Starting at Harvard and Falling for Your First Tree

Harvard’s freshman seminar “Tree” asks each student to choose a single tree among 16,000 at the Arnold Arboretum as their study partner for the semester. William Friedman, the arboretum’s director who created the course in 2020, acts more as a provocateur than a traditional professor, aiming to foster empathy for other organisms and to encourage students to unplug from the digital world.

The first class is a walk across the 281-acre arboretum, and from that field of woody plants each student selects a tree to be the subject of weekly assignments and a final project. Some gravitate to stature—a huge, 80-year-old dawn redwood is picked most years—while others choose by personal or cultural resonance: Jacob Kiflu chose a varileaf lilac for its “sprawling architecture,” and Stella Rosa Guest was drawn to a red-leaf Japanese maple, reading Japanese poems and practicing momiji-gari as she made the tree intimate.

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