A tranquil and restorative haven, full of majestic and rare trees,
a place where the glint of morning light across a pine branch brings warm, regardless of the season.
This open space offers serenity and community. It's a place to connect with ourselves,
with nature, and with each other. Marquan Park and Arboretum exist through the generosity of one family,
and the public and private collaboration that sustains it today.
Where is this magical place? It's right in the heart of Princeton, New Jersey.
A tranquil and restorative haven, full of majestic and rare trees,
a place full of majestic and rare trees,
a place full of majestic and rare trees,
a place full of majestic and rare trees,
a place full of majestic and rare trees,
The park has a long and storied history. Few tell it better than longtime Marquan Park Foundation trustees, Pam and Roland Mackold.
The park was established in 1842 when a man named Judge Field purchased a farm.
He was the first cousin to Robert Stockton, who was the Commodore of the U.S. Navy,
who was the grandson of Richard Stockton, who was the signer of the Declaration of Independence.
And the Stockton family were well-established here, amongst other things, they were principal investors in the Delaware-Raritan Canal.
Judge Field decided he wanted to build an estate. Now, he'd gone to England for the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851,
and he'd been very much impressed by the tremendous inflow of trees and plants from other parts of the world,
from the extension of the British Empire. This is quite attractive to him, so he not only hired a gardener from over there,
but he came back here with the idea of hiring some of the best people.
A man named John Knottman was the principal at it, and he knew he was going to build a big house for the property.
That became Guernsey Hole, but that wasn't built until 1855, so he had had a number of years to develop the park idea.
It became an arboretum because they gathered first New Jersey trees, and what we have in our woods area is the remnant of that.
Some of those trees date back right to his time, the old oaks and beech trees.
They sold the house in the 1860s, early 1860s, to a family named Brown,
and there was a mother and son who lived quietly by themselves, and they too were very keen gardeners and arborists,
just by good chance. They didn't develop it, they didn't do anything like that, but they did bring in some new trees,
and they were rose fanciers. They loved roses, and they had a giant rose garden here,
and they had a fence around the place and dogs to protect them because they didn't want to have the boys from the university
hopping over the fence and gathering roses for their dates. Apparently they did, and that was something of a game,
to jump the fence, grab a rose for your date, and then jump back again before the dogs got to you.
The Browns finally sold the property in 1881 to Alan Marquand,
and Alan Marquand was the founder of the art and archaeology department at Princeton University.
The grandson of Alan Marquand, Park trustee Alan Forsyth, shares his family history.
The grandfather Alan Marquand and my grandmother Eleanor Cross Marquand came here as newlyweds in 1897
and raised four children, and my mother being the oldest Eleanor, again,
we have four Eleanors in the family, my sister Ellie, who is the person who the sandbox behind me is named for,
who taught at the kindergarten of the Institute for Advanced Study for many years,
and had, you can imagine, unbelievably brilliant kids to take care of, and had a wonderful time working with them.
And she died young alas, and so we dedicated the sandbox to her.
Grandmother died in 1950, and there was a question of what to do with the estate,
and my aunt Mary and her husband Harold Hochschild bought the quarter up in the northeastern quarter of the park,
where the stables had been originally, and then garages.
The remainder of the park, in 1980s I think in total, was an arboretum and had been for a long time before that,
and my mother and her sisters offered it to the borough of Princeton, which was quite reluctant to accept this gift,
saying, green space, who needs green space for surrounded with green space?
And of course this is no longer true, and they are now very happy to have this park,
which is much loved by just about everybody in Princeton, who becomes aware of it and takes advantage of it.
The beauty of it is that they set up this foundation to manage the arboretum and the open space.
This foundation has been wonderful in maintaining the integrity of the park, and the town has cooperated.
It's been an easy relationship. It gets more complicated now, because we are now an arboretum officially.
It's a word, but now we have to, as an arboretum, we have to take care of each tree.
Board-certified Master Arborist Bob Wells helps the foundation and the town manage the tree collection.
I got involved with the Marklin Park project three years ago, when Pam Mekold contacted me at Morris Arboritum
and asked if I would come and do an inventory and a session of the trees here.
We came and took a geolocation of each tree.
We then discovered that there were 872 trees over 6 inches in diameter, representing 173 different species.
