Bill Logan - Bayard Cutting Arboretum

Bill Logan has spent the last five decades living with trees, as a writer, arborist, and teacher. He is founder and president of Urban Arborists in Brooklyn, NY. His firm cares for the grounds of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has planned, planted, and cares for numerous landscapes and gardens at historic properties and urban parks. Logan lectures across the country about the relationship between people and trees. He won the True Professional of Arboriculture award from the International Society of Arboriculture and the Senior Scholar award from NY State Arborists. His most recent book, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees, was awarded the 2021 John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing. His essay The Things Trees Know was excerpted from Sprout Lands and published in Orion and won the 2020 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. Logan’s earlier books are Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, and Air: The Restless Shaper of the World.Dirt inspired an award-winning documentary shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Oak was featured on CBS Sunday Morning. Logan has written for the NY Times, Orion, Emergence, Natural History, House Beautiful, House & Garden, and many other publications, winning numerous Quill and Trowel Awards from the Garden Writers of America. He is on faculty at the New York Botanical Garden, and has taught poetry in the NY City schools and nature writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

1:30P | Oak and Us: From the Ice Age to the Urban Forest
The centerpiece of Frederick Law Olmsted’s design for the William Bayard Cutting estate is the oak park that fronts the mansion. A homage to the great English tradition of oak forests and plantations, the oak park was meant to associate the landowner with that illustrious past, but it was also an assertion about the centrality of oaks to landscapes around temperate regions. Bayard Cutting’s oak park did not center on English oaks, but on oaks native to the United States. Hundreds of oak species exist around the world in a wide variety of climates. Because they are able to adapt quickly, as our climate changes, oaks are changing as well. Olmsted intuited that the genus might be become central to our urban forests. Our task now – one that the arboretum has embraced – is to find out what our once and future oak forests will look like. Bill will discuss the changing character of that crucial and intimate relationship, from the Ice Age to the urban forest.

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1:30P | Oak and Us: From the Ice Age to the Urban Forest