Arboretum Journal

For the hundreds and thousands who call the arboretum their special place in the city of Madison to walk, bike, study or certainly learn genus and species of flora and fauna, it is known that its creation was nothing to take for granted.  Unlike most other cities in the country, Madison grew in a particular time and position and under a unique leadership among community leaders to become an abundantly green city.  The UW Arboretum itself, much like the long anticipated creation of the Monona Terrace

under the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright, had been a dream in the mind of many for many years, the most prominent early pioneers Michael Olbrich, who also spearheaded the cross town natural mecca of Olbrich Gardens.  He took seriously many of the dictums set out by Thoreau and saw that Madison was still in an open position to be developed, either by industry, which is always naturally occurring

anyway, or by a new American sense that nature itself needs designation and that people need open green space in order for their lives to be fully whole. At one early city meeting in the 1930's, lobbying for the creation of a visitable green space along the shores of Lake Wingra, Olbrich was bold enough to use the words of Thoreau, which eventually landed on the ears of Aldo Leopold, "Hope and the

future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps...a township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below–such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages." These words of nature designation were taken seriously and put to action, the arboretum eventually becoming a purchased tract of land to be studied and also rehabilitated to its more natural state before city population incursion.  The arboretum land, located on the west side of Lake Wingra, is connected to the same tract of forest as Edgewood school and only a short ride away.  Bike trails run along the shoreline behind the school and towards the Arboretum entrance where, after

a short drive along McCaffrey Drive, is the parking lot to the Nature Center and then the Longenecker Woods, an experimental patch of woods in which each species of tree and shrub has been tagged described for the sake of observation.  Turkeys run wild throughout; narrow trails run throughout the swamp like woods, and the Curtis Prairie a world renown experiment in calculated prairie restoration.  The Arboretum, then, serves multiple groups at once – it is an open garden, forest, and prairie for all city dwellers, but it also a natural science learning and research center connected to the university, a place to enjoy and learn at the same time, a photographer's paradise.