By Dr. Marvin Miller, AIB President

Though my parents once shared with my undergraduate college advisor a photo of me wearing a straw hat, my first cognitive recollection of dealing with plants was when I was six years old. We grew some tomato plants on the side of the house we rented, and I remember tending these with my father throughout that summer. Staking, watering, weeding, tying, and harvesting were required that year, and the time spent provided me with my first insights into the structures of plants.

Over the years, I’ve had many other opportunities to admire plant structure up close. Certainly, in my early teens, when I read about pruning and was suddenly entrusted with the loppers and pruning saws, I got a great appreciation for a tree’s branches, crotches, trunks, and bark. When the four American elms on the property died as a result of Dutch elm disease, I learned about shade and its sudden disappearance. Planting a replacement oak just before I went off to college, I got a great appreciation for siting, then digging a hole larger than the root ball, then filling, tamping, watering, and finally mulching the new garden resident after it was carefully situated into the hole. A year or two later, I remember noticing an acorn that had sprouted nearby, and I watched the race over the successive decades to see that Pin Oak seedling’s height overtake that of the Willow Oak I had planted as a tree already three times my height.

As a horticulture major during my undergraduate years, I really learned a totally different way to appreciate plant structure. I learned about sexual and asexual plant propagation, about grafting, about xylem and phloem, and about the cambium layer lying in between. I learned to recognize many species, as woody ornamental identification was followed by Herbaceous I and Herbaceous II Plant Identification. Learning to sketch a plant’s discernible qualities for later identification makes you really notice a plant’s particular characteristics quite closely.

In graduate school, the sketching pencil was replaced by a camera, and a whole new way to appreciate plants was revealed. As I employed this new technology first for documentation and years later to photographically “capture” what was in my mind’s eye, I gained many other perspectives on plants. These views were sometimes focused on the smallest of details, yet at other times, the attention was aimed at the grandest of angles. And with the camera, I could record an image, as well, which others could see.

Appreciating plants has been a lucky endeavor for me. The fact that I still can be amazed by both nature’s strength and delicate fragility has kept me easily satisfied with the beauty she offers. And though we might think Mother Nature does a pretty terrific job on her own, at this time of year, we often see man’s hand helping to accentuate the curves she makes and highlighting the structures she has created.

Man has often utilized nature’s architecture as a guiding principle for our arts and our crafts. We talk
of the family tree, and utilize a tree-like graphic to display subsequent generations all ascending from the same source. We follow nature’s curves to help us design roads, tracks, and ship keels, and we employ nature’s bounty to build our homes, our businesses, and our places of worship. We look to nature to help challenge our imagination, while at the same time reassuring our emotions. And throughout our existence, nature is there to inspire, to challenge, and to allow us to appreciate her beauty.

At this special time of year, it is our wish to you and to yours to enjoy nature’s beauty and to allow her to share her secrets for the year to come. Happy Holidays!

A scene from The Morton Arboretum’s “Illuminations” program, December 2013, Lisle, Illinois.