Everybody who wants to know about our ability to grow food in the next 100 years should read a very interesting blog on the Shelter Wood Plants website entitled: Exploring North America’s Oldest Food Forest. A truly magical place in the suburbs of Philadelphia, now subdivided into parking lots and overgrown wooded areas, was once America’s number 1 agroforestry farm harboring an abundance of walnut, persimmons, pawpaw, hazelnut, hickories and other trees. John Hersey and J. Russell Smith, the place’s creators held competitions among farmers to submit the most outstanding examples of their tree crops, and so were able to crowdsource the best genetics from across the Eastern Seaboard and propagate a group of hardy cultivars still standing.

One of the most revered trees in history is the Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus Libani), native to the mountains of Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. According to the Scriptures, King Solomon used cedar wood for the temple in Jerusalem, and the Phoenicians built ships with cedar wood to support their trade along the Mediterranean coast.

The Cedar of Lebanon is a large evergreen with irregular broad-spreading horizontal branches. When young, the tree is more cone shaped but then flattens with age. On the shorter branches of the tree small rigid needles grow in dense clusters while on the longer shoots the needles are scattered along the branches. The trunk of young trees is covered with smooth, dark-gray bark while on older trees the bark becomes brown, fissured, and scaly. Large, barrel-shaped cones are usually light green when they first appear on the tree and become grayish brown in the second year.

The Marquand Park arboretum currently has two cedars of Lebanon in its collection. A younger cedar can be spotted on the left side of the path running east from the parking lot towards the wisteria. It was donated by the Princeton Nursery in 1971. The other cedar blends into a row of evergreens along the park’s southern edge and is located close to a small gate towards Guernsey Hall. The second cedar is a much older tree and, we believe, one of the park’s originals. Many rare trees were introduced into the park during its early existence, but most died and cannot be found in later descriptions or inventories. However, this older cedar of Lebanon is consistently mentioned throughout the park’s history. It was acquired by Richard Stockton Field as a small tree around 18421 and we can trace its growth, struggles for survival, and uninterrupted presence in the park over almost two centuries.

In an 1858 article, Visits to Country Places 2, a cedar of Lebanon on Richard Field’s estate was called a stubborn foreigner growing as rapidly as a white willow and able to withstand harsh winters. The nature of the soil – yellow loam on a subsoil of gravel – was mentioned as one of the reasons the tree was doing so well. Another article in the same year entitled: Encouragement for Young Planters 3 described the same tree as loaded with thousands of cones which would mature in 1859. For dating the tree this is an interesting observation because a cedar of Lebanon must be at least twenty years old before bearing fruit; thus, establishing the age of the tree around 1835 – 1838. The tree became so well known that Henry Winthrop Sargent decided to include an illustration of the cedar in his expanded edition of A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening by Andrew J. Downing (1859). By this time the tree was 36 feet high but had suffered some browning in the harsh winter of 1855-1856 4.

In 1867, a very busy Judge Field finally wrote an eagerly anticipated article on his beloved pinetum and had the following observations on the Cedar of Lebanon:

My largest specimen [cedar of Lebanon] is now upwards of forty feet high and has borne cones for several years. It suffers more or less from the cold every winter. It is too tender for our climate, and never can become here what it is in England and France. It is besides very slow in its growth, and cannot be recommended for general cultivation. 5

Richard Field also noted that Henry Winthrop Sargent had admired his cedar during a visit to the arboretum in 1858.

