Excerpt on Cox Arboretum from Vince Dooley’s Garden: The Horticultural Journey of a Football Coach
...reliance on information from those passionate plants people that have dedicated
themselves to evaluation and research has become increasingly more important, and my appreciation of their efforts grows with each season.
No one is appreciated more in this regard than Tom Cox and his supportive wife, Evelyn, who for the past two decades have devoted themselves to collecting, preserving, and evaluating plants and trees from around the world in their zone 7b arboretum.
Tom is a fellow Alabamian, but unlike me he grew up around a garden and developed early on a joy of learning about plants and trees. After retiring from the military he met his wife while working for BellSouth in Atlanta, and she became his number-one supporter of his horticulture passion. Tom and Evelyn started an arboretum in 1990 from fourteen acres that they had earlier bought to build a home near Canton, Georgia.
While Tom obsessed with learning everything he could about trees and plants, he
became, like many others, and me a Dr. Dirr disciple. We both were beneficiaries of
Dirr’s appreciation of those who are infected by the horticulture disease. Tom told me when he first attended conferences as an unknown, feeling somewhat isolated, Dirr would wave him over to join the crowd that was always gathered around the horticulture guru.
Tom always appreciated Dirr for that inclusion, calling him the person who helped him the most. Dirr admired Cox’s persistence and called him “phenomenal — he’s chasing the latest, greatest, craziest, most unusual trees in the world.” Today the Cox Arboretum <http://www.coxgardens.com/> as over 4,000 living specimens, displaying one of the largest private collections of temperate flora in the entire United States. Trees are a real passion, and he has over 600 representing some forty countries around the world. Recently Tom was selected as a member of the International Dendrology (study of trees) Society <http://www.dendrology.org/> that spans some fifty countries. There are only four members from the United States, and Tom is proud to be in that exclusive body whose mission is “to study, conserve and protect woody plants and shrubs throughout the world.”
In conjunction with his passion for trees he developed a special interest in conifers, the cone-bearing woody plants. There are more than 500 species representing some of the smallest, largest, and oldest trees in the world. Following the Cox pattern of persistence he became the first southerner to be elected national president of the society, and Evelyn became the editor of the Conifer Quarterly. Today Tom is co-writing a book on conifers of the South with Dr. John Ruter, professor of horticulture research at the University of Georgia on the Tifton campus.
I first met Tom when I toured his arboretum with Dirr a few years after he opened the
garden. I had just gotten the bug after taking a few of Dirr‘s courses and started following him on various road trips. I was a raw but enthusiastic learner as I followed Tom and Dirr, trying to absorb their horticultural dialogue as we walked from one plant and tree to the next. While I knew little about what was going on, I was observant enough to recall that the arboretum was having growing pains, and I thought to myself it was in much need of maturity. What a difference ten years makes in a garden; I returned a decade later to an absolutely amazing arboretum.
I spent that entire day getting a one-on-one tour from Tom who, like me, enjoys not only the plants and trees but their history. I was taking notes as fast as I could, picking up some educational gems from Tom. I was aware that the common feature of most all conifers is that they produce cones. The word conifer means in Latin “to bear cones.” I was not aware, however, that there are exceptions: for example, junipers that produce fleshy, berrylike cones and yews that produce a naked seed with a fleshy covering.
Tom further mentioned there were five conifers that are deciduous. I was aware of four and have them in my garden. The first is the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) and next is a close relative, the dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides ). They can be hard to tell apart, but thanks to Dirr’s course I was able to answer Tom’s question in that regard. The leaves of the bald cypress are alternate, while the dawn redwood leaves are opposite. The third deciduous conifer is the Larix , or larch l and I have a weeping form by the creek. Last is the golden larch (Pseudolarix amabilis), regarded as the golden coin tree in China, and I somehow ended up with three in the garden.
I was not familiar with the fifth deciduous conifer, a Chinese swamp cypress
(Glyptostrobus pensilis) believed to bring good luck in China. It is rare in all of China
except in the river delta in Guandong Province. Glyptotrobus pensilis is the only species in the genus, and I rather suspect in time the small tree that produces cypress knees will become extinct one day.
