ENST Graduate Student, David Ruppert, Gives Away Hundreds of Seedlings

David Ruppert's approach to preserving family trees is a bit unconventional. He plants them by the hundreds.

The College Park resident's quest to preserve and expand the seed of local vegetation began years ago on his family's Olney property, when a magnificent white oak began to fail and produced in its death throes a large acorn yield, called a mast. "Sometimes when they know it's the end they'll produce a last huge one," Ruppert said of the event. "It was a truly gigantic white oak, probably one of the biggest white oaks in the county."

To honor the tree, Ruppert decided to foster a new generation of the Olney oak and collected the acorns, storing them in his refrigerator in simulated winter and cultivating them into viable seedlings by spring. He planted those and the effort sprouted another offshoot: a new hobby.

Now a doctorate student in soil science at the University of Maryland, College Park, Ruppert has distributed hundreds of seedlings over the past three years at the annual Maryland Day on campus, encouraging patrons to plant them to preserve native horticulture heritage. Saturday, the day after Arbor Day, Ruppert will be on campus distributing 350 more oak, maple, persimmon, beech and other local tree varieties free to anyone who wants to plant one.

"It's kind of gotten bigger every year," Ruppert said of the effort, which is not related to his schoolwork, though it benefits from the greenhouse space he has on campus for soil experiments. "In fact, my adviser probably doesn't like that I do this; it's time I'm not focused on other things."

Ruppert said the list is very short of the native trees available at nurseries. "The tree genetics don't travel fast, which means our tree genetics are inherently local." Put those slow spreading processes up against shipped-in nursery trees and, "In effect, we're losing our natives."

In addition to the annual tree handout, Ruppert practices what he calls "guerilla gardening," an international movement to beautify neglected public spaces by planting things in them. In his case, he plants native trees, and being a veritable Johnny Appleseed of local forest DNA, even surrounds the seedlings with cages to protect them from deer and squirrels.

His mother, Barbara Ruppert of Kensington, said her son has been interested in trees since a childhood visit to Wye Oak State Park on the Eastern Shore. "I think it really caught his imagination," she said, and the family gave him Wye Oak saplings for his 21st birthday. Now, David Ruppert's tree craze is just a part of life, she said, and seedlings live in her dining room.

"He gets the whole family involved," she said. "It makes me really happy to know he's gotten something going where there are going to be these wonderful trees that are going to help the environment and make people happy so many years from now." David Ruppert said he's just trying to give trees a chance. "The odds of any particular acorn becoming an adult are vanishingly small," he said. "They're up against a lot and if we can get them in while they're already sprouted, they have a huge advantage."

Written by Jen Beasley, Gazette .net

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Last updated: 06/17/2009

ENST graduate student David Ruppert.