Sometimes I stand on the Academic Quad, and I try to count the oaks. What starts as an attempt to satisfy a quantitative curiosity inevitably becomes a more general opportunity for awe: I usually stall somewhere in the 20s, losing my place when I reflexively pause to think, This is a lot of trees.

These dignified oaks were the first trees I really noticed at Wellesley. In the fall, I walk under them with my eyes glued to the leaf-plastered pavement, the persistent thwack of earthbound acorns producing the soundtrack of a season. I can’t help but collect the leaves that call out to me. As a student, I would sometimes make bright blue cyanotype prints of their skeletal silhouettes, and now, I keep a folder of them in the filing cabinet next to my desk in Green Hall, where I work for the Alumnae Association.

When I walked on campus as a student, I was almost always walking to something—and was, very often, running late. These days, I almost always walk just to walk—or, to walk and, slowly, to think. Feelings about the landscape take root in a way they never quite did when I was a student. My friends, and some of my professors, even, are not on campus with me anymore. But the trees are.

Though it is one of 1,217 oak trees on campus, the white oak on the hill overlooking Severance Green is hard to miss. We’ve known each other for a while now, so I like to stop by to say hello. Predating the College’s founding in 1875, this particular tree is a presence and a witness. It presides over the green at about 75 feet tall, its crown approximately 150 feet in diameter at its broadest. It watched College Hall rise, and, from a barely safe distance, it watched College Hall burn. It faces crisscrossing paths central to campus, stands on the hill where generations have sat for class pictures, have sledded by on trays. In an environment otherwise defined by transience, it grows up and out and in place. The Sev Oak sees each one of us.

I was thinking about the Sev Oak when I pitched an essay about campus trees in a magazine brainstorming meeting last fall. Thus began a mast year for tree puns in the office and a yearlong excuse to visit my arboreal friend.

On a bright morning in December, I followed the sound of sawing to the shore of Lake Waban, leaned against one of so many oaks, and looked up.

I’d found the College arborists, Grant Perodeau and James Connors, trimming two trees next to the library. Grant worked from ground level, while James used a lift, markedly mechanical among the weathered branches. “It’s windy up there,” he said when he’d descended.

“We’ll just clean this up and then head over to the oak,” Grant told me. Usually, the Sev Oak gets pruned once a year before Commencement, but a branch had died over the summer. While Grant took his turn in the lift, I stood below with James, who pointed out a tulip tree across the green—the tallest tree on campus at about 110 feet, he said. Over the whir of Grant’s chainsaw, I asked about the cables supporting parts of the oak, and James said they’ve been there for at least 10 years. “It’s more of a precaution than anything else,” he said. “Did that branch that’s been there for 100-some odd years need it now? Hard to say, but better to be safe than sorry.”

The dead branch hit the ground. “Easy as that,” James said. “And most people would never know,” I responded. “Nope,” he replied as Grant lowered the lift. “But we’ll know.”

[supporting-images]

Grant walked back to join us, grass brittle underfoot. “Beautiful tree, eh?” he said. For a few seconds, nobody spoke, and we all looked. I don’t know what ran through the arborists’ minds in that quiet moment, but I thought about a description of the oak that I’d read in a 2004 report: “A superior placement of a superior tree.”

The oak’s deadwood wasn’t going far. In commercial tree care, every once in a while, a client might ask to keep wood from a downed tree, but most of the time, “You can’t get rid of the raw materials fast enough,” James said. At Wellesley, though, everything stays. Some wood is used at the firepits on campus, but most is made into mulch and returned to the grounds in springtime. I try to resist easy tree metaphors for growth (low-hanging fruit, if you will), but it isn’t even a metaphor to say that for the trees of Wellesley, the past nourishes the present and the future.

After chapel services one spring evening in 1877, Henry Fowle Durant proposed to the two established classes that the College celebrate an annual Tree Day.

“The boys, he said, planted an ivy just as they were leaving their Alma Mater,” an alum recounted in 1916’s Traditions of Wellesley. “How much better for the Wellesley girls, while still freshmen, to plant a tree, whose growth they could watch, as it watched theirs, all through the four college years, a tree in which, on every future visit, they would recognize a long acquainted friend,” Durant said.

As with so many of the Durants’ founding ideas for the College, it’s impossible to walk around campus now without seeing the legacy of this vision. Left and right are stones marking class trees—in the past, sometimes adopted (the Sev Oak is the class of 1920’s tree), but most of the time, planted by the class.

Today, class tree plantings represent one of the oldest continuing traditions at Wellesley, though the pageantry signature to Tree Day has been left behind in favor of a small ceremony during Family and Friends Weekend sophomore fall. The spade used on the very first Tree Day is the only item that the Wellesley College Archives takes out of storage (a custom-made, soil-streaked box) to “circulate”—once a year, every year, to plant another tree.

Grant and James—who’ve been at the College since 2014 and 2017, respectively—help with class tree plantings, of course, but they connect with the campus community in other, likely less expected ways, too. In recent years, they’ve worked with the Paulson Ecology of Place Initiative on several projects, including identifying and tapping a tree to make maple syrup on campus and supplying tree materials to make dyes and charcoal. It was through the art department that I first heard about Grant and James during my senior year, when my friend Mika Taga ’22 worked with salvaged campus wood for her studio art thesis. (She’d initially met Grant through the Paulson Initiative, too, while creating a sitting circle in the arboretum pine knoll as an intern.)