Each one of them is now mapped and inventoried.
This collection has five of the largest trees in New Jersey of their individual species.
That is just one of the many things that makes it an exceptional collection and a wonderful arboretum.
Let's go take a look.
This is an American yellowwood. It's a native tree, cladrastus luteia, or cladrastus contuciae.
The name changed just a couple of years ago, based on some of our more current botanical understanding
through the miracle of DNA that has helped us quite a bit in the last few years.
We have lichens all over it, which are actually an indicator of healthy air.
They are not poisoning the tree, they're not harming the tree in any kind of way.
They're in fact a combination of algae and lichens, and were used at various times as edible things by Native Americans.
This particular tree was planted in the early 20th century here in Markwin Park,
and while I wouldn't consider it one of our majestic trees here, it certainly is an interesting one.
It's got a beautiful flower that will be here in about three or four weeks, and we'll want to be watching for that.
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In honor of community members who have passed, the park has several memorial benches,
such as this one for Alex Gallup, inscribed with a poem he wrote at the age of 12.
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This is an American beach, this tree, it's known as the sweetheart tree,
and I think you can understand why people like to memorialize themselves by carving on the tree.
Also, in the early days in Europe, before the invention of paper, the bark of this was used for writing.
And the name of the beach tree in Germany, in German, is Buch, and this is the origin of our word, Buch.
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This is one of the New Jersey state champions.
It is a cucumber tree, Magnolia cumionata, it is located here on the edge of the native area.
One of the things that is really incredible about it are the growths here,
the kind of knee type growths that occur on one of the downturning low scaffold branches here.
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It's a really tough survivor, and the biggest one in the state of New Jersey.
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This is a sweet gum tree, and it's a very common tree, particularly along riversides and on the banks of streams and ponds.
It likes to have wet feet, that is to say, it doesn't mind having water close to its roots.
And this is its seed pot, it's a prickly little thing, which opens up and distributes hundreds of little seeds,
which are washed away in the water and taken downstream to be planted elsewhere.
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This is a Norway spruce, Pisces avies, but this is not spruce, this is white pine.
And you suddenly realize that a white pine grew against the trunk of this tree years ago,
probably when a squirrel brought the wind blew a pine cone up against the trunk of much bigger Norway spruces.
So now you have these branches sticking out to the side here, and it disguises the true identity.
So this tree is one of the grandomans of the park.
We've got the lightning protection system in it.
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In Markwood Park we have approximately a dozen different species of pines,
and quite often we're asked how to distinguish them from one from another.
And one of the easy ways that we can do that is to look at the bundles or fascicles, they call it.
Sometimes they will come grouped in two, or like the white pine, in bundles of five.
The bundles of two like this that are stiff are generally trees like Pinus sombergi here, Japanese black pine,
Pinus rigida, ridge pine, Austrian pine.
And so this particular one, Japanese black, low spread out tree,
and is actually one of the more beautiful ones here in this section of the arboretum.
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This tree is a Perotia persico, which indicates that it was found or originally named in Persian.
Now, this is a very important tree to me because I planted it in 1971 as a memorial to my three-year-old daughter who died in an accident.
And why did I plant this tree? Well, it has a history, at least with me.
When I was a small child, my grandfather lived across the street from the Morris Arboretum down in Philadelphia.
And I would go over there and there was a giant Perotia that served as a perfect jungle gym, wonderful to climb on.
And as you can see, the branches are so close together, it was impossible for a child to fall and hurt himself.
He would only fall to another branch.
And so I thought to myself, what could be a better memorial that maybe 20, 30 years from now, this tree will serve as a giant jungle gym for other three-year-old boys and girls, just like my daughter.
So it's a memorial tree.
And so I thought to myself, what could be a better memorial that maybe 20, 30 years from now, this tree will serve as a giant jungle gym for other three-year-old boys and girls.
And so I thought to myself, what could be a better memorial that maybe 20, 30 years from now, this tree will serve as a giant jungle gym for other three-year-old boys and girls.
And so I thought to myself, what could be a better memorial that maybe 20, 30 years from now, this tree will serve as a giant jungle gym for other three-year-old boys and girls.
And so I thought to myself, what could be a better memorial that maybe 20, 30 years from now, this tree will serve as a giant jungle gym for other three-year-old boys and girls.
