The impact of a person or a group of people is sometimes hard to see, but it is easy to see the impact that Eric Parkman has had on Clarkson University. When you look around campus and see the thousands of trees that cover the landscape, you are seeing the trees that he speaks for.
Parkman, a senior groundskeeper of trees at Clarkson, has been passionate about protecting and nurturing the trees on the Clarkson campus for years. Students and staff even liken him to the Dr. Seuss character “The Lorax.” The Lorax advocates for the environment, especially trees, which Parkman is also deeply concerned about preserving…particularly the ones that have been growing on the campus for hundreds of years.
“When you look at some of the old maps it shows where there are trees that we can find today that are probably some of the same trees. All the old pictures I have seen of Woodstock Lodge have always had at least two trees in front of it. So the two large eastern white pine trees have probably been here since at least the 1860’s,” Parkman said.
A Tree Inventory
Not all of the old trees on the Clarkson campus are native to the area. Parkman has a guess as to how they got there.
“There are some really old trees on campus that aren’t native to Northern New York – most likely the Clarkson family planted them. Trees like the Norway Spruce, and Gingkos near Holcroft House, and some others can be found on the property. Some of these were planted in the mid-1800’s and they also appear on old maps. Another example is some of the sugar maples that are along Clarkson Avenue look to be on a map from 1865. There are also some non-native trees that may have been planted due to their usefulness for fence building, for example,” he said.
Parkman is part of a cross-campus team made up of students, faculty, Clarkson’s GIS Spatial Analyst Developer and staff members to inventory the trees on campus. Right now, they have about 1500-1700 of them in the system. There are thousands more trees on the campus that they hope in the future to include in their inventory, such as the ones in the Clarkson Woods or along the Munter Trail. He’s also working on updating and creating the Facilities policies and procedures for tree care.
“This is the long-term structure for the proper arbor-cultural practices and standards to direct how we will care for and manage Clarkson’s trees for the health, safety, and the aesthetic and environmental benefits they provide, and it sets up a framework for students and members of the campus community to be involved,” Parkman said.
Sustainability Goals
“This is all part of our ongoing efforts to meet our sustainability goals, one of which is to continue to be recognized by the Arbor Day Foundation Tree Campus Higher Education,” Parkman said. Created in 2008, the program honors colleges and universities for effective campus tree management and for engaging staff, students, and the community in growing their community forest, the importance that green space provides for mental health, mitigating the effects of climate change, and reaching sustainability goals.
Parkman has given a lot of careful thought on how to manage and nurture the Clarkson trees as time goes on. “I have been doing some seed collection from our trees, and I am hoping to establish a small nursery so that we can start seedlings from our own trees. I hope to get the students involved in the project so that we could collect the seeds or use other propagation methods to grow offspring from our own trees so that when we do have to cut down a tree, we could use offspring to replace it and carry on the genetics. Perhaps we would even find trees that have developed into varieties specific to Clarkson.”
But his passion for trees isn’t just his day job. Parkman’s youth helped prepare him for his current career. He went to school for agriculture where he was first introduced to arboriculture as well as soil science and plant science. He has worked in farming and landscaping and he and his family have their own family farm too. He spends hours of his own time learning more about trees and how to take care of them.
“The other day he clocked out at the end of his shift and then came to my office to watch a webinar on maintaining ecological/organic landscapes. He is very committed to landscape stewardship. He is the sort of guy that I call when I have questions and I’ve referred other people to him,” said Alex French, Assistant Director of Sustainability.
Like the Lorax, Parkman is an advocate for the environment who knows that the next generation must protect the delicate balance in nature because all life is interdependent on one another.
“To me, there is more value in the big old trees on this campus than things like the grass, because you can easily replace the grass, but you can’t just replace a 200-year-old tree – it takes 200 years to grow. These trees are the living history of Clarkson and we owe it to the Clarkson family and students and alumni to be good stewards to maintain them and do our best to try to keep them around,” Parkman said.