Grounds Keepers

Jerry Brown already had his hands full. On the first day of spring, the to-do list for UVA’s lone arborist included:

Trimming a branch that was scraping against a window at Brown College, making it difficult for students to sleep.

Removing a tree that had fallen behind the Gooch/Dillard dorms, blocking a trail.

Marking with bright orange tape a half-dead pine that was leaning toward the concourse at Davenport Field, endangering baseball fans. A contractor was scheduled to take the tree down the next day.

All that would have to wait, though, until Brown dealt with the problem in front of him, which he discovered while he was walking through the heart of Central Grounds.

Brown, who has been at UVA 28 years, makes periodic rounds to keep an eye on the trees he knows better than anyone. As he walked near the Rotunda on a sun-splashed morning, he stopped in front of a tulip poplar he says is about 25 years old, with a low, broad canopy that makes it inviting and easy for children to climb. Brown didn’t like what he saw.

“This limb is dead,” he said, rapping his knuckles on a low-hanging branch heavy enough to hurt someone if it fell. Brown went to get his chainsaw.

For Brown and dozens of other front-line employees in the Department of Facilities Management, it’s all part of the mission, and important work. 

No mere afterthought, landscape is central to the idea of the University. As UVA’s Landscape Framework plan, updated in 2019, states:

“Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the University of Virginia’s ‘Academical Village’ has served as a model of American academic planning, demonstrating that the physical environment for living and learning is critical to the success of higher education.

“The site was designed to be a balance of building and landscape in a continuous layering of space from outside to inside.”

With that in mind, as the weather warmed and the landscape bloomed, Virginia Magazine stepped outside, ranging from the Lawn to the law school to meet some of the people charged with keeping up the landscape end of Jefferson’s bargain.

One man, 10,000 trees

“This is a pretty good office, I think,” Brown said as he walked across the green expanse between the chapel and the Rotunda.

Lean and sinewy, with a full gray beard and round wire-rimmed glasses, Brown wore a yellow Facilities Management T-shirt and a sun-protective hat. He did tree work locally for a private company before he was hired at UVA. There are trees on Grounds he’s climbed 20 times.

After recent shoulder surgery, though, he prefers to keep his feet on the ground. As of April, after the departure of a colleague, he was UVA’s only arborist. (The University was looking for another.)

There are roughly 10,000 trees on Grounds, a daunting number for one man. Not all trees get the same attention, however. Brown’s walk took him past some of the best-known and most closely cared-for trees on Grounds: the Pratt ginkgo, the large sycamores between the chapel and the Rotunda, and the holly trees on either side of the Rotunda’s north steps, among others. Brown performs a sort of triage, responding to calls and making his rounds to head off problems before they happen. That’s how he spotted the dead limb on the poplar near the Rotunda. He was able to lop it off himself, with both feet planted on terra firma, and feed the limb into a chipper hitched to his truck.

For jobs he can’t do himself, he relies on a network of local contractors who’ll come out on short notice.

“I just try to maintain what we have,” he said. “I don’t really have a system because I’m by myself and everybody wants something different from me.

“When I show up in the morning, I might have a plan for myself, but it might get turned around because a car hit a tree, or they just cut a bunch of brush the day before, and they didn’t tell me about it.”

The University is more proactive about tree maintenance than it was when Brown started in the mid-1990s, he said.

“It seemed like I was in here almost every night the wind blew, because a tree would fall. I had trees on cars and buildings all the time. It was just because they wouldn’t take a tree down until the last leaf fell off it.”

Trees don’t deteriorate to that point now, though there are other, ongoing—and self-imposed—hazards.

“Construction takes out more of my trees than anything,” Brown said. 

Weather and pests also take their toll. The emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle, has killed tens of millions of ash trees across the U.S. over the past 20 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The ash trees on UVA’s Lawn, which make up roughly two-thirds of the 60 trees there, are inoculated against the pest every other year. The inoculations are only a stopgap, though. As they succumb to old age, the ash trees on the Lawn will be replaced by other species.
For now, though, they are stately, many of them more than 100 years old. Brown planned to take a pass back through in a couple of weeks, to identify any that needed to be cleared of dead wood before thousands of people gather for Final Exercises.

The Lawn, weeds and all

The Lawn is Rich Hopkins’ turf.

Hopkins, UVA’s associate director of Grounds, says that the Lawn sees more football games annually than Scott Stadium. It takes a beating each spring during Final Exercises. And then summer heat adds its own stresses.

UVA once strived for a uniform look on the Lawn, sodding with fescue all over. These days, “we’re throwing everything at it,” using a mix of cool-season fescue and rye, and warm-season Bermuda, Hopkins said.

“We let the three of them decide where they want to live.”

The new approach is partly due to climate change. Fescue does not do well in summer heat, which has grown more extreme, and mixing grasses helps prevent brown patches on the Lawn. There are also cultural changes at work, however.  Many public institutions are moving away from the goal of having a uniform “turf” appearance, in favor of a more environmentally friendly form of management, said Travis Mawyer, a senior landscape supervisor. 

UVA doesn’t apply herbicides as much as it once did, on the Lawn or anywhere else. The current approach is less about bringing nature to heel than letting it do what it does.

“Not everything has to be so manicured,” said Helen Wilson (Arch ’89, ’95), a senior landscape architect. “With turf, we’re realizing diversity can actually be beautiful.”