The tree behind us here is an Arborvita, and it has an interesting history.
Samuel Champlain was establishing the French colony in Canada, and he was exploring south in the year 1609.
On the way down, the Huron Indians instructed him in this tree because it is the source of vitamin C.
And as you can appreciate, there are very few oranges up in Northern New York State, so it was very critical to their health.
Even in those days, scurvy was a problem, not only for sailors, but for people on land if they didn't get vitamin C.
So the Huron Indians taught him how to make a tea out of this.
He was very impressed by this tree, so he took samples of it back to France, and his patron was the king of France, Henri Cat.
And as he gave samples to him, he said he asked the king to provide the name for the tree as an honor, you see.
And the king said, this will be the Arborvita, the tree of life.
It provides life to explorers, particularly French explorers, so that's where it gets its name.
The Arborvita
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Small beginnings arise great giants, and this may not seem like very much,
but this is an English elm that is cutting from a very large and old tree at the Philadelphia Zoo that was planted by John Penn in 1794.
That particular tree is seven foot in diameter and is 110 feet tall, and it's a wonderful, wonderful tree.
The zookeeper there, or the head of horticulture, is a man named Jerry Schreck who decided that he wanted to try to disseminate this tree across the Philadelphia region.
And so he, three years ago, he took some cuttings, and this is one of them that he was kind enough to give to me.
And we brought it here and planted it in Parkwood Park.
It's within a few feet of a giant willow oak that was here until it came down and super sourced standy.
And so this will be our new giant in a mere hundred years.
This is a Yoshino cherry. It's the same tree which lines the malls down in Washington.
Those were donated by the Japanese government many years ago.
And in this particular case, you would think this tree might be 15 or 20 years old.
It's not. It's only been here for three years.
And the reason it's here is that a family got together and wanted to do a special present for their mother who lived up in Guernsey Hall.
And she can look out of her window and see this tree every spring in full blossom.
And that was their present to her.
And so this will be our new giant in a mere hundred years.
And so this will be our new giant in a mere hundred years.
And so this will be our new giant in a mere hundred years.
And so this will be our new giant in a mere hundred years.
We're on Magnolia Hill here at Markwood Park.
And we're standing right next to a southern Magnolia species, very common in the south.
It's actually a tree that retains its leaves throughout the winter.
A lot of people ask us about this tree and how it can exist here in our cold winters.
And the answer is that this is actually a variety called Edith's Bogue that was developed by nurserymen to be cold hearty for our region here in central New Jersey.
And one of the interesting things about climate change, if we can think of an upside to it, is that now we are able to grow Magnolia Grand Flora in our area.
And they're somewhat cold hearty and resistant.
And so it's a wonderful thing.
Holding some remnant flowers from last year, just a few weeks, we'll see it pop out more exuberantly.
I'll be here to enjoy it.
This is one of our, the nicest trees in the Markwood Park collection.
This is a Dawn Redwood Metasequoic Lip Distriboides.
It is from China.
And we actually know exactly when this tree was brought here because Ernest China Wilson from the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard was the man who was responsible for bringing this tree to the United States in 1947.
And Princeton, fortunately, was one of the recipient of the first trees that came here.
And so we know that this tree was planted in 1949.
Some of the other trees that are quite happy here in native to New Jersey are going to be our White Oak, our American Beach.
Red Oak is our state tree.
And so if you go in the state house down in West State Street and Trenton, you'll see both trees depicted on the carpeting on the floor.
The trees that are happiest here, I would say, are things like Tulipopla, L'Aria, Dendron, Tulipra, a wide variety of oaks, red oaks.
We have nice exemplars of both those trees here in the Arboretum.
We're on the east side of Markwin Park in a little bit of a low area, which is where you're going to find the ball cypress.
The ball cypress is native to North America here.
Taxodium disticum is the tree of the swamps down in the south in the Mississippi Delta, where it's the predominant tree there and has a distinctive characteristic of a growth or knees that occur that are actually breathing roots that are able to go above the waterline
and maintain their oxygen in that fashion, distinguishing characteristics of this particular tree.
Deciduous conifer loses its needles in the wintertime.
One of the questions that we often get is, how come the dawn redwoods got needles and the ball cypress over here does not?
