Waugh Arboretum plans Arbor Day activities

rbor Day will be celebrated on campus Friday, April 25 with a variety of activities organized by the campus's Waugh Arboretum.

     Kousa dogwood, Fraser fir and red oak seedlings will be sold for $3 each in front of Memorial Hall from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Arboretum T-shirts also will be on sale. The rain location is the Lincoln Campus Center concourse.

     Brian Konieczny of Landscape Services will conduct a workshop on pruning rhododendrons at 10:30 a.m. in the Rhododendron Garden behind University Health Services and below Hillside.

     The Class of 2003 and the Stockbridge School senior class will plant trees near the Isenberg School of Management from 11-11:30 a.m.

     A container gardening lecture by Sandy Clark will be presented at 11:45 a.m. in 105 Hills North. The talk is sponsored by the Campus Beautification Committee.

     A workshop on pruning forsythia will be led by Ray LaClaire of Grounds Maintenance at 1 p.m. in the Rhododendron Garden.

     Beginning at noon "Art in the Gardens: A Multimedia Performance at Durfee Conservatory" will explore how plants and the environment can offer a peaceful retreat from everyday stress. A series of linked presentations will underscore this theme.

     At 12:10 p.m., guides will direct the audience to a combined performance of the Kendo Club and UMass Fencing groups in full exercises in the exterior garden theaters - the Glade and Beech Forest. The rigorous interplay represents the universal struggle to seek justice and settle unresolved conflict.

     Guides will lead audience members in transition past them and eventually come to view several artists creating bonsai trees in another connected in the Black Pine Courtyard. The bonsai artists will include John Altyn of Los Angeles, U.S. Air Force Capt. Peter Holmsted, landscape architect Bruce Thomas of Facilities Planning, and several students from "Bonsai Basics," taught by Durfee director John Tristan. Entering the sanctuary of the interior space of the Durfee Conservatory will continue the inner peace that comes from contemplating such activity. The emphasis inside the conservatory will be on the bonsai trees and Japanese garden. "The Zen Garden at Durfee Conservatory," a video by Peter Averill, documenting the creation of the interior Japanese garden, will be premiered. Still portraits of Durfee Conservatory vegetation awaking from winter also will be displayed. All these visual images combined will evoke reflection into pathways open to travel. Our own thoughts and the omnipresent guides will help us through the symbolic cycles of our journeys.

     The performance cycle will be repeated at 1:05 p.m. to provide audience members with flexible lunch hour schedules more opportunities to experience the production.

     The Zen Garden at Durfee Conservatory" traces the creation of a new Japanese garden located at the historic plant house. The garden project was a collaboration of students working directly with designer Thomas Matsuda and Tristan during the spring 2002 semester.

     In addition to directing and filming the video, Averill photographed "Portraits of Durfee" for display in the conservatory and courtyard. His compositions of video poems of Matsuda's sculpture garden works at the Du Bois Library and other campus landscapes will be simultaneously displayed on monitors at multiple locations in the Durfee complex during next week's program.