Yes, we're talking trees again, this time because of Nina Bassuk of Cornell University. Nina is the 2008 winner of the Scott Medal, given by the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College for, among other achievements, "promoting a greater love of nature and spreading the gospel of better planning and design." She received her medal and a $12,000 award on Saturday and gave a truly inspiring speech afterwards.
Nina is a horticulture professor whose passion and research focus is urban trees and what she calls "real world applications" of her studies. One of her most exciting innovations is "structural soil," a system of soil construction that is strong enough to support sidewalks but porous enough to allow street tree roots to grow. She showed some truly horrifying slides of city trees that toppled over in storms and you could see that the roots only had enough room to dig down about six inches. No wonder they fell!
Nina's "structural soil" has been used all over the world.
It's always fascinating to go back to childhood and figure out how people came to be what they are. In Nina's case, it was a childhood spent in New York City, focused not on trees or horticulture but on music. She played the flute and played around with plants as a hobby. That order was switched when she went to Cornell undergrad.
Nina decided to concentrate on urban trees because "they have the most impact on the most people." Just how do you get trees to grow in difficult conditions? "Cities are pretty tough environments for trees to grow in. They're not like Swarthmore," she said.
City trees really suffer. They get bumped by mowers, utility trucks, cars. They get humiliated by dogs, sprayed by salt, stabbed and suffocated in their tiny, sometimes fenced-in pits and constricted and stunted by compacted soil.
Nina calls those too-small, compacted tree pits "coffins." I will never look at another street tree the same way.
The good news is Nina's "structural soil" - a combination of crushed gravel and rich organic soil - is the antidote to all of the problems I've listed. "This does work," she said, showing slide after slide of the elm, pear and palm trees thriving in her soil combination.
This is a person with what she calls a "geek-like passion" for horticulture and trees. I think her award should've been far more than $12,000! She's sort of like those MasterCard ads: priceless.
In the photo above, Nina (left) has just asked her daughter Sophie if she'd like to see her mother's medal. (The Scott Medal was designed by Walker Hancock, who did the dramatic WWII memorial sculpture inside 30th Street Station, and was originally solid gold but hasn't been since 1970.)
Sophie got right down to business. "I want to see the check," she joked. "It's going right into my college tuition fund."
