Featured series 
Tag: Arnold Arboretum
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Nation & World
For this flower, it’s ready, set, launch
Harvard researchers used high-speed video to not only quantify how fast the filaments in mountain laurel flowers move, but how they target likely pollinators.
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Nation & World
How tall trees move sugars
A nine-member team of scientists, mostly from Harvard, has discovered that the hydraulic resistance to moving sugar-rich sap downward from the leaves of tall trees does not increase with the length of the tree as much as would be expected.
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Nation & World
Wielding chainsaws for science
A collaboration between the Arnold Arboretum and the U.S. Forest Service has the two organizations, which typically fight tree pests, rearing wood-boring beetles for science.
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Nation & World
At the Arboretum, a scientific swerve
A new species of truffle fungus, related to the delicacy prized in Southern Europe, was found at the Arboretum by an undergrad researcher.
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Nation & World
Between Cuba and Harvard, an uncommon garden
Historian Leida Fernandez-Prieto came to Cambridge to research a Cuban botanical garden with Harvard roots.
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Nation & World
Wild ambition at the Arboretum
The Arnold Arboretum is seeking some 400 different species around the world to add to collections.
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Nation & World
The roots of artistry
A clever exhibit at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, designed by Graduate School of Design Professor Rosetta Elkin, is bringing organic beauty out of the shadows. Her installation highlights the root system of a white poplar.
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Nation & World
Wine watcher
Harvard biologist Elizabeth Wolkovich is studying wine grape phenology and changes that might be needed in a warming world.
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Nation & World
A walk on the wild side
Scientist Peter Del Tredici collaborated with artist Teri Rueb on a mobile sound tour of Bussey Brook Meadow.
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Nation & World
Of books, trees, and knowledge
In the Hunnewell Building is the Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library, whose books, papers, and photographs ― stored near living collections of many of the same plants they describe ― draw scholars from around the world.
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Nation & World
Enemy of ash
The Gazette spoke with Arboretum officials about the recent arrival of the emerald ash borer.
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Nation & World
Beating the beetles
The Arnold Arboretum celebrates a successful collaboration with the U.S. government to prevent tree destruction by the invasive Asian longhorned beetle.
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Nation & World
You call this spring?
Despite this year’s long winter and slow-warming spring, Harvard experts say that climate change hasn’t gone on hiatus. Long-term evidence indicates that spring in Boston has begun coming weeks earlier over the last century. The Gazette spoke with Elizabeth Wolkovich, a recently appointed assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, about spring’s arrival, climate change,…
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Nation & World
At the Arboretum, an unquiet winter
Despite the dormant appearance of the trees, the Arnold Arboretum isn’t waiting for spring, as pruning, mowing, research, and planning continue to move ahead at full speed.
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Nation & World
Fresh approaches in teaching
Incorporating hands-on, experiential learning with rigorous classroom study is the sort of innovative approach that Harvard has striven to support in recent years, the sort that will play a central role in the Harvard Campaign for Arts and Sciences.
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Nation & World
The little old machine that could
In the high-tech laboratory at the Arnold Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building, amid an array of expensive, shiny new equipment, sits a 1931 microtome, a machine whose well-oiled parts keep cranking out slices of tissue just 10 micrometers wide, thin enough for light to penetrate and perfect for making slides to see the internal cellular…
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Nation & World
Planting for peace
Mexican artist Pedro Reyes visited the Arnold Arboretum to plant a hydrangea — using a shovel made from the metal of surrendered firearms — as part of his Palas por Pistolas (Shovels for Guns) program.
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Nation & World
A learning gap is filled with plants
With classes in plant morphology fading in universities across the country, an Arnold Arboretum short course is seeking to plug the hole, bringing in top botany graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for an intensive, two-week course.
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Nation & World
The climb of her life
Pamela Thompson, manager of adult education for the Arnold Arboretum and a breast cancer survivor, has been training since January to summit California’s 14,000-foot Mount Shasta, a climb through ice and snow that will require crampons and ice axes, to raise money and awareness for breast cancer prevention.
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Nation & World
Harvard-Asia: Ties deep and broad
Harvard President Drew Faust’s coming trip to South Korea and Hong Kong is framed against a long history of Harvard’s engagement with Asia’s many nations.
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Nation & World
Plant power
The world we live in was made possible by the precursors to plants, which crossed two evolutionary hurdles that transformed not only plant life, but also the Earth’s atmosphere and its once-barren continents, Arnold Arboretum Director William Friedman said in a recent lecture.
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Nation & World
In the Yard, a changing of the guard
The trees of Harvard Yard are in the midst of managed change as the once-ubiquitous elms continue their decades-long decline. Mixed species, dominated by American trees, replace them.
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Nation & World
Darwin takes flight
Arnold Arboretum Director William “Ned” Friedman and freshmen from his “Getting to Know Darwin” seminar went to the home of a pigeon fancier. “Darwin not only wrote about pigeons, he bred them himself,” Friedman said.
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Nation & World
An invasion of New England
While new species naturally expand to other places and sometimes disrupt the scene when they arrive, the pace of introduction of invasive species has picked up enormously over the past century and a half, stressing and transforming New England forests.
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Nation & World
No summer lull in learning
It was a busy summer of Harvard-supported learning on campus and in the neighboring communities.
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Nation & World
New branch of science
Scientists from the Arnold Arboretum and the University of Colorado are working to define for the first time the complete microbiome of a tree.
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Nation & World
Tree Mob takes over Arnold Arboretum
William (Ned) Friedman, director of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, took the whimsical concept of a flash mob — a social media–driven spontaneous gathering — and applied it to outreach to the public to encourage interaction with the scientists, curators, and horticulturalists who work on the Arboretum’s 265 acres. The next Tree Mob is July 25…
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Nation & World
Fertile minds
Wrapping up an arboretum internship, students from Norfolk County Agricultural High School visited Harvard Yard to learn about Harvard Landscape Services’ recent switch to organic methods and materials.
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Nation & World
The last dance between Venus and the sun
Before 2004, the most recent Venus transit occurred more than a century ago, in 1882, and was used to compute the distance from the Earth to the sun. On June 5, 2012, another Venus transit will occur. Scientists with NASA’s Kepler mission hope to discover Earth-like planets outside our solar system by searching for transits…
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Nation & World
Splendid acres
A thousand or so visitors wandered the colorful collections of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum on Lilac Sunday.
