If you’ve walked past the Arnold Arboretum’s Hunnewell Building recently you may have noticed a new rock with a plaque in front of a dawn redwood tree. That plaque honors Hu Xiansu, the father of modern Chinese botany who identified the dawn redwood. There is much more to Xiansu’s story. The following was published on the Arnold Arboretum’s website in July 2026, and has been republished here with the Arboretum’s permission: On December 2, 2025,…
Posts tagged as “Arnold Arboretum”
The Arnold Arboretum said it does not object to the size, density or amount of units of a new proposal that abuts its property—but it wants the developer to alter the physical design to reduce shadows and visual impact to the Arboretum. The proposal is to raze the existing Poor Clare Nuns Monastery at 920 Centre St., and replace it with a new building for 158 residential units. This proposal is different than the previous…
In July, the Arnold Arboretum’s landscape comes alive with the broad, luminous blooms of temperate hydrangeas—plants that reward close observation, particularly when encountered in their diversity. Across the Arboretum’s living collections, 183 hydrangeas representing 79 accessions—comprising 15 species and many varieties and cultivars—offer a vivid panorama of form, texture, and color as summer takes hold. Each species tells its own story in the landscape. Bigleaf hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) represents perhaps the most familiar species in American gardens, offering an array of mophead and lacecap flowers whose colors shift with soil chemistry—from saturated blues to pinks…
Along the northwestern base of Hemlock Hill at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a broad sweep of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) grows where the woodland slopes down to meet the historic carriage road. Each June, in the filtered light beneath the hemlocks, these massed plantings offer one of the Arboretum’s most spectacular seasonal spectacles. A 22-acre woodland shaped by storm, succession, and scientific study, Hemlock Hill offers a rich diversity of shade-loving plants along…
Get your hands dirty later this month for the annual Earth Day Clean Up at the Bussey Brook Meadow in the Arnold Arboretum. The focus will be on removing invasive plants within the woodland areas adjacent to the Blackwell Footpath and South Street to improve the ecology of those areas and build previous volunteer efforts. Volunteers will also pick up litter between Bussey Brook and the train tracks, as well as along the South Street…
Everyone has heard of the “bee’s knees.” But what about the “tree’s knees?” Yes, just like bees, some trees have knees. The bald cypress, Taxodium distichum, native to the southeastern United States, can have spectacular knees. Like the golden larch (Pseudolarix amabilis), dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), all larch species (Larix spp.), and the Chinese swamp cypress (Glyptostroboides pensilis), the bald cypress, as the common name would suggest, is a deciduous conifer, with magnificent copper to bronze colors…
JamaicaPlainNews.com came across a beautiful coyote in the Arnold Arboretum who decided to howl (and bark) at an ambulance heard in the background. The howling begins around the :42 mark. The coyote was between the Hunnewell Building and Leventritt Garden around 5:30 pm on Feb. 18.
Last week’s winter storm offered a vivid reminder of New England’s climate in motion: nearly 18 inches of snow fell at the Arnold Arboretum between January 25 and 26—more than Boston received in each of the past two winters in their entirety. For the Arnold Arboretum, storms like this are more than remarkable weather events; they are data points in a long continuum of observation that extends nearly a century. Weather has long been one…
