Arboretum

Potter Guy Wolff demonstrates his craft during the 20th anniversary of the Scott Arboretum Biennial Plant Sale on the Swarthmore College campus. Wolff, based in Litchfield County, Conn., was on hand Friday and Saturday. The sale featured plants found in popular gardens at the arboretum, as well as other varieties.

The Barnes Foundation will spend more than $300,000 in the coming months to revitalize its property in Merion, including its arboretum, in preparation for the continued use of the land and gallery space. After the galleries are temporarily closed July 3, the art will move to the new Barnes home on the Parkway in Center City, expected to open next June. At a Barnes Community Day that attracted 450 neighbors throughout Sunday, executive director and president Derek Gillman - himself a Merion resident - told visitors "the Barnes is not leaving Merion.

The Arco Chemical Co. wants to plant several dozen trees along the West Chester Pike medial strip that borders the front of the company headquarters in Newtown Square. "We've tried to maintain a balance with nature here," said Gerald Davis, Arco manager of public relations. The 312-acre Arco site is a certified arboretum, containing more than 300 varieties of trees and shrubs. As part of the company's commitment to the surrounding community, an as- yet-undetermined number of flowering trees and shrubs will be planted along the medial strip that runs from Newtown Street Road (Route 252)

The Barnes Foundation will spend more than $300,000 to revitalize its grounds and structures in Merion in the coming months, in preparation for the continued use of the arboretum and the galleries. After the galleries are temporarily closed July 3, the art is moving to the new Barnes home on the Parkway in Center City, expected to open next June. At a Barnes Community Day that attracted 450 neighbors throughout the day Sunday, executive director and president Derek Gillman- himself a Merion resident - told the visitors that "the Barnes is not leaving Merion.

Biblical passages mark the trail of the arboretum at the Church of the Saviour in Wayne. The messages are there to inspire hikers as they meander through two miles of winding paths in 29 acres behind the church's sanctuary. "We're not trying to save souls, but we are trying to get people into the church," said Don Young, director of the nature center. Young selects the verses and hand-paints them on small pieces of wood, which are tacked onto stakes in the ground. There will be 26 such messages on this spiritual journey, beginning with A ("And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air. " Genesis 2:19)

For the first time since 1975, there won't be an outdoor-sculpture exhibition in Philadelphia this summer. Marsha Moss, who has single-handedly organized the shows, held for the last three summers at the arboretum in Fairmount Park, has canceled this year's edition. Moss said she took the action because the city was unlikely to help defray the expenses of an outdoor show, which it has done in the past. She has turned back an $8,000 grant she received for the show from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, she said, and has notified about 150 artists who responded to a call for proposals that the show will not take place.

There is, perhaps, no more energetic creature on Earth than a 7-year-old boy, zipping here, crashing there, all elbows and knees. So it comes as a bit of a shock to see a half-dozen uniformed second graders from Chestnut Hill Academy standing still, eyes focused on a tiny tree, as one of them tilts a watering can downward to give the sapling a drink. Young Nate McDowell explains: "This is an American chestnut tree. There used to be a lot of them on the East Coast, but they got a disease called blight, and a lot got sick and died.

Take a little girl. Wrap a ribbon in her hair. Call her an angel. Easy. Taking a college campus and calling it an arboretum doesn't involve much more than wrapping a ribbon around a tree trunk. Yesterday, Villanova University dedicated its campus as an arboretum - a place for the study of trees. Simple. But no ribbon. The purpose was not so much to create something new as to formally recognize what had been there all along - trees of significance. It also was meant to recognize the work of college staffers who had responded to alumni complaints over the last five years by rescuing long- neglected trees and shrubs.

Sculpture in the park is a fact of life, a 19th-century concept to which we have become accustomed and toward which we might even feel affectionate. In Fairmount Park, for example, the sculpture has so totally insinuated itself into the environment that the park would seem less "natural" if all the statues were suddenly removed. By choosing to locate her summer sculpture exhibition at Fairmount Park this year, Marsha Moss shrewdly exploits this tradition. In relocating from Penn's Landing, she has moved from a site that has become a progressive summer carnival, and one where the placement options are somewhat limited, to a milieu in which even bad sculpture can be redeemed by the sylvan setting.

Charles Fulton of Newtown Township has been appointed to the board of trustees of Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve Association. He heads the Penn's Woods Memorial Committee, which manages the association's arboretum in Washington Crossing Historic Park. "We have a nine-acre arboretum of trees which are dedicated to people both living and dead," Fulton said. For a donation of $100, he said, a tree would be planted, and for a $50 donation a shrub would be added to the arboretum.