Some conifers are hard to distinguish from others, but Tom pointed out a good key to identify a false cypress (Chamaecyparis). He showed me the backside of the leaf that is identified by tiny white Xs (in some cases Ys); up on close observation they are
recognizable, and this key is a tremendous help since there are some five false cypress species representing hundreds of cultivars.
While we were discussing conifers I got an additional education on one of my most
favorite trees, a Deodar or Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara). It is a graceful tree, and I like the hand-grenade-looking erect cones produce noticeably in the upper branches of the trees. I observed that Tom had a cedar where the branches almost touch the ground, and I could see multitudes of pinky-finger-size cones that I assumed would grow up to be the hand-grenade cones in time.
I revealed my ignorance and Tom enlightened me that the small cones on the bottom
were the male cones that would send up a cloud of yellow pollen to pollinate the female cones. The cedar is monoecious, meaning that on the same tree or plant there are male and female reproductive organs in separate structures. It was fun to pick up this tidbit, and the next day, driving by a beautiful Deodor a cedar by the house, I noticed the multitude of male cones on the lower branches and smiled with my new knowledge, looking forward to the fall when they will send up their cloud of yellow pollen.
Tom was filling me with a lot of knowledge and I had little to give back, except when we were discussing the cedars of Lebanon (Cedrus libani). Since Barbara is third generation Fleabanes, we traveled the country few years ago. She was in pursuit of her heritage, and I was in pursuit of the cedars of Lebanon; a tree that at one time covered almost the entire country. Today there are few left except for a cluster preserved on top of a mountain in the national forest in the Cedars of Lebanon region. 0ur Athens friend Tony Salloum, a native of Lebanon, was our escort and took us up to the town of Bicharia to see those magnificent trees. I mentioned it to Tom, and I believe this the only place in the world he has not been to observe the great trees of the world. That might also be true of IT many mentors, including Dr. Dirr.
Tom did mention the Bedgebury National Pinetum in England <http://www.bedgeburypinetum.org.uk/>, explaining that pinetum did not refer to pines but ito a collection of conifers . He asked me if I had ever been to see this collection of over 10 ,000 trees and shrubs — the most complete collection of temperate conifers in the world. I was on a roll at that point and answered yes. I to him I had been there with Dr. Dirr several years ago and saw a Leyland cypress (xCupressocyparis leylandii) that was 130 feet tall. Tom was pleased with my response. I didn’t contribute much after that during our tour but thoroughly enjoyed Tom pointing out plants and trees (and an occasional horticulture oddity) and throwing in some historical points of interest.
At that point Tom excused himself to meet with an electrician who had come to check the irrigation system that had been struck by lightning the previous night. This gave me a chance to reflect on the pinetum discussion, which reminded me of the University of Georgia’s state arboretum in Jackson County, near Braselton, called Thompson Mills Forest <http://warnell.forestry.uga.edu/warnell/tmf/>. The arboretum features a pinetum that contains all the native conifers of Georgia and more than a hundred species of gymnosperms from twenty-seven countries. The enthusiastic keeper of the 318-acre arboretum, Bill Lott, has given me several tours of this state educational laboratory. Mean while, Tom returned and we continued our tour of the Cox Arboretum.
We passed an Osage-orange tree (Madura pomifera) and Tom called it “bois d’arc,”
explaining that the French expression means, “bow of the wood,” since the Indians used the rot-resistant tree to make bows. The best bows are still made from the wood today. The tree was also used in the United States as a hedgerow and that use was a factor in the Civil War battle of Franklin, Tennessee, a Confederate disaster late in the war. There also is a colony of Osage-orange trees in the Barnsley Garden Resort near Adairsville, Georgia <http://www.barnsleyresort.com/>. I saw them there several years ago, which prompted my search to identify these trees with their huge orange-like fruit. The search unfolded an interesting history centered on the Osage Indians of the lower Midwest plains.
Tom then pointed to a tung oil tree (Vemicia fordii), stating that Henry Ford once planted it in groves in Florida to extract furniture oil from the seed pods. It is still used today in the paint and varnish industry.
