Featured series 
Tag: William Friedman
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Nation & World
New species in an urban ecosystem (read: solar panel)
A new species of bacteria, one that makes its home on the relatively hot and dry surface of a solar panel, was discovered recently at the Arnold Arboretum, offering a lesson that nature’s reach extends even to the artificial.
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Nation & World
Was Darwin first? Kind of depends
Charles Darwin’s work arose in an era where many were thinking about the source of nature’s variety.
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Nation & World
Perfection in miniature
Time and knowledge may be the most powerful fertilizers for the Arnold Arboretum’s Bonsai and Penjing Collection, which houses 43 miniature — and ancient — trees.
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Nation & World
Arboretum gets a solar boost
The Weld Hill Solar Project, currently underway, is the Arnold Arboretum’s third and largest solar project and Harvard’s most ambitious sustainability initiative to date, with nearly 1,300 solar panels powering a 45,000-square-foot science laboratory and teaching facility in Roslindale.
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Nation & World
Seeing the forest for the trees
Novelist Richard Powers’ “The Overstory” features trees as key characters in an entwined tale of human life and our impact on the natural world. He will speak at the Arnold Arboretum and the Mahindra Humanities Center later this month.
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Nation & World
Design course opens students’ eyes to ‘plant blindness’
A course at the Graduate School of Design takes students from the classroom into Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, where plants come to life for these landscape architects.
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Nation & World
In plant tug-of-war, mom wins
Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum researchers examining how the battle of the sexes is waged in plants have found a maternal path to victory.
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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
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
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
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
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
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
Seeds of inspiration
An artist and curatorial associate at Arnold Arboretum fuses material she has gathered during her 25-year Harvard career into evocative works of art. Hardy Brown’s first solo exhibit at the Arboretum, “Ex Herbario: Recent Works by Susan Hardy Brown,” is now on view at the Hunnewell Visitor Center through Sept. 16.
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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
Splendid acres
A thousand or so visitors wandered the colorful collections of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum on Lilac Sunday.
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Nation & World
Clues on how flowering plants spread
Researchers at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum have highlighted female competition among plants, saying it is a new factor that could have driven the mystifying diversity of flowering plants.
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Nation & World
AAAS announces 15 Harvard fellows
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded 15 Harvard faculty members the distinction of being named an AAAS Fellow on Jan. 11.
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Nation & World
New Arboretum director hosts meet and greet
In his first month as the Arnold Arboretum’s new director, William Friedman is hosting two meet and greets and has established a Director’s Lecture Series.