By Jami Badershall,Staff Writer

FARMINGTON – With people’s busy schedules, it can sometimes be difficult to find the time to get back to nature. But if you simply slow down and look around, you may find that nature is everywhere, even in downtown Farmington.

“I think it’s important for people to connect to the environment,” said Drew Barton, a forest ecologist and associate professor of biology at University of Maine at Farmington. “Nature is so embedded in this community. Nature is right here on campus. It’s an important part of our identity.”

An arboretum has existed on the UMF campus since June 1991. Retired economics professor Roy Van Til took it upon himself to tag trees with brass plates bearing the names of the tree species. He also created a guide about the trees surrounding the UMF. Van Til made his last revision a couple of years ago before handing the project over to the college’s Green Campus Coalition, an organization seeking to promote the environmental sustainability of both the campus and Farmington community.

Last year, under the guidance of Barton, the Green Campus Coalition secured a Project Canopy Assistance Grant from the Maine Forest Service. By bringing together several organizations and individuals from the college and the community, the grant was used to complete three projects, Barton said.

The first was to plant an orchard of 12 apple, peach and pear trees behind the Honor’s House on the UMF campus. This project tied into the second, which was tree planting and landscaping at the Sweatt-Winter Day Care on campus, and will be used to teach the day care children about trees. The third and largest project has been to renovate the arboretum and guide.

“Not many people know about the arboretum,” Barton said. “We have this wonderful resource. Not many campuses have an arboretum.”

Last fall Barton and biology student Laura Lalemand taught a course through the Gold LEAF Institute Senior College (50 and older), which is part of UMF. The course focused on the arboretum.

“We taught techniques for identifying trees and that then evolved into looking at the arboretum,” Barton said. “We had them walk around the arboretum and come up with suggestions for modifications, ways to make it work better.

“We wanted to involve Gold LEAF because we thought they could give us a fresh prospective. And the kinds of people who participate in Gold LEAF have a lot of skills, and they are smart.”

What resulted were new, easy-to-read tags on the trees to replace the brass ones that had tarnished, as well as a revamped guide. Volunteers, including Gold LEAF students, replaced the tags last weekend, and the guide should be back from the printers next week. Barton also hopes to make the guide soon available online.

“The old guide was black ink on green paper,” Barton said. “It’s been a great asset to me and my students, but we wanted to create a colored guide with photos.”

Descriptions of the trees have been refined and rewritten, and directions guide viewers through two trails that feature 46 tagged trees. The smaller Northern Loop starts with an Amur maple at the UMF Gallery and follows Main Street and winds through some of the campus buildings. The longer Southern Loop starts with a ginkgo tree at Marot Library and takes you to Abbott Park, where several nonnative as well as native Maine species reside. For example, the massive cucumber trees that are usually found in the southern Appalachian states or the obviously named shagbark hickory that does not normally grow past the very southern tip of Maine. And the bur oak germinates naturally in central Maine but not Farmington. Barton ages those specific trees found in Abbott Park to be anywhere from 60 to 100 years old.

“Someone, a long time ago, did some very conscious planting of trees they thought would do well here,” Barton said.

The more common species of maples, pines, white and yellow birch, spruce and balsam fir among others can also be seen along the trails, including a 150-year old sugar maple directly in front of the campus library. A tree of significant importance along the Southern Loop is an American chestnut, a species nearly obliterated by blight in the 1920s through the 1960s and 70s, Barton said.

“It is one of the most important trees ecologically and economically,” Barton said. “This one survived from its roots and sprouted back.”

But, he added, when this particular tree in Farmington reaches a certain size at maybe 10 years old, it dies again and will resprout.

Barton and his volunteers tagged some trees around the campus that are not listed along the trails in the guide, just so more people will notice them what species they are, something that is important to Barton.

“I don’t care what course I’m teaching, I will teach the students how to identify trees,” he said. “I like it, and everyone likes learning it. Sometimes the worst students in the classroom will be the best at identifying trees.”