Branch Campus There’s Much To Learn At UI Arboretum

Former botany professor Richard Naskali is no retiring, contemplative academic. He lopes around like a junkyard dog with a chewed-off ear and a spike collar, guarding English oaks and Asian smoke trees like they were transmissions and windshields of ‘55 Chevies and ‘67 Mustangs.

Naskali is a steadfast warrior for the primacy of plants in the University of Idaho’s 63-acre Arboretum and Botanical Garden on the south edge of the UI campus.

History says a 1980 Master Plan established the placid, ordered character of the arboretum. In fact, it might have been a well-chosen epithet.

“Damn it,” fumed Naskali as campus leaders were considering equestrian trails, bike paths and the like.

“You don’t jog in a cathedral.”

The arboretum’s director since 1987, Naskali has an ironclad rule: “If it’s contradictory to the welfare of the plants, it shouldn’t happen in an arboretum.”

As a result, pets, skiing, sledding and athletic games are banned, and jogging and cycling are restricted to one designated path.

Many of the arboretum hardwoods now are beginning to glow with fall colors. But the most colorful entity in this place remains the director.

Both the plants and Naskali will be on display Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m. Naskali will give a walking tour of the arboretum, and he will suggest suitable trees for home gardens. The tour is free and will begin at the arboretum entrance off Nez Perce Drive.

The UI has a long history with plant displays. Beginning in 1910, UI faculty member Charles Shattuck began planting trees and shrubs on a 19-acre hillside on campus. In 1933, after Shattuck’s death, UI regents formally designated the site the Shattuck Arboretum, and then, it seems, promptly forgot about it.

In following decades, it grew up unmanaged and was invaded by Norway maples, “the kudzu of the North,” Naskali sneers. The Shattuck Arboretum is now being managed more intensively, and mistakes made in it are not being repeated in the newer arboretum.

Campus support for a new arboretum developed in the mid-1970s, and it took a committee that included Naskali “about five nanoseconds to pick this site,” he says.

It must have taken uncommon foresight to envision groves of oaks and maples and pines on these hillsides. The valley was being used as a golf course driving range and an alfalfa field.

Naskali has such a dominating presence in the arboretum that he may seem to own it. In fact, while he put in the first plantings with retired UI President Ernest Hartung on a snowy Easter morning in 1982, Naskali has been operating under the direction of an advisory committee for about a year. He welcomes it.

“Ownership of the place ought to be beyond me. While it’s a trip when people say ‘your arboretum,’ I like much more the idea of ‘our arboretum,”’ he says.

Plantings are grouped geographically, and trees and shrubs from temperate regions of Europe, Asia and North America are represented.

Following Naskali around the place is illuminating, and energizing.

“Elm trees! Elm trees! Elm trees! People love elm trees,” he bursts out, charging up to a grove.

In the leaves of another tree, he points out where green and white cells exist in what he calls “a balance of terror,” a genetic mosaic.

“This is nice. It shows some things about developmental biology.”

In a collection of lilacs, he notes a variety developed by a Soviet botanist during the Cold War. Its Russian name translates to “Beauty of Moscow.”

“It took a long time to get one,” says Naskali. “I don’t think it could be in a better place.”

If there is much here to delight, there are also things to make an arboretum director despair. He points to the checkerboard pattern of some early plantings done without his supervision. He rolls his eyes skyward. “Forgive them, they know not what they do.”

On the floor of this valley are a creek and two small man-made ponds. A couple of pre-arboretum willows still line a creek bank, and “some unknown zealot takes suckers off them and plants them up and down the valley. We get the most amazing behavior patterns down here.”

A rising fish dots the surface of one of the ponds.

“Goldfish,” Naskali snorts. “Some ecological terrorist, singular or plural, in the early days was either too wimpy to flush their fish or they thought they were being ecologically friendly.”

The creek, ponds and surrounding trees would seem to invite beavers.

“Oh, that would be a worst-case scenario,” says Naskali, truly horrified. “That would be worse than five sledders.”

While the battle to have the arboretum viewed as a plant museum rather than a park or playground continues, Naskali sees some heartening signs of victory. A young mother follows two little girls capering down an arboretum trail.

“I just love to see these types come here, without their dogs,” he observes pointedly, “with their prams and their little kids. They learn civilized behavior by example. We don’t have to pick up much trash down here.”

He is delighted that fisheries, forestry and landscape architecture departments at the UI are beginning to use the arboretum as a teaching tool, and he has always been shrewd enough to seek support for the arboretum in high places. Former UI President Hartung helped found it, and one of his successors, Elisabeth Zinser, so loved the arboretum that she got married there.

Interim UI President Tom Bell hasn’t shown that kind of ardor, “but I did see him jogging here on a Sunday morning,” says Naskali. “I’m going to get him down here for a tour yet.”

If only to warn him to stay on the trail.