Five years ago out of debt for the first time in 50 years and with plenty of cash, my next step was to acquire 4 magnificent properties on a total of 15 acres in Upper Merion Township, PA (the area of my childhood) to go with one that had been mine for 43 years that had been George Washington's Headquarters in Dec of 1777 before moving on to Valley Forge. It had been the home of Robert Dechert who in 1948 had sponsored an Arnold Arboretum expedition to China to bring back a tree that had not lived in the Western Hemisphere for 10 million years. It was a dawn redwood or metasequoia. He was given one of the saplings as thanks. It now is the tallest tree in eastern Pennsylvania and has been one of the drivers of my obsessive collecting.
Overtaken with a hoarding disorder madness and finding the ultimate source in Watercrest Nurseries in Chester County, PA, over 1000 conifers over 12 feet tall have been installed on this land.
You will see that his charges are less than 5% of what a standard nurseryman would ask. That and some gifted Ecuadorian heavy machinery operators have enabled me to create 5 arboreta, one substantial, all within 3 miles of each other!
Basically from 1735 to 1778 Linnaeus had a hard time fitting in cyprus, chamaecyparis, cedar into his Systema Naturae. So it took DNA analysis of the last 10 years to finally get it right. Ned Friedman, head of the Arnold, tells me that his center's study of dendrology is 50 times more accretive than all the other institutions in North America combined! Wow. Rare to find Harvard guys bragging but he was right!!!
If you ever find yourself near the Delaware Valley, it would make me happy to give you a tour.
My great challenge now is irrigation as 30 days in a row of 90 degrees heat will kill this collection off as it did for 10% of my plants last Summer. Global warming is horrible personally for me. We really are in trouble.
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