Weeds are part of that diversity. UVA is certified as a Bee Campus, committed to pollinator-friendly practices. When Hopkins came to UVA 26 years ago, wild violets bloomed on the Lawn each spring, an explosion of purple. Previous lawn-care practices eliminated them. But the violets and other weeds have crept back as UVA allows them their place in the ecosystem, Hopkins said. 

“It’s a cultural change, and we’re trying to be responsible stewards of the landscape,” said Tim Spencer, landscape supervisor for North Grounds, and a 35-year employee. “But we need to educate our customers also, because things may not look exactly as they are used to seeing them, but it’s better for the environment, better for the bees, better for everything.”

The new frontier

Spencer’s domain is the sprawling North Grounds, home to the School of Law and the Darden School of Business. As he rode through one morning in March, contractors were putting the finishing touches on the new Forum Hotel Kimpton on the Darden grounds. It will have its own arboretum, which Spencer’s crew will maintain.

“It’s a little daunting,” he said. “But once you get used to it, it’s OK.”

Rare is the day that comes without some surprise. Spencer got an email informing him that sod had finally been installed in front of the Darden Bookstore, which had been under construction for more than a year.

“All of a sudden everybody’s gone, and they drop sod down and say, ‘Can you come and water this?’”

He’ll roll with it. As surprises go, it’s less painful than the one he got years ago, when he reached to pull weeds in a garden near Darden’s Flagler Courtyard and was bitten by a juvenile Northern Copperhead.

He wound up in the emergency room, with his arm swollen to his elbow.

Not far from the scene of that bite, Spencer came upon horticulture specialist Karl Quimby, tidying an area near a parking lot. At UVA, that person wielding a rake might well have a specialized degree. Quimby’s is from Penn State, where he majored in horticulture business and production, with a minor in arboriculture.

He came to UVA a year ago after working at the Denver Zoo, to be closer to family and to work in a less harsh climate and more diverse landscape.

“The palette is bigger here as far as plants go,” Quimby said. “There’s a couple dozen plants that like Denver. Here, it’s hundreds.”

It makes things more interesting. Quimby and Spencer are now trying to figure out the right mix for the mature garden near the courtyard. They recently removed some cherry trees that were shading out some ornamental plants there, opening up the space, and the possibilities.

“It’s a labor of love,” Spencer said.

The quiet work behind the walls

No place on Grounds is more highly cultivated, with a lighter touch, than the gardens behind the 10 Lawn pavilions.

Originally working gardens filled with quarters for enslaved people, smokehouses, vegetable patches and animal pens, the spaces were transformed into ornamental gardens in the late 19th century. Their current design dates from the 1950s, when the Garden Club of Virginia commissioned landscape architect Alden Hopkins to remake them.

Boxwoods are prominent throughout the gardens, and periwinkle is a common ground cover. Each has its own character, however. Some have meandering paths, while others are laid out geometrically. 

Semicircular benches in Garden X invite visitors to pause under a massive live oak. Garden VIII, next door, has upper, middle and lower tiers, connected by steps, with a pair of big magnolias at the rear. 

Grapevines cling to a fence in an arbor in the lower garden of Pavilion II. Across the Lawn, on a mid-April afternoon, azaleas bloom in the garden behind Pavilion I. Altogether the gardens contain 200 species of plants. A crew of two tends them, visiting each garden at least once a week.

“It’s challenging,” Mawyer said. “They’re all walled off, so we can’t get large equipment in there. The alleys are tight, so there’s nowhere to park trucks, so almost all the work is done by hand with hand pruners and smaller equipment. 

“We want to have higher-skilled, higher-quality workforce people doing the work.”

Roland Von der Muhll is one of those people. He has worked in the Pavilion Gardens for seven years, coming over from a Central Grounds crew. He began his landscaping career working in the Japanese garden of a Cornell University professor in the late 1990s. He also worked on vegetable farms and orchards.

On an early March afternoon, Von der Muhll and fellow gardener Chris Sutton worked in the garden behind Pavilion VII, the Colonnade Club, raking the walking path and pruning hydrangeas. 

A rentable space, this garden sees more use than any other. It’s framed by boxwoods. Many of the other gardens have fruit trees—apples, figs, grapes, peaches, pears, pomegranates, quinces—in their lower sections, closest to the Range. It’s symbolic, because the Range was once the site of dining halls, 
Mawyer said.

But for an enterprising few, it’s more than that. With something ripening at virtually all times throughout the spring, summer and fall, a person could eat their way across the gardens. Some do, Hopkins said.

“People have their favorite trees, and they know when to come around.”

The shelter provided by the walls makes the gardens their own microclimates, able to accommodate fruits and herbs that might not otherwise do well here. Their serpentine design also plays a part, Von der Muhll said. 

“Before there were greenhouses it was seen as a way to extend the growing season,” he said. “The curvature of the wall helps concentrate some radiant heat in the winter. That’s one of the reasons we’re able to have fig trees grow quite well in a number of gardens, where they might not survive so well out in the open wind somewhere else.”

Herbs such as rosemary and lavender thrive here as well.

A student of the history of the gardens, Von der Muhll is happy to share his knowledge with visitors, including students in a gardening class at Hereford College who learn about edible plants and the basics of pruning herbs and fruit trees.

For many, the gardens are simply a place to find a bit of serenity. For that reason, Mawyer said, gardeners work around students and other visitors, rather than the other way around. If a professor is holding a class or someone is picnicking, a worker scheduled to mow, for example, will find something else to do.

“We’re here for the students and the University. We try to do our work quietly and in the background as much as possible.”