Climate Champ: Tim Boland

Every journalist has them — those sources who reply quickly, have deep and vast expertise, are kind, and are generous with their time.

Tim Boland is such a source. 

Wondering what, exactly, is so bad about invasive species? Call Tim. Curious about what makes fall foliage so colorful? Tim can tell you. Wondering about something as obscure as whether smoke from wildfires in Canada changes the color of hydrangeas on Martha’s Vineyard? Tim’s your guy. Can you plant seed paper? Tim’s got an answer. Why isn’t your milkweed growing? Ask Tim. (See links to all these stories below.)

So, when Tim Boland recently announced his retirement from his role as executive director of the Polly Hill Arboretum, you can imagine the collective groan that rose from newsrooms across the Vineyard and beyond. 

But Tim is much more than a patient and reliable expert. He is, at his core, a grower — someone who has spent his entire career placing literal and metaphorical seeds in soil, his mind on the question: How can I help this survive and grow? 

His career, as he describes it, has been one of “slow, enduring growth” — a phrase that sums up Tim’s philosophy. Fast-growing trees, he’ll tell you, sometimes don’t do well in nature. They can be brittle. The ones that tend to last are the ones that take their time.

Tim’s love of trees and plants started with his grandfather. Every year around Mother’s Day, the two of them would head out together to plant redbuds — “beautiful, lavender-flowered trees” native to Michigan, where Tim grew up. A couple a year, sometimes three. 

In high school, he got a landscaping job at a local hospital, and his passion really took root, leading him to enroll in every biology course he could find in both high school and junior college. Later, at Michigan State, he dove into the school’s robust agriculture program.

With no position lined up upon graduation, Tim responded to a notice on a job board for something called a “curatorial internship” at Swarthmore College’s Scott Arboretum in Pennsylvania (established and endowed, incidentally, by the Scott family to honor the patriarch — class of 1895 — and inventor of the paper towel). Tim describes it as “pretty much a tree museum on campus.” 

In 1986, a mentor encouraged Tim to take a year-long fellowship at the Royal Horticultural Society in England. When he talked his then-girlfriend (now wife), Laura, into coming with him, her parents were not impressed. Tim laughs: “We were, what do you say, not yet married.” But the opportunity to spend what he calls “a year growing plants” was too good to pass up. “I always say America’s original art form is jazz, whereas [England’s] art form is gardening.”

Back at Michigan State, Tim became a plant propagator, running a 26-acre nursery with what he describes as “free run on what I wanted to grow.” There was something special about the public garden at Michigan State that piqued a deeper curiosity in Tim. It was set up “like a European garden,” Tim says, with different sections designated for different types of plants, including an area devoted to medicinal plants, and even one for American weeds. Plants, he says, were arranged by their plant family. “I got very interested. Why is that plant in that plant family? Why is an oak related to a beech? Why is it not related to a maple?” The Grounds Department agreed to pay for Tim to get a master’s degree in plant taxonomy — the study of plants’ evolution and relationships — and Tim went back to school while continuing to work.

He spent a lot of time in the herbarium, a vault of dried and pressed specimens that he calls “the maps to the plant kingdom.” He used location data on old specimens to track down living plants in the field, then visited them to gather seeds. The herbarium’s curator, who’d noticed Tim’s particular interest in oak specimens, proposed another opportunity to Tim: a month-long trip with him to Mexico, to study the oaks there.

Mexico, perhaps surprisingly, is a hotbed of oak diversity — home to roughly 225 of the world’s 430 species — and the trees, which have leathery foliage, look nothing like the oaks of the northern United States. “You wouldn’t even recognize them,” Tim says. 

With expanded knowledge and experience, Tim landed a job as a curator at Chicago’s Morton Arboretum. Located on nearly 2,000 acres about 30 miles west of the city, the arboretum specialized in trees and tree science and was, Tim says, “a great spot.” He loved the work. What he didn’t love: a 45-minute commute each way, through a city populated by 11 million people and not nearly enough trees.

Four years into the job, he heard about a position at the Polly Hill Arboretum on Martha’s Vineyard. “Are you kidding me?” he recalls his wife asking. 

But Tim had already met Polly Hill herself, when he was just 24 and delivering his first public talk on hollies, a subject fed to him by another mentor (he’s had a lot!) who volunteered with The Holly Society of America and who insisted he needed to hone his public speaking skills. Polly, then in her 80s, was in the audience. Aware of her reputation as a “plant genius,” with a particular love for the hollies of Martha’s Vineyard, he recalls feeling nervous and thinking, why does she have to be here? 

He needn’t have worried, he says. Polly was generous with her praise. And 20 years later, he found himself applying, despite his wife’s wariness about life on a small island, for a job at the arboretum Polly had created on Martha’s Vineyard. He accepted the job not long after taking his family to visit the Island. It helped when they got a glimpse of what surrounded the house where they’d live: Trees. And plants. And critters. Then aged 7 and 11, Tim’s two kids decided that the Vineyard would be a great place to grow up.

When he arrived in 2002, Tim found an organization with what he calls “some problems.” A building on site had been condemned; a barn needed renovation; the infrastructure that a functioning arboretum required didn’t yet exist.

But there was a board of about 15 people, some of them deeply committed year-rounders who were, as Tim puts it, “the mechanics of it.” And there was also Polly herself, then 95, but still very clear about what mattered. 

