed on campus. Behind Barnum Hall on a small patchy piece of ground between the stones of the building and the massive backup generator lies a small feast. Here, small, edible weeds called shepherd's purse — a relative of broccoli and chickweed — grow.
"[Chickweed] comes up in February, and in the olden days, people would be eating nothing but carrots and potatoes left over from last September, and they could not wait for chickweed," Ellmore said.
However, Jumbos aren't the only ones eating the wildlife on campus. Small birds of all varieties live in the canopies of trees, accompanied by squirrels and red-tailed hawks. The "albino squirrel" is a particular Tufts favorite; it even has a group devoted to it on Facebook.com. But sometimes the fauna on campus don't get along.
"Every once in a while you see a squirrel skin on the grounds, if facilities hasn't picked it up," Ellmore said. The squirrel skin would be all that remains of a hawk's dinner. But the gruesome sight is usually packed away by the time that students are up.
"Most of the times [Ground Supervisor] John Vik's crew is here at seven in the morning, so they pick up that stuff before we notice it," Ellmore said. "That has really cleaned up the vermin on campus. Those hawks have done a wonderful job."
