Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 5, 1995 TAG: 9509050002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: VIRGINIA B. JORDAN SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
If the front yard needs mowing every time you look at it, and you cringe when the neighbors survey the overgrown hedge, just consider the problems of Jerry Dobbs. As Virginia Tech's landscape supervisor, his combined front and back yards are 850 acres, and the visitors come from all over, hundreds at a time.
It is 6 on a summer morning, and Dobbs is starting out with his planting crew, headed by James Simmons. They are bound for the area between Norris and Holden halls sitting on a rise above the Drill Field, and the pickup is loaded with two dozen oak and ash trees.
They are using an augur to drill the planting holes, a noisy procedure, but windows are open, and classes start at 8 a.m. Is this Mission Impossible? By 8 a.m. the drilling is done, and the plantings are finished quietly. Two dozen young trees, in full leaf, stand proudly in their appointed places. Dobbs is happy. "I really like to see results,'' he says.
There was no quiet back in 1994's ice storm, when the pistol shots of branches breaking and the crash of trees falling was everywhere. Three hundred trees were either damaged or fell. ``The question everyone asked me was, `How are you going to replace all those trees?'''
Enter Drs. Roger Harris and Alex Neimiera, and their project, the Tech Urban Horticulture Center, five productive acres on Prices Fork Road. A new growing system, called pot-in-a-pot, is so successful that 400 young trees have been grown there and delivered to Dobbs since 1993.
Neimiera found this method being used at a wholesale nursery, Lancaster Farms, in Suffolk. "Of the nurseries in the eastern United States, this one is really on the cutting edge of container plant production,'' he said. His research of nursery practices takes him all over the state.
Harris illustrated how it is done: the seedling arrives from Oregon in its growing pot filled with cedar chips and is placed into a larger pot sunk into the ground. The pots are equipped with drains for excess water, and also with spaghetti tubes, connected to underground pipes, which deliver water to the seedling. Water is automatically controlled by a computer system.
Harris, who has seen his share of trees, loves best those native to Virginia. "They remind me of beautiful places here," he said.
Beautiful places all over the campus are blooming in Hokie colors. In front of the Memorial Chapel are scarlet celosia and orange and yellow marigolds. Scarlet and gold appear again at the front of Burruss Hall, and masses of rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans) decorate the Donaldson Brown Center. Most of these beauties were supplied by Tech's own greenhouses.
Dobbs thinks of the campus in terms of "hot spots." These are the areas most in the public eye: Burruss Hall, the chapel, and the area around The Grove, the university president's house, and all of them get a lot of attention.
Does he have a favorite? "The Grove," he said reverently. No wonder, as it would be hard to find more magnificent trees than those around the president's house. In the stump of a white oak that had to be cut down recently, there were 500 rings, which dates it to 1495.
The many trees that shade the campus develop ailments as they grow older - "just as people do,'' said Dr. Jay Stipes, who, as plant pathologist, looks after them. He has a list of campus tree stresses, from soil compaction to lack of nutrition, to Dutch elm disease, which requires injection of a fungicide, a technique that he developed. Stipes has roamed the world helping some famous leafy patients.
There will be more of them in the Tech campus' future. The master plan drafted by Matthew Gart, the college's landscape architect, emphasizes trees, bushes and ground cover instead of grass, which should lessen maintenance - and the bottom line.
"Grass," said Dobbs, "is easy to install but expensive to maintain."
If he prefers flowers to grass, it is probably because at one time he was knee-deep in them, helping to create the Mary Ripley Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which had 250 varieties and a color wheel. While there, he became interested in genealogy, the hobby that still occupies him, and especially the tracing of Civil War ancestors and family trees.
But he still plants real trees - and can always see results.
by CNB