By Andy Schmitz, Director of Horticulture and General manager
This article was originally published in The Brenton Arboretum’s Spring 2014 newsletter.
Provenance: The word provenance is being heard a lot more around the offices at the arboretum as we discuss our collections and decide on how to enhance and expand them. From art museums to arboretums, the word provenance is used for describing the origin or the history of an accessioned or acquired object, be the object a historical painting or in the case of the arboretum, a tree.
For a piece of art work, provenance is the history, who created it and owned it, and where has the art work resided until now; a chronological order.
But, for a tree, provenance is the seed origin, where the seed of the particular tree was collected, who collected it and the details about the collection site. The details of a collection site may range from basic information such as a description of the habitat and date sampled to very intricate details including species abundance, soil description, slope and aspects, plant height and width, leaf quality and/or notable ornamental characteristics.
Cold Hardiness: So, one might ask, why is provenance important in deciding what to add to our collections? Part of the answer is cold hardiness. In central Iowa, we want to plant trees adapted for our winter conditions. A real world scenario for the arboretum is the case of the post oak, Quercus stellata. The native distribution of post oak extends from the last tier of counties in southeast Iowa to the Carolinas, down to Florida and over to Texas. Considering the species can be found in Iowa, one may assume it is an adaptable tree for Iowa. However, back in 2003, three seedlings of this species were planted here at the arboretum, they grew well and were over four feet tall until the very cold winter of 2008-09 (32nd coldest winter on record for Iowa) in which temperatures reached 20 below zero. All of the post oak trees were dead in the spring of 2009.