Previously we featured super dynamo Council cofounder Nancy Wolf. Continuing in that series, we talk here with another beloved Council cofounder and current board member, Cornell Urban Horticulture Director Nina Bassuk, who prefers to go by “Nina.” We asked her about her recollections about the early days of the Council. In a subsequent post, we’ll get some updates about things going on in the life and garden of Nina and her husband, the landscape architect Peter Trowbridge.
Nina, a native of NYC, received her bachelor’s degree in Horticulture at Cornell and then went on to receive her Ph.D. from the University of London while carrying out her research at the East Malling Research Station in Kent, England. Her current work in Cornell’s Urban Horticulture Institute focuses on the physiological problems of plants grown in urban environments, including plant selections, site modification and transplanting technology.
Nina is the coauthor with her husband of Trees in the Urban Landscape, a book for arborists, city foresters, landscape architects, and horticulturists on establishing trees in disturbed and urban landscapes. Nina is on the technical advisory committee of the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) and helped to develop the Student Weekend Arborist Team (SWAT) to inventory public trees in small communities. She is a recipient of the Scott Medal for Horticulture and an ever-popular speaker at the ReLeaf Conference.
Nina Bassuk on the Council’s Origins: “The impetus for the creation of the Council—which was then known as the NYS Urban and Community Forestry Council—was the fact that federal grants were coming from the US Forest Service to the states for the first time for urban forestry related projects. Each state had a different way of handling the grant funds; for instance, in Pennsylvania the money went through Cooperative Extension, while in New York the money went through DEC.
One of the requirements of the federal grants was to have an advisory group advising the DEC, who would in turn handle grants to municipalities, on urban forestry matters. The state foresters had to learn about urban forestry in a hurry! Some of them embraced the new urban forestry aspect of their positions, while others didn’t.
The Council started out as an advisory group of eight or ten folks. Nancy Wolf was the prime mover and shaker in creating this Council but there were others like Naomi Zurcher and Marty Mullarkey who teamed up with us. Andy Hillman might have been on board that early, too.
In 1992 we started having annual conferences; the first three were held in Ithaca before the fourth one moved to Syracuse. CCE’s Joann Gruttadaurio organized those first three conferences, which attracted 50 to 80 people. I met Andy on a beastly hot July day at one of those early conferences, and that was serendipitous, to say the least. I loved Andy’s enthusiasm; he was game to try anything in the name of research. When the Ithaca city forester position came open, I encouraged him to apply for it, and that led to many years of happy research collaboration in Ithaca.
The role of the conference was to teach volunteers and regional foresters alike about site assessment and remediation, plant selection and tree care. I remember being asked often, ‘What’s the best tree?’ You know, like ‘Give me the goods—the magic bullet.’ I had to explain how site-specific that decision of ‘best tree’ is … how if the site is lousy, no tree will grow well there… and if that’s the case, how to remediate the site to make it possible for a tough tree to grow.
The earliest grants were directed to education, but then planting grants came to be. When Mary Kramarchyk became state urban forestry coordinator, she did something hugely valuable which was to identify the nine regions in the state and initiate educational events in the regions.
Region 3 ReLeafers attend a tree planting workshop in Millbrook in Dutchess County, in 2005. Nina Bassuk is third from left.
My focus was on getting research-based and technical information out to the urban foresters and allies, while Nancy Wolf was really big into volunteer education and the community aspect of urban forestry. She is a force of nature. We came to sort out our differing priorities well and realize we could talk to all these people at our conferences, that we could have different tracks to address effectively audiences as varied as urban foresters, utility arborists, and community groups. Nancy and I became good friends.
When the Council became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, that was really helpful because we could accept money in addition to the DEC funds. We became more organized over time, moving from an advisory group to a Council with a Board and membership. I was and am really happy to be a part of it.