Meet Beth Kelly, the director of guest experience

Creating Adventures

Meet Beth Kelly, Holden Forests & Gardens’ director of guest experience.

You and the Guest Experiences Team welcome hundreds of thousands of people to the arboretum each year. What makes the arboretum experience different? Why is it a special place?

There really is something for everyone out here at the Arboretum, and our guest experience team definitely helps make the experience unique and special for guests and members alike! For seasoned hikers and garden enthusiasts we have miles of trails and cultivated gardens. The Emergent Tower and Canopy Walk are great for adventurers, and seasonal Tram Tours are perfect for folks with more limited mobility. For young kids (like my 5 and 1-year-old) Buckeye Bud’s Adventure Woods is a fun, natural play space. And what makes us even more unique is that all these great adventures are set against the backdrop of Holden Forests & Gardens’ living collection of plants and trees.

What are some of your favorite plants and trees and why?

I love nature but do not have a very green thumb, so some of my favorite plants are perennials that grow without needing much help from me. Purple coneflower and black-eyed Susans are bright and cheery, but I also love ferns of all kinds. Conifers, too — our winters in this area can be so bleak and gray that those splashes of evergreen are so welcome come January and February.

What are some of your favorite books and/or films about nature?

One of my areas of focus in college (I went to art school) was natural dyes. The book, Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay is still a favorite from those days. The author explores the history of traditional natural dyes, so many of which are botanically-derived — indigo, madder root and marigolds to name a few. Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire is an oldie but a goodie, too — a fascinating look at how humans and plants affect each other’s fates and futures.

What is one of your first memories experiencing wonder with a plant or a tree?

That’s a pretty far-back memory from when my mom helped me make a book of seeds as a Kindergarten assignment. We cut open fruits and vegetables to pick out their seeds, dry them, and label and glue them into a little book. I remember being amazed at the difference in size and shape of seeds like tomatoes and lemons, and especially how different they were from the fluffy dandelion and helicopter maple seeds I played with in my backyard.

Save the Date

January 28-March 12