Mount Vernon clones its trees to save the past.

Story by Diane Ney / Sept. 19, 2001

 Printer-friendly version

George Washington's estate (Mt. Vernon Ladies Ass.)

"The Black Gum Trees which I had transplanted to my avenues or Serpentine Walks, & which put out leaf and looked well at first, are all dead, so are the Poplars, and most of the Mulberrys. The Crab apple trees also, which were transplanted into the Shrubberies & the Papaws are also dead, as also the Sassafras in a great degree—the Pines wholly—& several of the Cedars—as also the Hemlock almost entirely..."

When George Washington wrote this lament in his journal in 1785, chinch bugs had infested the grounds at Mount Vernon. The bugs are long gone, of course, but hundreds of deer now imperil the greenery at Washington's 500-acre Virginia estate and gardens.

A coalition of organizations is working to combat the tree-loss problem on two fronts: A thousand trees, donated by the National Tree Trust and the Champion Tree Project, are to be planted on the estate over the next 10 years, and 13 trees original to the estate are to be cloned.

The cloning would have delighted and intrigued Washington, who devoted years of his life to agricultural experimentation. Washington's scientific approach to farming, says James Rees, Mount Vernon's executive director, included "introducing the mule to American farming, creating an improved kind of plow, experimenting with crop rotation, and pulling mud from the bottom of the Potomac River to create better compost for his plants."

It's a safe bet, though, that cloning never crossed Washington's mind.

The Roots

Dean Norton, George Cates, and David Milarch (Champion Tree Project)

The cloning project came about through a combination of serendipity and philanthropy. For several years, Mount Vernon's director of horticulture, J. Dean Norton, had been noticing the dearth of small seedlings in the estate's forests and blamed the growing deer population. Not only were the deer eating the seedlings, Norton says, but "those that made it to a decent size were being used by the bucks as rubbing poles to remove felt from their horns. I was seeing a lot of damage to the bark."

Norton was exploring several solutions when he received a call from George Cates, director of the National Tree Trust, a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to tree planting and maintenance. The result was the donation of the thousand trees to the estate, which eventually brought David Milarch, co-founder of the Champion Tree Project, to Mount Vernon.

Milarch had begun the Champion Tree Project in 1996 to protect trees that are the largest, and often the oldest, living examples of their species by cloning them from either a bud or a cutting of the tree. The first to use this process to preserve trees, Milarch and his team have had "100 percent success, which is extraordinary, since we were told by all the experts that what we were doing was impossible."

An active advocate of tree preservation and a man with a strong sense of history, Milarch immediately took up the mantle of working with living history. "Washington's extensive notes show us he was corresponding with horticulturists around the world, experimenting with tree growth," he says. "He may have been the most knowledgeable person regarding trees in this country at the time." Milarch was happy to partner with the Trust and Mount Vernon in donating trees to the estate.

At that point, reforestation was the sole initiative. "All the trees being donated were those mentioned in Washington's writings and diaries and already cloned or grafted by the Champion Tree Project," says Norton. "There was no mention of cloning any of the trees at Mount Vernon."

A Fruitful Partnership

The "serpentine walks" Washington refers to in his journal are along the Bowling Green, a large expanse of lawn facing the house. Between 1785 and 1787, Washington planted hundreds of trees brought from forests on what was then an 8,000-acre estate.

Those trees are among the ones that have suffered the deer overpopulation. Only 13 of those planted 200 years ago have survived. This was of special concern to Norton, and so, as he and Milarch passed through the Bowling Green at the end of a long day of discussing the reforestation and reviewing the sites, Norton asked a favor.

"I told Dave about the 13 remaining originals and asked if the project could clone one or two of those. I'm sure there are trees in the surrounding forests that are just as old, but we know for a fact that these 13 were specifically selected by Washington to be planted here."

Milarch agreed. A month ago, he and his sons took buds and cuttings from two white ash, two tulip poplar, seven American hollies, one mulberry and one hemlock. An audience of several dozen print, broadcast, and Web journalists, along with thousands of tourists visiting Mount Vernon, watched this first step of the cloning process.

The DNA from the trees will now be sent to nurseries, where the material will be grafted onto a similar root stock, producing genetic duplicates of the original trees. Once matured, the trees will be planted on the estate. Additional cloned trees will be sent to Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum for safekeeping.

Rees, Norton, and Milarch see the cloning project as part of the stewardship of the estate and a way to pay tribute to Washington. "He really was an enlightened agriculturalist," says Norton, "a good plant man who constantly questioned his own abilities, which was one of the reasons he was so good at what he did. He read, he researched, he asked questions and he learned from his mistakes."

Whatever the results of these two projects, undertaking them will be in the spirit of the first farmer.

Diane Ney is an award-winning playwright and freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.