Exploring Tanglewood's Trees

SEE THE BSO’S BELOVED SUMMER HOME THROUGH ENTIRELY NEW EYES

By Scott Edward Anderson

Photos Courtesy of The Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives

July 2026

Read Berkshire Magazine's July 2026 Issue.

The morning is warm and bright, the Berkshires just waking up, and Dale Abrams has already spotted something. We haven’t made it 20 feet from the main gate when he pulls up short and points toward a stand of eastern white pine, the trees heavy with cones, their feathery fronds trembling in a light breeze. “Look at that cone crop,” he says with the excitement of a kid in a candy store. “They did a huge mast year, major cone production.” He sounds genuinely delighted, the way a person does when the natural world offers up something for which they’ve been waiting.

It happens again when looking at a northern white cedar or arborvitae for signs of pollen production. The tips of the fronds, just at the edges, have gone faintly yellow, the pollen-producing parts, ripe and preparing to get ready for future release. “Soon our cars will be covered in yellow,” says Abrams. Spring is doing exactly what spring does.

This is how the walk begins, and this is how it will go for the next hour and a half. Two naturalists move through an extraordinary landscape—I worked with The Nature Conservancy for 15 years—stopping every few minutes because something has caught one of our eyes: a weeping hemlock, a species I’ve never seen before; a red oak the architects of the Linde Center built around, curving at a safe distance from the potential future of falling limbs.

This summer, walkers of all backgrounds are invited to have their own version of this experience. Beginning July 1, the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI) and Mass Audubon are offering Time Traveling with Tanglewood’s Trees and the Lenox Landscape, a guided tour of the BSO’s storied summer campus in Lenox, on Wednesday and Thursday mornings throughout the season. The tours are led alternately by Abrams, Mass Audubon’s education manager for Western Massachusetts, and the equally adept and enthusiastic Nicaela Haig, Mass Audubon’s senior teacher naturalist for the West/Berkshires region. Often in the background, the BSO can be heard rehearsing, so that the walk may unfold, quite literally, to an ever-changing soundtrack.

It would be easy to describe Tanglewood’s grounds as simply beautiful 524 acres of manicured lawn, mature trees, and sweeping views of the surrounding Berkshire Hills. But to walk with Abrams is to understand that the campus is also a kind of palimpsest, each layer of its history written into the trees themselves and on the landscape.

Abrams grew up training his eye on wild landscapes— California state parks, Yellowstone, Colorado, and Puerto Rico with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—before settling in the Berkshires, where he has spent the past quarter century studying the region’s forests, wetlands, and wildlife. His specialties include birding and tracking, and he holds advanced degrees in biology and environmental studies. All that knowledge comes to bear on these walks through Tanglewood, where the trees are neither purely wild nor purely ornamental, but something in between: a cultivated landscape that has been accumulating for well over a century and is now grappling, like so many landscapes, with the pressures of a changing climate.

“See this stretch right here?” he says, as we pass through a section near the main path. “This was hemlock. They did some restoration work and decided this is maybe our time to replace it. Climate change. Insect resiliency.” The culprit he’s referring to is the hemlock woolly adelgid, a tiny invasive insect from Asia that has devastated hemlock populations across the eastern United States. Where hemlocks once defined the shaded corridors of the Tanglewood grounds, the estate’s caretakers are now experimenting with alternatives, including arborvitae, which offers similar structure but with greater insect tolerance, although it, too, may need to be replaced as the climate shifts. Its natural habitat is further north.

Not all the horticultural choices have been so strategic. As we move into a more open section of the grounds, Abrams gestures toward a couple of Norway maples. “Someone had the bright idea of planting Norway maples here, perhaps my least favorite tree,” he says. “They’re super aggressive invasive species. Dense shade. Just about nothing will grow under them. They’re prolific with seeds and they keep spreading.” He pauses, then adds, diplomatically, “Although these particular ones are pretty well- formed, I have to say.” The Norway maples do look tidy, almost stately, in the morning light. It’s complicated, as so many things are in landscape management.

What makes this morning’s walk distinctive, elevating it beyond a pleasant walk through a pretty campus, is that Bridget Carr, Tanglewood’s director of archives and digital collections, has supplied historical photographs of the grounds going back decades. Part of our walk involves attempting to match those images with the landscape as it exists today. While it sounds straightforward, it isn’t.

