Although Apple Park has opened to a small group of employees, the site's buildings and landscaping remain in ongoing construction around the campus. In a new interview with Backchannel, Apple Park's senior arborist, David Muffly, has provided insight into the work it's taken to choose, locate, and plant 9,000 trees at Apple Park, as well as detailed his first interactions with former Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Jobs discovered Muffly's work during walks he would take around a large satellite dish on Stanford's campus, admiring as he went hundreds of native oak trees along the path. He made Apple headhunters find the arborist responsible for planting the trees, leading to Muffly, who at the time was working a job pruning lemon trees in Menlo Park.
David Muffly
The two were said to have hit it off "within 20 minutes of meeting," where Jobs described what would see a grand opening seven years later as Apple Park. Muffly and Jobs met in 2010, and in 2011 Muffly was granted the official title of "senior arborist" at Apple.
Eventually, Muffly was shown early design drawings of Apple Park and the arborist realized the full scope of the project. While thousands of workers would be focusing on the construction of the campus' architecture, he and a small team of landscaping experts would face the full brunt of responsibility for what Jobs considered one of the most important parts of the site: the trees.
Muffly eventually began working with Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm The Olin Studio to make Jobs' vision a reality at Apple Park. The team agreed that Apple Park should be stocked with trees and greenery "that might thrive in drought conditions brought about by climate change," as well as diversifying the variety of trees on the campus with native trees as the backbone of the ecosystem and then less common genetics dispersed throughout Apple Park.
As Muffly worked with Jobs in the early planning of Apple's new campus, before the late CEO's passing in 2011, he was impressed with Jobs' knowledge of trees. "He had a better sense than most arborists," Muffly said, and at his official pitch to the Cupertino City Council, Jobs promised an increase from the 3,700 trees on the site to 6,000 before the project's completion.
To fill the revised goal of 9,000 trees on the site, Muffly eventually scoured Christmas tree farms across California.
All of the landscaping work for Apple Park eventually created shortages for other companies attempting to buy trees in the area, with a report by the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year stating that, "Buying trees is a surprisingly cutthroat business."
In a behind-the-scenes look at Apple Park last month, one architect reminisced about Jobs' particular fondness for trees: to the late CEO, "trees were the most beautiful bits of art," said architect Stefan Behling. "He used to say, 'The most amazing thing about trees is it doesn't actually matter how rich you are: You can never buy a really old, beautiful tree.'"
You can read the full Backchannel interview with David Muffly right here.
Article Link: Apple Park's Senior Arborist Recalls Meeting Steve Jobs, Sourcing 9K Trees Over 7 Years