We passed a couple of Snowbells, the first a Styrax japonicus called ‘Emerald Pagoda’
that he called the late Dr. J. C. Raulston’s “greatest contribution to horticulture.” The
newest Styrax Tom is excited about is from Taiwan (China) called Styrax formosanus,
which blooms earlier than any in the genus. He is also excited about his maple from
China (Acer pentaphyllum) that he explained was the rarest maple on Earth. Another
interesting maple we passed was a striped snake bark maple. I remember I had gotten one from Dirr but forgot the species. When I got home I checked and found I have an Acer capilipes, one of fourteen Asiatic snake bark maples, the same species Tom has in the arboretum. The green bark, with light green and red brown stripes, provides year-round interest in my garden. I also acquired another snake bark cultivar Acer tegmentosum from Mildred Fockele, director of horticulture at the Atlanta Botanical Garden <http://www.atlantabotanicalgarden.org/>.
At the start of the walk next to the house, Tom pointed out the Wollem pine (Wollemia nobiis) a new introduction from Australia that he is evaluating for growth adaptability in the South. What got my attention were the numerous dwarf Ginkgo biloba he was evaluating. He has at least ten varieties of this fascinating tree whose history dates back over 150 million years. Because my ‘Witch’s Broom’ dwarf ginkgo has per formed well, I am anxious to follow the evaluation of Tom’s dwarf selections.
I was also impressed with the work Tom is doing crossing Abies firma (Japenese fir), the amazing heat-tolerant fir, with several other firs that do not hold up in the South. His conclusion is that any cross with the heat-tolerant Abies firma will produce spectacular heat-tolerant firs. The list of plants in the Cox Arboretum goes on and on. Tom’s collection of redbuds (Cercis species) got my attention also, along with a must-have weeping parrotia, assuming I can find room on “weepers creek” in the garden.
The industry will long be indebted to Tom for the work he has done at his arboretum. He calls it his legacy he explains, “Some people leave books. I leave trees!”
-- From Vince Dooley's Garden: A Horticultural Journey of a Football Coach, John F.
Blair, Publisher. This excerpt used with permission of Vince Dooley.
...reliance on information from those passionate plants people that have dedicated
themselves to evaluation and research has become increasingly more important, and my appreciation of their efforts grows with each season.
No one is appreciated more in this regard than Tom Cox and his supportive wife, Evelyn, who for the past two decades have devoted themselves to collecting, preserving, and evaluating plants and trees from around the world in their zone 7b arboretum.
Tom is a fellow Alabamian, but unlike me he grew up around a garden and developed early on a joy of learning about plants and trees. After retiring from the military he met his wife while working for BellSouth in Atlanta, and she became his number-one supporter of his horticulture passion. Tom and Evelyn started an arboretum in 1990 from fourteen acres that they had earlier bought to build a home near Canton, Georgia.
While Tom obsessed with learning everything he could about trees and plants, he
became, like many others, and me a Dr. Dirr disciple. We both were beneficiaries of
Dirr’s appreciation of those who are infected by the horticulture disease. Tom told me when he first attended conferences as an unknown, feeling somewhat isolated, Dirr would wave him over to join the crowd that was always gathered around the horticulture guru.
Tom always appreciated Dirr for that inclusion, calling him the person who helped him the most. Dirr admired Cox’s persistence and called him “phenomenal — he’s chasing the latest, greatest, craziest, most unusual trees in the world.” Today the Cox Arboretum <http://www.coxgardens.com/> as over 4,000 living specimens, displaying one of the largest private collections of temperate flora in the entire United States. Trees are a real passion, and he has over 600 representing some forty countries around the world. Recently Tom was selected as a member of the International Dendrology (study of trees) Society <http://www.dendrology.org/> that spans some fifty countries. There are only four members from the United States, and Tom is proud to be in that exclusive body whose mission is “to study, conserve and protect woody plants and shrubs throughout the world.”
