Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University
Where is the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University?
When was the Arnold Arboretum founded?
What plants are part of the Arnold Arboretum’s collection?
How many living plants does the Arnold Arboretum have?
Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, major botanical research center in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Founded in 1872, it is the oldest public arboretum in North America. It has about 16,000 living plants and is known for its collection of temperate woody flora. The arboretum has been a national historic landmark since 1965. It is supervised by the provost of Harvard University.
History
The arboretum was founded on land donated to Harvard College in the mid-1800s by Benjamin Bussey, a Boston businessman. It was named for James Arnold, a merchant with a deep interest in horticulture and agriculture whose financial endowment helped establish the arboretum. Soon after its founding the arboretum organized numerous expeditions and campaigns for plant exploration in the United States and around the world, including in China, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Efforts to breed cultivars began in the 1950s. The arboretum’s greenhouses, known as the Dana Greenhouses, were constructed in 1962. The Weld Hill Research Building, a research facility with laboratories and greenhouses, opened in 2011.
Plant collections
The arboretum houses about 65 maple species, with such varieties as the paperbark maple, the silver maple, the Japanese maple and its cultivars, and the three-flowered maple. More than 200 species of conifers, including the golden larch, the Colorado blue spruce, the Japanese black pine, and the Korean plum-yew, are also at the arboretum. There is a range of dwarfed (bonsai and penjing) deciduous and evergreen trees, with some specimens up to 275 years old. The arboretum’s collection also includes Oriental cherries, forsythias, lilacs, honeysuckles, oaks, and magnolias.
- Date:
- 1872 - present
The Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum, located at the Harvard University Herbaria in Cambridge, maintains about 1.5 million reference specimens, principally from southeastern and eastern Asia. Its seed herbarium has more than 2,000 specimens. The arboretum has a robust library and archive collection and publishes a quarterly magazine, Arnoldia.