Well, that's just the way that it evolved here on two different continents.
So it's a neat exemplar in this part of the park of species that are native and non-native and how they can compare and contrast and both adapted to wet sites.
So just one of the more interesting aspects of Markwin Park in our collection here.
Over here is a stand of white pines.
In colonial days, these trees were always the property of the king because the wood and the pine was used for spars and masts of ships.
So it was very critical to the expansion of the British Navy and the British Empire.
Every one of them had a special mark on it that indicated that it was the property of the king.
And if anybody was to cut one down, illegally, why the penalty was death.
Now, it so happened that if a tree fell naturally hit by lightning or maybe just toppled over in a storm, it would fall down.
Then the local people could use it for their own purposes.
And that's where we get the word windfall.
We're standing in front of the cedar of Lebanon at Markwin Park, Cedrus Labani.
This is one of our signature trees here.
It's native to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa and, of course, Lebanon, the Middle East.
It's the famous usage in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.
This tree is about 160 years old and was one of the original plantings here in 1850 on the state here at Guernsey Hall.
It is mentioned by a landscape architect named Downing in 1860 in his book.
And he was noted for his use of Lebanon cedar around the great estates.
One of the things that was very popular in those Victorian days were wisteria gardens, wisteria plants, and a structure that would hold them up.
This is a clinging vine.
So this pergola, this wooden structure that was here is part of that and we think was one of the elements of the original garden from the 1870s.
It was rebuilt in the 1930s and then when we started working here three years ago, it was crumbling apart.
And one of the things that we decided to do was to replace it and make the center of it go to a high point.
One of the neat things about the tree collection at Markland Park is the predominance of coniferous species.
And so we have an abundance of pine, spruces, furs.
We have some, a number of fault cypresses like this one here.
So this tree is our camcipers by Cyphera gumosa, a sagora fault plume sagora fault cypress.
And it is one of perhaps 14 other camcipers that we have here, fault cypress.
One of the unique things about Markland Park is that it's a public-private cooperative effort.
And while it was given by the family in 1953 to the foundation for perpetual care,
much of that maintenance and care really lands on the shoulders of Princeton municipality.
And so we really work together with them to try to make this the best parks and wonderful places to come to.
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We actually have a total of close to 600 acres of public parkland in Princeton,
and Marquan is a 17-acre parcel of that.
Beautiful collection, a wide variety of species of trees.
We have many trees, a mature size, a visitor could come and see what a tree looks like
once it's actually attained its specific size and dimension for its species and genus.
Unlike the street trees, which we have to keep pruned and elevated away from vehicles and pedestrian use,
the trees in Marquan Park are in a lawn setting, so their natural branching habit is allowed to fill in
and grace the ground and gives you a beautiful form from afar.
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We're so lucky to have Marquan Park in Princeton.
It's one of the gems of our park system, and it's in many ways unique.
Because it's a planned area, you can see the trees, and all the trees are labeled,
so you can learn something about if you see a really beautiful tree that maybe you want to plant in your own yard.
And one of my favorite places in the park is, of course, the sandbox.
I remember taking my own children there, and it's a place that really embodies the values of community
and the values of sharing, and it's magical for the kids to show up in this totally enormous sandbox
from the perspective of a small child and to see all the toys that are there
that someone has donated for them to play with, and it's a really magical place.
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We need our public to get involved in our parks and to help us through different volunteer groups
to help us out and help us take care of the parks, and that can happen on all different levels.
We do have several volunteer organizations that are involved in working in the parks and community gardens in town.
Mark Juan Park has a foundation, and they do have an active volunteer group, but always looking for more help.
It's important for the community as a whole to come and visit this park and also perhaps maybe lend a hand in taking care of it,
because it is for everyone, and the public space is for everybody, and we need the public's help in taking care of it as well.
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Juan Park is one of Roman's most favorite places, right? We come here almost every week.
I also grew up in the Princeton area, so I grew up right in this park as well.
I used to come here with my mom, and now he comes with his grandmother, so it's such a beautiful place.
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The park was given by the Mark Juan family to the town, which was before really the big purchases of land, the open space, awareness, how important this all was.
And so looking back on it, it really is very significant that this family had seen to do that, and it is truly a gift.
It was a brilliant gift. They were a brilliant family.
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