The staff of the Arboretum has also worked to honor Olmsted’s vision of the space as an educational and cutting-edge locale. The Arboretum utilizes the most advanced watering and soil enhancement techniques, visibly tags and tracks 15,000 plants, and recently released an iPhone app that allows visitors to do their own research.

“Visitors and our staff once just had to make their best guess about plotting where plants were,” Hetman says. “All of our plants are now ‘globally located.’ On our web app, you can now track every plant that we have here instantly. This is where things are going…. It’s improving how we do our jobs and allows visitors to find our plants.” Geese waddle alongside the Arboretum’s ponds as I download the web app and find my way to a few of the highlighted plants of the month. By using modern science to honor his vision of the garden as a place for education and engagement with the specimens, the Arnold Arboretum has found a way to preserve its scientific viability without undermining Olmsted’s original aesthetic.

THE SPOILS OF THE SOIL

The theme of technology-as-preservation continues to come up in my interviews and encounters with landscape restoration. I stand outside of Johnston Gate and watch as two property maintenance workers from Harvard Campus Services organize the shovels, spades, and levelers that rest against the brick wall next to the gate. I’m meeting Eric T. Fleisher, an environmental consultant who developed Harvard’s organic soil system. Before long, Fleisher drives up in a red Campus Services pick-up, white bags of soil bouncing in the bed of the truck. Dressed in a beige blazer, Fleisher’s style couldn’t be more different from that of his team. Yet he is down in the soil with them, mixing in his product while the group works on steadying the baby oak they have just dropped into place. Fleisher emerges from the pit as one of the workers breaks open the bags of soil, fires up a parked backhoe loader, and begins moving the soil from the truck and into the pit.

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While a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design in 2007, Fleisher tested out his creation of a new a sustainable kind of soil that creates its own nitrogen in a one-acre parcel nearby Holden Chapel. The experiment was a success—landscapes all over campus soon adopted Fleisher’s soil. When new restorations happen, he watches over their implementation into the plots. “I’m up here one or two days a month and work on microbiology in terms of the soil’s health,” he says. “When we do a restoration, it’s important that we get the right soil in.” Fleisher is especially thrilled that the soil is entirely non-toxic and opens up the Yard and other green spaces on campus without any chemical concerns to students and visitors. “There’s less need for water or fertilizer…. We’re creating a closed-loop, high quality compost that goes into building these soils and spaces.” Thus, restoration can be progressive, as opposed to merely responsive. By injecting safe and sustainable practices into aesthetic reimagining, designers and scientists can both make a positive difference on their environments.

HELP  FROM  CHICAGO

The Johnston Gate restoration, like the arboretum’s scientific development, has theory at its core. Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for The Chicago Tribune, talks to me on the phone from his office early in the morning. A

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fixture at the Tribune since 1992, he led a Wintersession course as a Nieman Fellow last year on the 26 gates of Harvard Yard. Kamin was so interested in the gates that he edited and co-authored a collaborative book with his students and another teacher on their architectural history. Kamin’s presented his exploration during a talk at the Harvard Club of Chicago and sparked an unexpected $5,000 donation to fix Johnston Gate, which is named after native Chicagoan real estate entrepreneur Samuel Johnston, Class of 1855. “We looked at the gates, we looked at the design aesthetically, and we looked at the landscapes surrounding them, some of which are in less than ideal shape,” Kamin says. Johnston Gate was one of those that had fallen into a state of disrepair. The two trees that graced the entry until last week have been uprooted and replaced with new red oaks. Liriope, a purplish plant, will grace Fleisher’s soil closer to the ground. Kamin, audibly excited about the tree replacement and panel restoration, explains why the new replacement trees are fitting, given the initial intent of Johnston Gate. “The Gate is an entrance to the Yard, but it is also an extension of the Yard,”

“It doesn’t just create a border between the street and Harvard, but those little panels of greenery were meant to extend the Yard outward to the edge of the city, where town and gown meet.” Before the restoration, the trees by the gate were not displayed in a way that did justice to original intent of the landscape. “The hackberry trees were in these awful-looking dirt patches,” explains Kamin. “There was no sense of the Yard extending past the Gate.”

With Kamin and Fleisher providing both theory and scientific savoir faire, the Johnston Gate restoration appears poised to beautify and repurpose the panels so they reflect their former glory.