Bulletin of Remarkable Trees is a newsletter chronicling my research into my grandfather, E. Lowell Kammerer: landscape architect, arboriculturist, and curator of collections at the Morton Arboretum (~30 miles west of Chicago, IL) from the late 1920s until 1966.
Although his handwriting was often beyond my comprehension, I was always fascinated by my grandpa’s journals, notebooks, and papers, preserved in heavy plastic boxes that sat untouched on the same shelf in our basement my entire childhood. Occasionally as a kid, I’d peek into a box and flip through one of the red, hard-bound journals with some impossibly ancient date stamped on the front. But the prospect of reading through one always felt daunting.
At so many major junctions in my life, the Arboretum has played a cardinal part. My husband proposed to me during the Illuminations event, held during the holiday season, in almost the exact spot where my parents had been married 30 years before. And at a time in my life where I’d been sidelined by illness, after fighting more inner battles than I care to recount, suddenly, serendipitously, I felt a curiosity pull me towards the boxes containing my grandfather’s life and work, stored away by my parents for decades. After getting their permission to peruse the contents, I cracked open the first of a half dozen large boxes - and thus began the journey into my grandpa’s work and life.
If you’d like to check out some highlights, here are a few Bulletin issues that will give you the lay of the proverbial land:
If you’d like to stay up to date about my discoveries and insights, consider subscribing!
I offer both free subscriptions, which will give you access to Bulletins that come out every other week, and paid subscriptions, which will let you be privy to additional offerings, like Arboretum Through the Seasons: Then and Now, and my new series about my grandfather’s trip to Japan in behalf of the Arboretum! You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
