About William Bryant Logan, Founder, Urban Arborists & Visiting Professor, Pratt Institute
William Bryant Logan founded Urban Arborists, a New York City-based arboricultural firm whose aim is to revivify the relationship between people and trees, at every scale. The firm cares for trees that include a 140-foot-tall tulip tree in the Bronx and entire woodlands of garden cemeteries, as well as city parks like Madison Square Park, Battery Park, and Union Square Park. It managed the installation and is responsible for the training and care of many formal tree gardens, including the plaza of aerial hedges and pollards in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The company also helps to establish, maintain, and renew tree collections planted in difficult urban situations, including the High Line, the high terraces of the new Google building, and The Spiral. Urban Arborists has planted more than 7,000 trees in the city of New York. Logan is a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute’s new MLA program. He has taught pruning and tree identification, as well as tree risk assessment, for more than 20 years at the New York Botanical Garden. He is a visiting professor of writing at Sarah Lawrence College and has taught and lecture around the world at botanical gardens and conferences. Writing is his passion. His most recent book, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees won 2021 John Burroughs Medal. Oak: The Frame of Civilization was featured on CBS Sunday Morning. Air; The Restless Shaper of the World led to a NY Daily News feature in which we took microphotos of the air at sites around New York City. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth was the basis of Dirt The Movie, which showed at the Sundance Film Festival. All of Logan’s writing is about the relationship between people and the world around us: What is it, what was it, and what might it come to be.
8:45A | Living with Great Trees
Trees are not like people. We have 68 organs. They have three. We get old and die. Trees get old and just get older. As a saying in Europe goes, “An oak is 300 years growing, 300 years living, and 300 years dying.” The period of growing downward, getting smaller is an important period of a tree’s life. We are now learning how to care for and to preserve trees in this third stage of their lives. The talk will profile four of New York City’s oldest trees, trees that we at Urban Arborists have cared for during the last three decades. One is the Spuyten Duyvil tulip tree, which is at least 325 years old. The others are English elms. One at Washington Square Park is virtually intact, while two at Madison Square Park have required ingenuity to preserve them despite many structural issues. We will review our work with these trees and look at how what we have learned might help enrich our knowledge of how to live and work with older trees.