That winter day at the Sev Oak, before I left, I asked on a whim whether I could take a bit of the deadwood, thinking Mika and I could make something from it. Grant cut a chunk off the limb for me, and I carried it to my office, clutching it to me like an earthy-smelling toddler the whole walk back.

The next time I saw Grant and James, it was summer, and it was about a swing. The day’s sunshine made the importance of tree shade abundantly clear, and Suzanne Langridge, director of the Paulson Initiative, had invited me to join her for the installation of a swing made by psychology major Shreeya Lakkapragada ’26. (See “In the Swing of Things” on page 5.) While Grant and James worked on hanging the swing from a northern red oak near the L-wing entrance to the Science Complex, Suzanne told me more about the project.

Interested, in part, in studying the psychological benefits of swings for adults, Shreeya created two new swings for Wellesley’s campus, previously home to only one—the beloved chapel swing honoring Kathryn Wasserman Davis ’28, trustee emerita.

Shreeya has worked on the project from every possible angle: studying the history and engineering standards for swings with engineering faculty member Amy Banzaert, planning how to track usage and benefits, talking to higher-ups at the College for approval, making the swings in the art department with help from woodshop technician Andrew Kemp, scouting locations to hang them with Grant and James, and tapping countless other community members for support in their areas of expertise. (And the project is ongoing—this fall, Shreeya is developing programming related to the swings and creating even more of them.)

“I thought about tree rings and the ways that each generation of Wellesley students encircles those that came before.”

I called Shreeya while she was in India, where she grew up, over the summer. Even from across the world, her enthusiasm was infectious. She’s told me that for her, Wellesley College is home. That deep connection is reflected in the way she talks about the landscape, this project, and the community that helped make it happen. When I asked if she has a favorite tree on campus, she declined to answer—she didn’t want to be partial, having only been on campus for two academic years so far. “I think I’ll just know when I know,” Shreeya said.

Just before the fall semester started, Grant and James installed the second, wider swing. It hangs from 1906’s tree—an ash at the edge of Sev Green by Rhododendron Hollow. Watching James try it out, Grant and Suzanne joked about adding “swing testing” to the arborist job description.

When Shreeya got back to campus, we went to that swing. Side by side, we swung high enough that I felt just a little bit queasy for the rest of the afternoon. It was worth it, though, to look out at Sev Green—at the Sev Oak—from a new perspective, and to laugh together at a spot on campus where I felt sure I had never laughed like that before.

Around the same time, I finally had a chance to give Mika the wood that had been drying in my office all winter and spring. She stopped to visit me on campus on her way from Philadelphia, where she’d lived since graduation, to the Catskills. She hopes to have more time for woodworking living there than she did in the city. She also wants to start learning about forest management and credits Grant and James as inspiration.

Mika took me to the dump site where wood and other natural materials are stored until they return to campus, in one form or another. I took her to Shreeya’s swings, where there were already signs of use—dirt tracks in the grass from feet pushing off the ground and dragging along it to a stop. Mika admired the raw edge of the red cedar seats—made from a campus tree, over 100 years old, whose sister tree still stands near the ninth hole of the College’s golf course. I thought about tree rings and the ways that each generation of Wellesley students encircles those that came before.

When we got to my office and I handed Mika the wood, she smelled it and sighed. She hadn’t done any woodworking until our senior year. She told me that her reverence for wood, now foundational to her art practice, stems from the trees here. She described them as pillars of campus, and I agreed—a blueprint from which the College grew.

“I need your help with something,” I said. “Will you count the oak trees on the Academic Quad with me?”

Circling the quad together, we tallied about 70. Ten or so look like relatively recent plantings, including the class of 2013 and class of 2016’s trees. The rest are giants, reaching and bending around each other and the buildings in which we play out our daily lives at the College.

There are a total of 4,100 trees in the managed inventory on campus and 160 unique species. Grant and James both laughed when I asked whether their work is overwhelming. Above all, it’s a matter of perspective, they said, and managing long- and short-term risks. And it’s cyclical work, even when challenges arise (or when leaf cleanup seems never-ending).

Over the past year, I’ve asked a lot of people when they first noticed Wellesley’s trees—first really tuned in to them. Grant and James are always paying attention, though, and the first time we met, Grant told me that looking up is all it takes to find more work. “So, what stands out when you look around right now?” I asked one day this summer.

“I’ve been assigned this task and responsibility of caring for the trees, so I can’t help but look at them that way a lot of times,” James said, easily picking out two dead branches in the landscape behind me as examples. “But I see a lot of the beautiful stuff, too, you know?”

Grant agreed, adding, “I have an appreciation for the past people, past arborists and grounds crew, that have got this landscape to where it is today.”

Nothing lasts forever, but some things do last for a very long time. When I pass Shreeya’s swing on my way to visit the Sev Oak, sometimes it’s swaying gently. Maybe from the wind, maybe because somebody else was here, just before me, just a moment ago.