Working from the Heartland

Randy Fisher
Arborist, Winterthur Gardens
Wilmington, Delaware

Randy Fisher's roots in Winterthur are deep and long. His father worked here. As did his grandfather before him. As did his uncle. As his mother still does. As one of Winterthur 's two arborists, Randy has a double-edged relationship with many of the 2,000 trees on the property. A computerized database keeps track of every tree and the latter-day treatments each has had: from the installation of lightning protection...to the fastening against the building momentum of wind storms...to crown cleaning. But his memories of growing up on Winterthur 's grounds carry other references to many of the same trees. The one that cradled the treehouse. The ones whose limbs provided a springboard into huge piles of raked fall leaves below. The one on which his mother tacked the fatty hide of a bacon slab to watch the birds peck at it only to watch instead a red fox jump and jump again to snatch the skin and drag it into the woods for itself.

Randy's mental database carries plans for this property well into future decades long after his own life as run its course. And that's just right by him, he says, because what he wants to leave behind is a plan for the trees that will be studied and respected by future generations of arborists. Arborists just like him.  

The rhythms of Randy's days at work in Winterthur have been set for a long time, for many years punctuated by a daily lunchtime rendezvous with his father and mother at the house they shared on the grounds of Winterthur. Until one day in 1992.

"Dad died of a heart attack right here. He came home for lunch and started telling me about a pain in his left shoulder. He had arthritis, so I figured it was related somehow. I told him I thought he should go to the doctor, but he just said nah, he'll wait until Mom got home. But by then he was having hot flashes, and he blamed that on indigestion. So he said he'd just go upstairs and lie down for a while. As he was coming out of the upstairs bathroom he just collapsed. The doctors told me later that the heart attack was so massive that even if he had had that heart attack in the emergency room, there would have been nothing that they could have done for him. That was a shame.

"He worked all the way up until the end. My mother's still employed here. She stayed here for about a year, but then bought a house less than a half block from where I live with my wife and kids. She works at the museum here, but she loves the garden. Every once in a while she'll take her lunch up to the Pinetum and check on Dad's tree."

"Dad's tree" is an incense cedar that was planted in his memory in a grove of evergreens that has been the Fisher's playground for generations. Randy says his family selected that spot because one of his father's favorite things to do was to listen to the wind whistling through the white pines and Canadian hemlocks surrounding their vacation cabin in the mountains.

Not far away is a pignut hickory, planted in the memory of "Pap" Fisher, Randy's grandfather. He chose a hickory because it reminded him of the axe handles his rugged grandfather used to swing when he was alive. Randy lets his children play among the trees just as his parents did, and he's begun to introduce to them the idea that someday he will want a tree there of his own. Even if it means providing the funds himself to make it happen. And just as with the two fathers before him, Randy's tree will bear a tag with dates. The date he began to work at Winterthur. And the date he will stop,like his father very possibly the day he dies.

"It costs $1,000 to have a tree planted in the garden here. The tree will grow until it decides to give up, and the same species with the memorial tag will be planted in its place. That's the plan anyway."

To Randy, Winterthur is a family business. Equipped with only a high school education, he left the property briefly to join the military and then become a forester. Then tried building houses. Then returned Winterthur to start a new life as an arborist.

"By the time I left forestry, I figured I'd done just about everything I can do to a tree," he says. "But then when the job of assistant arborist opened up here, I discovered there's no way I could stop learning. The difference between being a forester and arborist is scale. A forester is concerned with the entire ecosystem of the forest. Arbor culture looks at every particular tree."

At Winterthur, that's a lot of trees. But there are also a lot of flowers. Wouldn't it make sense to be more attracted to a career that focused on the glamour of Winterthur...its flowering beds? Randy says no.

"The trees and flowers work together," he says. "Without the trees the azaleas wouldn't be able to thrive like they do. They like the partial shaded areas. When you see pictures of azaleas in full bloom, you'll also see the massive trunks of trees coming up right through a carpet of azaleas, you need both of them.I don't think one draws away from the other."

Now and then evidence of another father figure's influence reveals itself. That of Mr. du Pont himself. A tall tulip poplar, for instance, is hidden off a rarely used road. On close inspection you can see lightning protection, a cable hung along the long trunk. It has been there a very long time -- evidence that Mr. du Pont himself valued that particular tree and ordered it protected.

Working for Winterthur 's past is just as important to Randy as working for its future.

"It's important to respect the person who started this," says Randy. "Mr. DuPont was always a person who invited change. He was always taking plants out and putting new plants in. But don't think you have to keep the property exactly the way it was when he was here. Take his thoughts and his notes and move on. That's what he would want us to do.

"I respect him because of the knowledge that he had. He was a family person. He had gardens set up as areas where his family could play. And he wanted the public as well as his family to enjoy the garden. It's important to know that background and respect that background before you make any decisions about which trees to remove. I respect anyone who cares for trees and nature the way Mr. du Pont did."

And, like du Pont and the senior Fisher men, Randy is counting on staying at Winterthur for his entire career.

	Randy displays the commemorative tree tag honoring his father.

"I'll be here the rest of my life unless they force me out," he says."I hope they don't because I'll be crushed if it happens. I want to retire here is what I want to do.

"And yes, I want to see changes. I'd like to see the whole tree care program to be continued and changed as necessary.I'd like to see more people understand trees and they way they work.

"A lot of these trees will be here when I'm gone, and there will be more," he says. "We're always putting back more than we take.I'd like to be remembered as the one who instigated the tree planting program.

"And when I'm dead and gone 100 years from now, it's nice to think that the arborist who will have my position will study and respect what I'm doing now."

Such a long view might make an individual feel inconsequential, much like the way we feel when we stare at a night sky. But not Randy:

"It makes me feel more important. I feel like this place is mine, and I'm starting to do something now that's going to affect future generations."

Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.