Tim worked as a curator for two years, then became director when the Arboretum’s founding director retired. One of the first things he did was to create the organization’s volunteer program. He started with just two, but today there are a dozen, coming twice a week to do what he calls “hard labor” on the grounds, greenhouse work, and pressing, gluing, and labeling specimens in the herbarium. 

By the time Polly died in April 2007, at 100 years old, Tim was guiding the organization through a deliberate, patient expansion. With the help of a facilitator, the organization had drafted a strategic plan that included renovating Polly’s house to include a research library, building a greenhouse, and adding a maintenance building. These improvements happened over a number of years; a nonprofit organization, the Arboretum relies largely on fundraising for both operations and capital improvements, and major building projects occur only once the money to support them is in hand. 

Through it all, Tim was guided by a simple rule: don’t ruin the spirit of the landscape. 

He and the board made a significant decision to focus Polly Hill’s work on native plants, in part as a way of signaling the organization’s investment in the local community. Documenting local plants is an important conservation tool. Now, in the herbarium, staff and volunteers document everything growing on the Vineyard, native and non-native alike. The collection currently holds nearly 5,000 specimens, comprising about 90% of all plants growing on the Island. The entire collection is digitized and accessible online, and shared with botanical gardens around the world through a consortium of Northeastern institutions accounting for regional flora. 

One particularly interesting discovery they’ve made through this documentation process, Tim says, is how many rare species exist on the Vineyard. “We have probably about a dozen very globally rare plants,” he says, including the cleft-leaved hawthorne found nowhere else on the planet. There’s also a Green Adder’s–mouth orchid — tiny and easily overlooked — with just six other known populations in the world, and a purple milkweed that hadn’t been seen in over 60 years, spotted by the sharp-eyed BiodiversityWork’s Matt Pelikan as he drove along a busy road. 

Chancing upon that purple milkweed had important consequences. “When a plant is isolated and it doesn't have other plants to pollinate it,” Tim explains, “it becomes genetically kind of narrow. And so, out of hundreds of flowers [on this specimen] that could have produced milkweed pods, there was one.” The Arboretum harvested that one pod, and from it propagated 30 seedlings. Tim reported this discovery to the Massachusetts Natural Heritage program, which provided funding to go check on seven or eight other purple milkweed populations across the state — populations that haven’t been checked in 20 years. The Arboretum has secured funding for a project to collect specimens from these genetically isolated populations, in hopes that cross-pollinating them will help the subspecies grow stronger and recover. (See more about Matt Pelikan’s milkweed.)

These days, the Arboretum’s work feels more urgent than ever. When Polly started gardening in 1957, Tim estimates that roughly 15% of the world’s plants were under some form of threat — mostly in the tropics. Today, between climate change and habitat destruction, that figure stands at around 40% worldwide.

Nonetheless, Tim thinks it’s time to retire. 

When asked what he’ll miss, he doesn’t hesitate: walking into the greenhouse and seeing the seedlings; watching kids run freely through the grounds — something the official guides frown upon, but Tim delights in; and the volunteers, the ones who’ve shown up twice a week for decades, working side by side, sharing the stories of their lives. “People need to listen more,” Tim says. “In other cultures, they listen to old people.”

He won’t be gone entirely, but his future work will be around the edges. “I'm feeling almost like Polly,” he says. “She said, ‘I had my fun, and now it’s over.’ I have a respect for what’s next, almost a Buddhist detachment.” 

He’s planning to work on Polly Hill’s archives — hundreds of Polly’s letters going back to 1926, plus his own correspondence — and he may become a research associate, continuing his work on the Island’s flora. He’s also on the board of the International Oak Society, raising funds for conservation projects on four continents, including work in Mexico on sustainable harvesting of oaks for charcoal in communities too poor to have other fuel.

For now, he’ll continue to live on the Vineyard, walking past trees he grew from seed. “You’re like, oh, that tree,” he says, pausing. “I’ll miss the seedlings.”

What You Can Do

Read more about what Tim’s told Bluedot Living

• About invasive species
• About foliage
• About the color of hydrangeas
• About planting seed paper
• About why your milkweed might not be growing

Here’s the entire PHA collection.

Donate to The Polly Hill Arboretum.

Volunteer! Volunteers are welcome to give tours, guide school trips, help in the greenhouse, welcome guests in the visitor center, and assist with horticultural work: pollyhillarboretum.org/get-involved/volunteer/ or email: info@pollyhillarboretum.org

So, Who Was Polly Hill?

In 1926, according to the PHA website, Polly Hill’s parents purchased an old sheep farm property in West Tisbury called Barnard’s Inn Farm and created a family vacation home. Polly spent “many carefree summers” there. She married Julian Hill and began a family in Delaware, and with the passing of her parents, she and Julian took over management of the farm. Polly found the Vineyard “horticulturally impoverished,” and, at age 50, was determined to learn what else she could grow. So she began planting seeds. 

After much planting and experimenting, an arboretum gradually emerged, and soon enough Polly was being praised for her experimental approach and her recordkeeping, garnering awards along the way. “Polly wasn’t just an inspiration to gardeners,” the history on the site recounts, “she motivated anyone seeking the determination to change their life at any age.”

Polly Hill died at age 100, in 2007.  The Arboretum is home to 50+ acres of rare trees and shurbe, including Polly’s famous North Tisbury azaleas, the national stewartia collection, camellias, hollies (about which she was an expert), and many more. 

Find more history and visitor information at pollyhillarboretum.org.