Kenyon College Trees Have Roots Back to 1614

Kenyon College grounds manager Steve Vaden leads the Apple Valley Garden Club on a tour of its trees, with some dating back 300 to 400 years.  (Photo by Don Comis)

This northern red oak is one of Kenyon's senior trees, 300-to-400 years old.  (Photo by Don Comis)

I went on a tour of Kenyon College trees with the Apple Valley Garden Club on September 17.  It was a nice homecoming to my alma mater, but it also showed me more of what I missed seeing when I was there.  Apple Valley is a development in Howard, Ohio, about 5 miles from Gambier, where Kenyon is located.

I was especially surprised to realize I never saw an “upside down” tree that is a favorite of many people, even though it is located near Pierce Hall, where I ate meals three times a day for three years.

The tree is a European weeping beech tree.  Its branches all reach down so low to the ground that you can hardly see the trunk.  Only when you step over one of Kenyon’s old stone and chain fences and enter through a break in the branches do you see the wild tree trunk which has fantasy-like shapes, including one that looks like an elephant.

Sure enough the beech tree is carved with initials and professions of love, but I didn’t see any dates back to the sixties when I was there, when it was an all-male college.

I imagine it is a great place to relax or read a book!

This European weeping beech tree is so upside down that you can't see its trunks or branches from the outside.  (Photo by Don Comis)

Once inside, the tree reveals the fantastic shapes of its trunks and branches.  (Photo by Don Comis)

Grounds manager Steve Vaden led the tour, telling us that the oldest trees were in the 300 to 400 year old range and the tallest tree was about 170 feet high.   It didn’t take long for Vaden to show us examples of the oldest trees, such as a northern red oak next to one of the buildings.

Naturally having so many old trees can cause problems.  Vaden described the time one of the oldest trees fell in the part of the campus where the graduation ceremonies are held—the day before the ceremony.

Vaden said that Dave Heithaus, facilities manager of the Brown Family Environmental Center at Kenyon, will do a timeline of a big oak tree that had to be removed, by examining the rings on a slab saved from the felled tree.

That should be quite a timeline if the tree goes back to 1614 or 1714!

One of the ways the college earned its Arbor Day Foundation “Tree Campus USA”  is by setting a goal of always keeping at least a 14 percent tree canopy cover on campus.  Kenyon has thousands of trees, Vaden said.

The tree program is part of Kenyon’s overall commitment to sustainability.   We were reminded of one example as we arrived for lunch in Pierce Hall---Kenyon was a pioneer among colleges nationwide in serving locally grown food (40 percent of the food).

The tree tour made me think back to the trees just cut in my Apple Valley yard, the oldest of which only dated back to about 1955, when it was all farmland.   I was older than the two trees cut down and one that was trimmed.  I figured their ages by doing my own ring-counting.

A "Tree Campus USA" banner hangs over us as we have a meeting before having lunch in a new addition to Gothic Pierce Hall.  (Photo by Don Comis)