Josiah Hoopes included an abbreviated version of Fields’s pinetum in The Book on Evergreens published in 1868. Hoopes was far more optimistic about the cedar’s hardiness than Judge Field recommending it without reserve given the proper care and cultivation. Hoopes optimism is not surprising. After all he was a nurseryman and had to make a living selling trees to a wealthy clientele 6. In 1870, Judge Field died, and the estate was sold to Susan Dod Brown. The winter of 1871- 1872 was quite severe and many evergreens in the arboretum died or were severely damaged. However, a report on the arboretum entitled: The Winter at Princeton, presumably by the son of Susan Dob Brown, noted that the Cedrus Libani remained uninjured. 7

Shortly after the estate was sold again in 1887 to Allan Marquand, Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arnold Arboretum described the tree as “fifty-four feet high with a trunk girth, one foot above the ground, of seven feet and two inches, and a spread of branches of thirty-three feet.” According to Mr. Sargent, this growth was not remarkable for the age of the tree and mostly could be blamed on the less than ideal climate for the tree.8 Sargent’s measurements were repeated in an article in American Forestry by George Nash in 1913 9.

The tree is listed by Eleanor Marquand in her tree inventory of the estate in 1917 and also in an unpublished manuscript written in 1937.10 Ms. Marquand noted that a Norway spruce had been planted near the cedar as a nurse tree to protect the frozen needles from the heat of the sun in the winter time. The tree should have been removed years ago and was the reason why the cedar did not have any branches on its south flank. A photograph dated around 1914 in the Historical Society of Princeton shows a lush cedar of Lebanon with a large Norway spruce located in the back. Then, James Esson in an article on Mrs. Marquand’s “Trees at Guernsey” in 1942 recorded the circumference of the trunk at 8 feet and 10 inches without providing any additional details about its condition 11.

In 1953, the estate became a public park, and when Dorothy Compton, a retired school teacher in Princeton, published the first of many articles on the outdoors in the Princeton Harold (1960), she chose Marquand Park as her first topic to write about. On her visit to the park she paid homage to the cedar calling it a “living museum piece”. She estimates its height at 60 feet but did not measure the trunk 12.

To date, the circumference of the cedar of Lebanon is 11 feet and 2 inches (measurement taken a foot from the ground to facilitate a comparison with previous measurements). Its height is estimated at 70 feet. Compared to cedars from the same era, the growth of the tree is indeed not remarkable. A cedar of Lebanon of similar age in the Tyler Arboretum in the Delaware valley has gown almost twice as large. Still it is miraculous the tree survived despite the many storms, cold winters, and other challenges it endured.

Realizing how difficult it was to grow cedars of Lebanon in our harsh climate, Charles Sprague Sargent hired Walter Siehe, a German botanist and seed collector who had observed in the mountains of Anatolia a subspecies of the cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus Libani stenocoma) with a better chance of survival. In 1902, Sargent obtained from him a large bag of cones with ripe seeds that successfully germinated and resulted in a large plantation of rapidly growing cedars at the Arnold arboretum 13. Many of the hardy cedars of Lebanon in this country are assumed to be descents of the Arnold arboretum trees including a beautiful specimen in the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia. The younger cedar planted in Marquand Park in 1971 is a hardy Cedar of Lebanon and maybe related to one of the Arnold Arboretum trees as well.

Andrew J. Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, revised and enlarge edition ( New York, 1859): p. 493

1. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, vol.13, 8, pp 357-8, 1858

2. Magazine of Horticulture, Botany and all Useful Discoveries and Improvements in Rural Affairs, 1858, vol 24, pp 454.

3. Andrew J. Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, revised and enlarge edition ( New York, 1859): fig 38.

4. Magazine of Horticulture, Botany and all Useful Discoveries and Improvements in Rural Affairs, 1867, vol 33, pp 41.

5. Josiah Hoopes, The book of Evergreens. A practical treatise on the Conifers, or cone-bearing plants. (New York, 1868): p. 422

6. The Gardener’s monthly and horticulturist, 1872, vol 14, p. 343

7. Garden and Forest; a Journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art and Forestry, 1889, vol 11, pp. 148-149

8. American Forestry, 1913, Vol 19, p. 392

9. Princeton University Library, Allan Marquand Collection.

10. The Horticultural Society of New York Monthly Bulletin, 1942, May, p. 6

11. Princeton Herald, 1960, vol 37, January 27.

12. Anthony S. Aielo and Michael S. Dosmann, The Quest for the Hardy Cedar-of-Lebanon, Arnoldia, 2007, Vol 65, No 1, pp. 26-35

In April of 1955, shortly after Marquand Park opened to the public, the Princeton Borough recognized the educational importance of the park’s tree collection and commissioned a map with 70 trees identified byJames Clark, the horticulturalist of Princeton University. The Borough also ordered corresponding plastic name tags which were placed on the trees by boy scouts of Princeton and Perms Neck (Princeton Herald, 32, 42, April 2, 1955).

