PEM is known for its historic houses — but the trees and plants that surround them are a historic treasure all their own. Between the museum campus in downtown Salem and the land surrounding PEM’s library and collection center in Rowley, Massachusetts, PEM properties cover more than nine acres of gardens and green spaces. In May 2024, PEM’s campus was designated as a Level 1 Arboretum by the global ArbNet Arboretum Accreditation Program and the Morton Register of Arboreta.
PEM’s constant list of improvements to its historic properties includes the care and keeping of its garden resources. After nearly nine years of renovations, the 1916 greenhouse behind Ropes Mansion on Essex Street is operational again. (Sisters Sarah, Mary and Eliza Ropes wanted to promote botany classes to young ladies). Radiant heat in the floors will allow PEM’s gardeners to overwinter plants and protect seedlings. Next on the list is replacing the hand-cranked ventilation with an automated system.
PEM’s Head Gardner, Robin Pydynkowski, and Horticulturist, Katelyn Sponholtz, have been hard at work this spring between applying for the arboretum designation and completing all their usual seasonal work to get the gardens going.
New plantings at Cotting-Smith House. Photo by Katie Sponholtz/PEM.
That work includes planting historically appropriate crops at the 17th-century John Ward House and sprucing up the gardens at the Cotting-Smith House for a wedding. Perhaps the biggest annual project is an epic arrangement of 5,000 plants at the Ropes Mansion Garden. We caught up with Robin and Katelyn to chat about what all of this means for the PEM community.
New plantings at Cotting-Smith House. Photo by Katie Sponholtz/PEM.
Q: What's going on here today at Ropes?
Robin: The roses are coming along. They're starting to bud up. The peonies are about to bloom. See that bed down there, with all those buds crusting the top? Those are all peonies. They're well over 100 years old and they're going to be magnificent.
Q: What do you like best about renewing the gardens year after year? How long do you see yourself continuing to do this?
Robin: It's ever hopeful. There's always that. I just take it all day by day. See how the gardens evolve, see how I evolve, and it's all good.
A happy head gardener in the Ropes Mansion Garden. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM.
A happy head gardener in the Ropes Mansion Garden. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM.
Photo by Ken Sawyer/PEM.
Some of the most fun is when somebody walks in for the first time. I remember a young lady who walked in and was speaking with her grandmother on the phone at the time, and she says, "Gram, I just walked into Disney," because she was surrounded with butterflies and flowers. It's interesting to see how other people see the garden through their eyes.
Photo by Ken Sawyer/PEM.
Q: Why does it matter that we're going to be an arboretum?
Robin: ArbNet is a truly global, tree-centric community with all kinds of resources, all kinds of information. We're certified as a Level 1 Arboretum, but we'll continue to pursue it. It involves the community. It involves education. It also, to my mind's eye, shows the commitment of the Peabody Essex Museum: this way we have committed to the living collection that we have here. It gives us a good way to expand it and to use the latest science, and I just find that thrilling.
The PEM Garden behind the museum. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM.
This community of international arboreta has that up-to-date scientific information, and they're willing to share it. Everybody's working together to talk about different issues, whether it's jumping worms eating the leaf litter or what's going on with beech leaf disease. There's a great amount of scientific knowledge on woody plants. We can bring that forward and use that right here to improve the campus.
The PEM Garden behind the museum. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM.
Q: What are you most excited about?
Katelyn: Seeing progress with some of the trees and being able to plant new ones. Hopefully, planting some more at the Rowley campus as well. That was another thing we did all winter: Map that out and design it. We don't get a lot of opportunities to plant things in downtown Salem that are going to become ginormous — like a scarlet oak, just a giant — but Rowley is pretty much a blank canvas for us.
Robin: Yeah, that's a big building. It needs to be connected with the earth it sits on. We've got the room there to do that. The arboretum thing is really exciting to my mind's eye because we really can go forward and take care of these plants the way they should be taken care of. I'm hoping that everybody will see a marked change on campus within the next several years. We want it to be respected and to take stewardship of it.
Q: Tell me about PEM’s experiments in growing food.
Katelyn: Anything that grows, we grow, basically. It's historic, so it makes sense. If they couldn't eat it or make medicine out of it, our ancestors weren't growing it.
Robin: They were messy, and that works for us. They only had so much time.
Katelyn: Like the Three Sisters method, an Indigenous gardening method that’s designed so that you can set it and forget it. All you do is harvest it. The Three Sisters are squash, beans and corn. The squash grows as your ground cover. Then you have the corn, and the beans grow up the corn.
Q: What's in store next for PEM’s garden volunteers?
Robin: We're going to ID all the trees. The arboretum proposal included 47 pages of details for every woody plant, including current status, projected care, common and scientific name and any historical anecdotes. Because these are living things, that’s an ever-changing and evolving list that we need to maintain.
Katelyn: There's also the educational aspect. We'll have tours for our volunteers to learn the history. Also, we’re now connected to all the arboreta around us, so we can visit and see how they run their programs.
Robin: Everybody went to the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University for a lecture on bonsai because we have bonsai at our Yin Yu Tang home now. We need to learn more!
Katelyn: At the Arnold, we got a good tip for a beneficial insect company that we're now connected with, and we wouldn't have known about it if we didn't go there.
Robin: John Robinson, who first designed the Ropes garden, was friends with Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arnold Arboretum. It was a very exciting time for botanists at the turn of the century. All this plant material was coming in (mainly from Asia) and they didn't even know what some of it was. It still had to be classified, it still had to be identified. Sargent gave Robinson 91 woody plants for Ropes. That's a big tree to move from Jamaica Plain to Salem!
Q: People come to the museum to look at an old object and say, "what is the provenance?" We're doing that with trees now?
Katelyn: Yeah, they're just still alive and they're still growing! I started in 2020, and the progress we've made since then is really cool to watch. Life paused in many ways during the pandemic, but plants don't pause. They do not stop growing.
Robin: You can't put mother nature on a shelf and say, "Hold on, now. We don't have the budget. We'll get there eventually." You just do what you can do and don't give up.
Q: What do you think John Robinson would say now?
Robin: Oh my goodness. I think he'd be delighted. The arboretum for us is beyond words. We can finally do what we should be doing. I'm so excited.
The Ropes Mansion Garden is free to visit, and is open 365 days a year from sunrise to sunset.
Calling all green thumbs
PEM is looking for garden volunteers to help maintain the historic Ropes Mansion garden and other properties on our campus. Help our green spaces bloom all summer long!
Sign up at pem.org.
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Press Release
Peabody Essex Museum celebrates its gardens and green spaces with designation as an arboretum