In conjunction with his passion for trees he developed a special interest in conifers, the cone-bearing woody plants. There are more than 500 species representing some of the smallest, largest, and oldest trees in the world. Following the Cox pattern of persistence he became the first southerner to be elected national president of the society, and Evelyn became the editor of the Conifer Quarterly. Today Tom is co-writing a book on conifers of the South with Dr. John Ruter, professor of horticulture research at the University of Georgia on the Tifton campus.
I first met Tom when I toured his arboretum with Dirr a few years after he opened the
garden. I had just gotten the bug after taking a few of Dirr‘s courses and started following him on various road trips. I was a raw but enthusiastic learner as I followed Tom and Dirr, trying to absorb their horticultural dialogue as we walked from one plant and tree to the next. While I knew little about what was going on, I was observant enough to recall that the arboretum was having growing pains, and I thought to myself it was in much need of maturity. What a difference ten years makes in a garden; I returned a decade later to an absolutely amazing arboretum.
I spent that entire day getting a one-on-one tour from Tom who, like me, enjoys not only the plants and trees but their history. I was taking notes as fast as I could, picking up some educational gems from Tom. I was aware that the common feature of most all conifers is that they produce cones. The word conifer means in Latin “to bear cones.” I was not aware, however, that there are exceptions: for example, junipers that produce fleshy, berrylike cones and yews that produce a naked seed with a fleshy covering.
Tom further mentioned there were five conifers that are deciduous. I was aware of four and have them in my garden. The first is the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) and next is a close relative, the dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides ). They can be hard to tell apart, but thanks to Dirr’s course I was able to answer Tom’s question in that regard. The leaves of the bald cypress are alternate, while the dawn redwood leaves are opposite. The third deciduous conifer is the Larix , or larch l and I have a weeping form by the creek. Last is the golden larch (Pseudolarix amabilis), regarded as the golden coin tree in China, and I somehow ended up with three in the garden.
I was not familiar with the fifth deciduous conifer, a Chinese swamp cypress
(Glyptostrobus pensilis) believed to bring good luck in China. It is rare in all of China
except in the river delta in Guandong Province. Glyptotrobus pensilis is the only species in the genus, and I rather suspect in time the small tree that produces cypress knees will become extinct one day.
Some conifers are hard to distinguish from others, but Tom pointed out a good key to identify a false cypress (Chamaecyparis). He showed me the backside of the leaf that is identified by tiny white Xs (in some cases Ys); up on close observation they are
recognizable, and this key is a tremendous help since there are some five false cypress species representing hundreds of cultivars.
While we were discussing conifers I got an additional education on one of my most
favorite trees, a Deodar or Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara). It is a graceful tree, and I like the hand-grenade-looking erect cones produce noticeably in the upper branches of the trees. I observed that Tom had a cedar where the branches almost touch the ground, and I could see multitudes of pinky-finger-size cones that I assumed would grow up to be the hand-grenade cones in time.
I revealed my ignorance and Tom enlightened me that the small cones on the bottom
were the male cones that would send up a cloud of yellow pollen to pollinate the female cones. The cedar is monoecious, meaning that on the same tree or plant there are male and female reproductive organs in separate structures. It was fun to pick up this tidbit, and the next day, driving by a beautiful Deodor a cedar by the house, I noticed the multitude of male cones on the lower branches and smiled with my new knowledge, looking forward to the fall when they will send up their cloud of yellow pollen.
Tom was filling me with a lot of knowledge and I had little to give back, except when we were discussing the cedars of Lebanon (Cedrus libani). Since Barbara is third generation Fleabanes, we traveled the country few years ago. She was in pursuit of her heritage, and I was in pursuit of the cedars of Lebanon; a tree that at one time covered almost the entire country. Today there are few left except for a cluster preserved on top of a mountain in the national forest in the Cedars of Lebanon region. 0ur Athens friend Tony Salloum, a native of Lebanon, was our escort and took us up to the town of Bicharia to see those magnificent trees. I mentioned it to Tom, and I believe this the only place in the world he has not been to observe the great trees of the world. That might also be true of IT many mentors, including Dr. Dirr.
