Bartlett Tree Experts has run on research since a horticulture teacher started it in 1907
Four generations of one family have run Bartlett Tree Experts, and the clearest record of their habits is an arboretum on a former horse farm outside Charlotte.
Stamford, CT
Before the automated system went in, the azaleas on Rhodie Hill got their water by hand. The hill stands 80 feet high at the R.A. Bartlett Research Laboratories and Arboretum outside Charlotte, North Carolina, and paths wind around it to the top. “In midsummer, it was challenging to stay ahead of the heat, especially because the water had to be manually hauled up the paths that wind around the hill,” Robert A. Bartlett Jr. wrote in Arnoldia, the magazine of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, in 2022.
His father, Robert Bartlett Sr., bought the 350-acre property in 1965, a few years after becoming president of the family business. It had been a working horse farm, with large fields and pastureland. The elder Bartlett planted azaleas and hollies, the start of collections that would grow into the tens of thousands. “In those early years, I remember seeing young trees begin to establish themselves and rise above the forage grasses,” his son wrote.
Bartlett Tree Experts cares for trees and shrubs on residential and commercial properties. By 2022 it had field offices across the United States and in Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is a family-owned company. Bartlett Jr. represented the third generation of family management when he wrote about the arboretum as chairman and chief executive, and a great-grandson of the founder was already in the company’s leadership. Through all of it, the family has held on to the founder’s emphasis on research. The Charlotte property, with its laboratory, training center, diagnostic clinic and arboretum, is where that emphasis is easiest to see.
Francis Alonzo Bartlett was born in 1882. He graduated from Massachusetts Agricultural College, now the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in 1905. The school later gave him an honorary doctorate. He taught horticulture for two years at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Then one of the institute’s patrons persuaded him to move to the New York area, where valuable shade and ornamental trees had begun to wilt and die. Bartlett took up the challenge and founded his company in 1907. Its formal name, the F.A. Bartlett Tree Expert Company, carries his initials.
In 1913 he set up an arboretum at his home in North Stamford, Connecticut. It served as a training school for his employees and as the company’s first tree research laboratory. His grandson has said the first Shade Tree Conference met in Francis Bartlett’s home. By 1927 the company had enough scientific work underway to justify a formal research lab, the Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories, which stayed in North Stamford until the move to Charlotte in 1965. Part of the original Stamford site still exists as the Bartlett Arboretum and Gardens, though it has no tie to the company.
The crews in the field were changing the work too. In a 2022 history of arboriculture for the Citrus County Chronicle, arborist Eric Hoyer credited a Bartlett arborist in 1917 with being one of the first to tie into a tree with a rope for safety. That practice became the basis of modern climbing, the way arborists get up into a tree to prune it or take it down.
Francis Bartlett died in 1963. Two years later his son moved the laboratories south.
Charlotte made sense for a company with field offices in many climates. The weather there let the staff grow species common in both northern and southern gardens, and scientists ran experiments on plant care and pathology in plots on the old farm. But the summers were hot and humid, and the water supply was crude. “The earliest systems consisted of gasoline-powered pumps sitting on the shore of the ponds and serving manually operated spigots,” Bartlett Jr. wrote. Remnants of those systems are still on the property, and some of the old piping is still in use.
Over the first 30 years, some of the plants began to suffer. The climate was shifting under them as well. When the elder Bartlett bought the land, the U.S. Department of Agriculture placed it in plant hardiness zone 7. By 2022 it was considered zone 8. Dry spells ran longer, and rainfall swung harder.
Robert Bartlett Sr. died in 1998. His son decided the property would remain a research station, with a training facility for clients and arborists and a diagnostic clinic, and that it would also become a serious arboretum. Water came first. The company built a distribution system that fed the old network of pipes and kept one large pond full as a reservoir. In 1999 it began installing the first automated system, which sent precise amounts of water overnight to specific parts of the property. The collections grew faster than they ever had, and the steady water opened new ground for research plots.
By 2022 the arboretum held more than 26,000 accessioned plants in 14 major groups. It had one of the largest holly collections in the United States, along with extensive collections of elm, crape myrtle, maple, witch-hazel, linden and boxwood. Seven of its collections were accredited through the Plant Collections Network, among them the largest collection of magnolia cultivars in the world. In the diagnostic clinic, researchers processed thousands of plant and soil samples sent in by the company’s field offices.
That research ends up on job sites far from Charlotte. In Cleveland, Lake View Cemetery holds seven trees honored in 1946 as Moses Cleaveland trees, after a rigorous process estimated they were already standing when the city’s founder arrived in 1796. They include tuliptrees, red and white oaks, a massive sycamore and a beech. In 2018, Bartlett arborist Chadwick Clink invited Jim Chatfield, a horticultural educator who wrote a column for the Akron Beacon Journal, to walk among them. Clink and the company worked with the cemetery’s horticulturist, Robin Menges, to care for the old trees, using organic soil amendments to support the root systems and the specialized pruning that trees of that age need.
The company has also grown by bringing in other old firms. In 2022 it acquired S.P. McClenahan Company of Portola Valley, California, which Seymour P. McClenahan had founded in 1911 with desk space in the Mercantile Exchange Building in San Francisco. It was the largest acquisition in Bartlett’s history, and both companies were four-generation family businesses. McClenahan’s 55 employees became a division of Bartlett. John Henry McClenahan had been chief executive of the company his great-grandfather started, and he stayed on to run the Portola Valley office as local manager. His younger brother, Josh, joined as loss control manager. At the time, Bartlett counted 153 operations in 39 states, Canada, Ireland and Great Britain.
Patrick Franklin, the founder’s great-grandson, was then vice president of special operations. He represented the fourth generation of family management at a company that had just bought another family’s fourth-generation business.
Back in Charlotte, the arboretum’s newer work looks outward. By 2022 it had begun focusing on wild-collected plants, with priority on species of conservation concern. One is the pyramid magnolia, a rare North American tree. The arboretum partnered with the Morton Arboretum, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the U.S. National Arboretum and a University of Florida research center to scout wild populations, assess their health and collect seed when the trees had any, so it could be propagated and shared.
The plantings Bartlett Jr. most enjoyed watching through the year were the early ones. The main group of magnolias borders Youngblood Road, a two-lane highway that passes the arboretum. “When you drive around the corner and see the magnolias in bloom, the sight of the different colors almost takes your breath away,” he wrote.