I wish that when I was a college freshman, a course like Harvard’s seminar called “Tree” had been part of the curriculum, because since I learned about the class last year, I’ve never looked at a tree quite the same way again.
It’s not a botany course, nor one for aspiring arborists – despite its name. A sentence from the syllabus for “Tree” hints at its core intention:
“Imagine a semester devoted to connecting two organisms,” it reads, “a person (you) and a tree (not you).”
And then it adds this: “The goal of this freshman seminar will be to initiate a personal and lifelong connection with ‘the other,’ the vast and variant organisms with which we share the planet.”
The creator of the class is the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, evolutionary biologist Ned Friedman, and he’s here today to tell us more about it—and about what we can each learn from making a connection to a tree.
Since 2011 Ned Friedman has been director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a 281-acre world-renown collection of woody plants founded some 150 years ago. In 2020 he created the curriculum for a new freshman seminar called “Tree,” and each fall since, about a dozen students join him on the adventure it promises. I’m so glad to welcome him to the program today to learn about some lessons the trees have to teach us.
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