New Beauty for Gorham Campus

The ice storm that to many Mainers was a disaster, for John Waters, USM's arborist, has been an opportunity to bring greater beauty and diversity to the Gorham campus.

Waters, a licensed arborist for 29 years, joined USM's Department of Facilities Management as our Gorham campus landscape supervisor three days before the ice storm hit Maine in January, 1998. He spent the next two months, he says, addressing the most pressing aspects of the damage. Since then, he's been looking ahead.

The extensive loss of trees caused by the ice storm was followed by a mini-tornado that struck in late August, 1998, and a smaller ice storm in January, 1999. By early last March, Waters' staff had removed 63 trees because of damage.

Waters was up to the challenge of nature. After completing comprehensive landscape surveys of the Gorham and Portland campuses and at the Stone House in Freeport last spring, Waters successfully applied for a Community Forestry Recovery Grant, and USM received $147,000 for tree replacement and maintenance for Gorham.

Waters, who worked for 17 years as a foreman and municipal floriculturist for the City of Portland, is taking a long view of the campus landscape. "We need to look down the road to what the campus will look like 20 years from now," he says. In his view, we need to start planting now to have the majestic trees in the future that will replace the historic oaks and maples now on the campus. "Some of these trees are as old as 150 years," Waters guesses. The ice storm snapped off 15-20 year old growth near the top of the trees, Waters explains, and left wounds that allow disease to enter the trees and shorten their lives.

The grant will enable him to replace damaged and lost trees and to do corrective and preventive pruning so that future storms won't render as much tree loss. In addition, Waters is adding flowering trees and exotics, like Turkish filbert, cork trees, and Kentucky coffee bean trees, to the native pines, maples and oaks. "The new plantings will give me the ability to diversify the campus landscape," he says. Waters and his team have planted purple beech for leaf color, frontier elm for stature, locust and ginkgo for their feathery leaf "texture," and hawthorns and tree lilacs for flower displays.

"I'm very pleased to have this opportunity," Waters says. "The grant recognizes the importance of green space."

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