“Look, there’s the Bowl,” Abrams says, pointing to Stockbridge Bowl in a photo on the screen. “And that’s a path that’s maybe this path.” We orient and reorient. Trees appear in the old photographs that aren’t there anymore. The ridge beyond the Bowl is Monument Mountain.

A handsome elm with its characteristic vase-shaped crown appears in several of the photos but has disappeared from today’s landscape. “That’s gone,” Abrams says. The American elm, of course, fell to its own epidemic, Dutch elm disease, which swept through the continent in the mid- 20th century and altered the skylines of countless New England towns, forests, and estates.

We enjoy the detective work. At one point, scanning a photograph of what appears to be a straight line of Norway spruce behind the theater near the main entrance, we both spot something simultaneously: a couple of trees still standing along the path next to the gift shop that matches the image almost exactly. “That is totally this space,” I say, and Abrams agrees with evident satisfaction. The trees in the photograph look smaller. The trees before us are enormous. The photograph, we figure, is probably from the 1960s, which means those spruces have nearly tripled in size in 60 years. Norway spruces grow fast, Abrams noted earlier; seeing it in real-time is something else.

Our tour doesn’t move in a straight line, because the landscape doesn’t allow for it. Tanglewood is a place of surprising transitions; you round a corner and suddenly the manicured lawn gives way to something wilder, a pocket of forest layering where young sugar maples are pushing up under the shade of enormous 150-year-old hemlocks, where birch seedlings are colonizing decomposing stumps, where fungi trace perfect circles around the grass-covered remnants of an old stump. Abrams calls it “the next generation coming in. Nature’s recycling.”

“Look at this,” he says, crouching by a moss-covered stump where a cluster of black birch has taken hold, their roots cascading over and through the decaying wood. “Life cycle, all right there, in one spot.” I think of the title of the program, Time Traveling, and understand that it’s not only about old photographs, although Abrams may incorporate some of them into this summer’s program. Every tree ring is a year; every stump and seedling is a time capsule. The hemlocks that someone decided to keep rather than clear, perhaps for their wind-breaking value or maybe just because they were beautiful, are still here, 150 years later, outlasting everything.

At the far edge of the campus, we stop to look at what might be the most remarkable tree on the property: a tangled and gnarled Norway Spruce with bumps on its limbs like the spiky plates on the back of a Stegosaurus, its cascading branches hovering just above the ground without quite touching, one limb is narrow at the base, swells outward, then reaches in a long sinuous arc toward the earth. “That thing could be ancient,” I say. “Or not,” Abrams says. “It’s hard to tell.”

And it’s not just trees on this walk. As we walked onto the lawn in front of the Koussevitzky Music Shed, Abrams hears the calling of a merlin (a small falcon), one of the more dashing members of the accipiter family, hunting from the treetops. We see she has something in her talons, training binoculars on the limb where she shreds her prey at altitude. “She made short order of whatever it was,” Abrams says, already moving his binoculars as she heads to another tree in the distance. There may be a nest up there. There may also be crossbills in the pines, a highly irruptive species,nhere in force this winter and lingering into spring, with bills specially evolved to pry seeds from conifer cones. Abrams points upward as a migrating flock of blue jays courses the sky above us.

This, finally, is what the program offers that a casual stroll through the grounds does not: the company of someone who knows how to read a landscape the way a scholar reads a text, who can tell sugar maple from red maple at a glance, who notices when a tree is stressed before the tree itself begins to show it, and who carries, as a kind of additional lens, the awareness that this campus is not static; that it is always changing, that its caretakers are making decisions under pressure, and that the choices they make now will determine what walkers see here a century from now.

The Tanglewood campus has been called many things: a stage, a sanctuary, a summer pilgrimage. After a morning of walking it with Abrams, I’d offer another word: an archive. The trees remember everything.

Time Traveling with Tanglewood’s Trees and the Lenox Landscape runs Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10–11:30 a.m., July 1–August 20. Tickets are available through Tanglewood Learning Institute at bso.org/events/2026-tli-audubon-tours. The program is generously supported by Maria Carls, in memory of David Carls.