Tom did mention the Bedgebury National Pinetum in England <http://www.bedgeburypinetum.org.uk/>, explaining that pinetum did not refer to pines but ito a collection of conifers . He asked me if I had ever been to see this collection of over 10 ,000 trees and shrubs — the most complete collection of temperate conifers in the world. I was on a roll at that point and answered yes. I to him I had been there with Dr. Dirr several years ago and saw a Leyland cypress (xCupressocyparis leylandii) that was 130 feet tall. Tom was pleased with my response. I didn’t contribute much after that during our tour but thoroughly enjoyed Tom pointing out plants and trees (and an occasional horticulture oddity) and throwing in some historical points of interest.
At that point Tom excused himself to meet with an electrician who had come to check the irrigation system that had been struck by lightning the previous night. This gave me a chance to reflect on the pinetum discussion, which reminded me of the University of Georgia’s state arboretum in Jackson County, near Braselton, called Thompson Mills Forest <http://warnell.forestry.uga.edu/warnell/tmf/>. The arboretum features a pinetum that contains all the native conifers of Georgia and more than a hundred species of gymnosperms from twenty-seven countries. The enthusiastic keeper of the 318-acre arboretum, Bill Lott, has given me several tours of this state educational laboratory. Mean while, Tom returned and we continued our tour of the Cox Arboretum.
We passed an Osage-orange tree (Madura pomifera) and Tom called it “bois d’arc,”
explaining that the French expression means, “bow of the wood,” since the Indians used the rot-resistant tree to make bows. The best bows are still made from the wood today. The tree was also used in the United States as a hedgerow and that use was a factor in the Civil War battle of Franklin, Tennessee, a Confederate disaster late in the war. There also is a colony of Osage-orange trees in the Barnsley Garden Resort near Adairsville, Georgia <http://www.barnsleyresort.com/>. I saw them there several years ago, which prompted my search to identify these trees with their huge orange-like fruit. The search unfolded an interesting history centered on the Osage Indians of the lower Midwest plains.
Tom then pointed to a tung oil tree (Vemicia fordii), stating that Henry Ford once planted it in groves in Florida to extract furniture oil from the seed pods. It is still used today in the paint and varnish industry.
We passed a couple of Snowbells, the first a Styrax japonicus called ‘Emerald Pagoda’
that he called the late Dr. J. C. Raulston’s “greatest contribution to horticulture.” The
newest Styrax Tom is excited about is from Taiwan (China) called Styrax formosanus,
which blooms earlier than any in the genus. He is also excited about his maple from
China (Acer pentaphyllum) that he explained was the rarest maple on Earth. Another
interesting maple we passed was a striped snake bark maple. I remember I had gotten one from Dirr but forgot the species. When I got home I checked and found I have an Acer capilipes, one of fourteen Asiatic snake bark maples, the same species Tom has in the arboretum. The green bark, with light green and red brown stripes, provides year-round interest in my garden. I also acquired another snake bark cultivar Acer tegmentosum from Mildred Fockele, director of horticulture at the Atlanta Botanical Garden <http://www.atlantabotanicalgarden.org/>.
At the start of the walk next to the house, Tom pointed out the Wollem pine (Wollemia nobiis) a new introduction from Australia that he is evaluating for growth adaptability in the South. What got my attention were the numerous dwarf Ginkgo biloba he was evaluating. He has at least ten varieties of this fascinating tree whose history dates back over 150 million years. Because my ‘Witch’s Broom’ dwarf ginkgo has per formed well, I am anxious to follow the evaluation of Tom’s dwarf selections.
I was also impressed with the work Tom is doing crossing Abies firma (Japenese fir), the amazing heat-tolerant fir, with several other firs that do not hold up in the South. His conclusion is that any cross with the heat-tolerant Abies firma will produce spectacular heat-tolerant firs. The list of plants in the Cox Arboretum goes on and on. Tom’s collection of redbuds (Cercis species) got my attention also, along with a must-have weeping parrotia, assuming I can find room on “weepers creek” in the garden.
The industry will long be indebted to Tom for the work he has done at his arboretum. He calls it his legacy he explains, “Some people leave books. I leave trees!”
-- From Vince Dooley's Garden: A Horticultural Journey of a Football Coach, John F.
Blair, Publisher. This excerpt used with permission of Vince Dooley.