May 30, 2002
Urban Horticulture struggles to rebuild
For the UW’s Center for Urban Horticulture it’s been a year of re-creating and reconnecting — work that’s far from done even a year after an arson attack damaged the center’s main building, rendering most if it beyond repair.
On the anniversary of the firebombing May 21, center director Tom Hinckley and his colleagues recognized the support the center has received from the UW, the state Legislature, friends and donors.
For example, donors ranging from those able to write checks for $15 to the ones able to contribute thousands have given more than $400,000 to make the replacement space bigger and add enhancements not possible within the basic budget for the building. And in this year of “rebuilding” on numerous fronts, Orin and Althea Soest of Sequim just created an $800,000 remainder trust to help one day pay the director’s salary.
Fifty faculty, staff and graduate students lost books, papers and workspace after the fire a year ago. Years of research on ecosystem health and plant science were destroyed or damaged, Hinckley says. Today a bare cement foundation sits where Merrill Hall’s labs and offices once stood. The section of Merrill Hall that housed the library and herbarium (an herbarium stores pressed plant samples for reference) remains but is unusable.
In addition to the $5.4 million appropriated by the UW and Legislature for rebuilding, the UW spent more than $1.2 million to recover materials from the damaged hall, obtain work and office space, pay salaries for recovery work, and demolish unsafe portions of Merrill, Hinckley says.
Over in Issacson Hall, one of the small buildings at the center that did not catch fire, the Northwest Horticulture Society, Seattle Garden Club and Puget Sound Mycological Society loaned their office space for the center’s use. Those offices, plus a classroom and graduate-student offices, became the center’s reception area and facilities office and, in December, space for the library and herbarium to reopen on a limited scale.
The library provides examples of what’s meant by using donor dollars to enlarge and enhance what will be built, Hinckley says. The library will be at least 25 percent larger with direct funds and a matching-fund challenge to other donors from the Miller Charitable Fund of Seattle. And the Northwest Horticultural Society established a fund with $10,000 and a commitment to raise $200,000 for library furnishings and shelving.
Washington State University has pledged to raise money for a larger amount of space for its Master Gardeners Program and the new, nonprofit Master Gardeners Foundation is contributing $80,000 and will have its offices at CUH. The Master Gardeners clinics resumed at CUH, on a smaller scale than before, last December.
Toward rebuilding, Miller Hull Partnership of Seattle was hired last year. The building design is at a critical point and the funds the center has on paper as of May 31 will determine the structural design of the building, Hinckley says.
Even after the end of the month, however, donations will be welcome. The center, for example, recently announced an opportunity to purchase floor tiles with various leaf designs engraved with donors’ names to pave the new lobby. Fund-raising continues for such things as:
- An alternative add-on, if there is donor money for design and construction, for an expanded lobby to make it easier for the public to get the information they want about plants, gardens and forest and urban resources. An enhanced lobby would provide a showcase for CUH work and the resources that are housed there — from student projects to rare books, from herbarium specimens to photo-essays of continuing education classes.
- Landscaping to provide a needed transition from the dense neighborhoods on one side to the wetlands and natural area on the Union Bay side.
- A possible, separate structure to house space for what’s termed an environmental forum, where natural resource planners could convene and have the latest technology available to discuss policy issues and interact with people around the world, Hinckley says.
Donations are welcome at the Center for Urban Horticulture — Recovery, University of Washington, Box 354115, Seattle, WA, 98195-4115. See the center’s plans at http://depts.washington.edu/urbhort/html/current/merrillhome.html.
The investigation into the arson continues, led by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in cooperation with the UW police and FBI. Lt. John Schultz of the UW said ATF has had a few people of interest but there are no suspects at this time.
Members of the terrorist group Earth Liberation Front, the group claiming responsibility for the fire a year ago, targeted the office of research associate professor Toby Bradshaw. They accused Bradshaw of genetically engineering poplar trees — that is, injecting the trees with poplar genes that had been changed in some way in the laboratory or by inserting genes from entirely different plants, insects or animals. U.S law says such transgenic trees may be used for research but can’t be released into the environment. Bradshaw was not genetically engineering poplar trees at the center but is interested in the technique as a research tool for understanding tree genetics.
Bradshaw has long used traditional tree-breeding techniques for studying the basic biology of poplar trees and trying to determine the genes that power such things as leaf size, growth and other characteristics. Poplar trees are far easier to work with than, say, Douglas-fir trees, which is what makes poplars such a good model for studying how genes express themselves in all trees.
The fire in Bradshaw’s office rapidly spread to labs and offices where faculty, staff and students from the UW and Washington State University conducted work on such things as preserving Washington’s endangered plants, finding ways to re-establish native grasses and plants in the region’s prairies where invasive non-natives now reign, rehabilitating wetlands and natural areas in our cities, and helping home gardeners and landscape professionals.
Undergraduate and graduate courses were compromised as faculty and graduate-teaching assistants struggled with lost materials and the aftermath of the fire. Caren Crandell, a master’s degree candidate at the time, said of the Web-based wetland restoration class she was conducting with associate professor Kern Ewing, “We were unable to get feedback to students for two-plus weeks, and they were unable to re-do any of their work, something we all had counted on as part of the learning process in this course.”
Numerous graduate students were forced to delay the completion dates for their degrees because of the fire.
