08/30/2026
Have you been? Did you know how it started?
In December 1883, the City of Boston and Harvard signed a lease that runs for one thousand years. The rent is one dollar. 🌳
The land is the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. Charles Sprague Sargent, its first director, and Frederick Law Olmsted worked out the arrangement together, and it solved a problem neither side could solve alone. The city would own the ground and keep up the roads. Harvard would hold the lease and run the science. In exchange, the gates stay open to the public.
That agreement is why you can walk hundreds of acres of a world class research collection on a Tuesday afternoon without paying anything or asking anyone. 🍁 The trees around you are not landscaping. They are a living collection, each one carrying an accession record of exactly where in the world its seed came from, and plenty of them were rooted here before your great grandparents were born.
The lease has roughly 857 years left to run. Do you have a regular loop through the Arboretum, or is it more of a once a year peak foliage trip for you?