The next mention of a tree map was in 1959 when the Garden club of Princeton commissioned Elizabeth Johnson Marshall, a local landscape architect, to design a map to be reproduced on a large metal plate placed at the entrance of the park near the parking lot. The public could buy a paper copy of the map and use it to locate and identify trees while walking in the park. A copy of this paper version still exists in the Princeton Public Library. It shows the names of trees written in at their location and, on the right side of the map, is also a key list of trees with grid locations (Princeton Herald, 37, 15, 18 November 18, 1959).

In 1968, Mary Marquand Hochschild, the daughter of Allan Marquand, published an article on trees and shrubs growing in the park entitled: A Calendar of Colors. In her article, she mentioned the creation of a new tree map by Dorothy Compton, a retired natural science teacher. We learn from her article that the map took many years to complete and could be purchased for a quarter at the Bainbridge House or the Junior Chamber of Commerce on Nassau street. Buying it was well worth the expense according to Mrs. Hochschild (Town Topic, Outdoor Living -Spring 1968, p. 2).

A revised edition of the Dorothy Compton map became part of a Marquand Park Foundation publication called A Guide to the Marquand Park. The guide was published in 1972 and dedicated to Mary Marquand Hochschild. The trees on the large fold-out map are represented by circles and color coded into three groups, 1) conifers and hollies; 2) deciduous trees; and 3) shrubs and masses of shrubs. The circles have numbers with each number representing a unique plant species. In the guide are descriptions of the tree species accompanied by illustrations of salient plant characteristics by Pamela Machold. The numbering system of the descriptions corresponds to the numbers on the map and also include grid locations to facilitate finding the trees. An attempt was made by Miss Compton to include most of the trees and shrubs in the park which gives the map a rather crowded appearance.

In 1989, A Guide to the Marquand Park was entirely revised by the Foundation. It includes a smaller fold-out map with fewer trees, and each tree species is represented on the map only once with a numbered circle. The map has arrows inviting visitors to follow a certain route through the park, locate a tree along the trail and on the map, and then look up the description of the tree by matching the number of the tree on the map with the number of the description in the guide. The descriptions include the same illustrations of the 1972 guide with added illustrations by Dorothy Geyer. In 2003, A Guide to Marquand Park was revised with a new numbering of the trees and some more details of planting beds along Lovers Lane added on the left side of the map. This guide with the same map was reprinted in 2004.

The number of tree maps of Marquand Park published over a period of about 50 years is truly remarkable and shows how important the park and its rich collection of trees was to the town and its visitors. They also show the struggle to create tree maps that could easily orient visitors to the tree they were interested in, make sure they looked at the right tree, and then provide them with meaningful information and visuals about its characteristics.

A next step in our map explorations will include careful comparisons of these maps so we may better understand how the park developed as a public park over time; specifically, it will be important to get a better idea of new trees that were planted, which trees survived, and which ones did not. For this project two important geocoded tree inventories completed by the Marquand Park Foundation in 2014 and 2018 will be available as well.

To explore the history of the trees on the property even further, a hand-drawn map by Eleanor Marquand of 1917, preserved in the Princeton University Library, and 19th century published accounts of the estate will provide additional details about tree species planted before the gardens of the estate became a public park.

Plans are underway for a Children’s Arboretum at Marquand Park

We welcome you and your ideas at a community meeting on

November 1, 2018 at 6:00 pm

Historical Society of Princeton at the Updike farm

354 Quaker Road, Princeton

Please, join. Your ideas are very important to us

marquandparkfoundation@gmail.com