Nina and her husband, the landscape architect Peter
Trowbridge, also retired from Cornell, continue to spend
as much time in their gardens as possible. They have
10 acres (4 ha) of designed space filled with trees and
shrubs, some perennial gardens, beautifully designed
vegetable gardens and fruit orchards, a pond, a high-
tunnel greenhouse, tidy farm building ruins, rock walls,
and now—a micropropagation lab. Their daughter
Sophie and her husband Ryan live in the adjacent
building that used to house Peter's landscape archi-
tecture group practice; it's since been converted into
Sophie and Ryan's home. Ryan brings a background
in micropropagation with a special interest in carniv-
orous plants, especially the Nepenthes genus. Nina
and Peter intend to help out with the business.
"These days, Peter and I do our gardening for half a
day, in the morning," Nina says. "Right now we're anx-
iously watching the fig trees that occupy part of the high
tunnel, hoping that the hundreds of green fruits will
ripen." (Some years they do, some years they don't). "We
like to eat them right off the plant—if they ripen," she
says, laughing. "They don't love Ithaca's winters … so we
did finally add heat to the high-tunnel greenhouse so the
temperature doesn't go too far below 40 degrees F (4.4
degrees C) in the winter; that should help the fig ripening
situation." Nina says that like so many horticulturists, she
and Peter can't resist a hardiness-zone-defying challenge.
After traveling so much for so long, Nina says she
would like to do considerably less of it. She goes to
New York City, where she is from (Brooklyn), and
visits her daughter Cory on Long Island. "That's all
the traveling I want to do for now, except that I'd
like to see our good friends in England, friends from
my grad school days," she says. "I'm looking forward
to more time to play music, which was my passion
and training even before horticulture. I play piano
and flute; the latter's been on hiatus for awhile,
so I'd like to explore a way to play more regularly.
I enjoy reading good fiction—it's got to be page-
turning—and am eager to have more time for that."
Nina takes special pride in the
Cornell Woody Plants
Database and hopes readers will take advantage
of this resource. The UHI website will also remain
up, and Cornell Landscape Architecture Assistant
Professor Jamie Vanucchi will teach a scaled-
down version of Creating the Urban Eden.
The Cornell Woody Plants Database is an Urban Horticulture Institute resource
Nina is particularly proud of. Nina herself narrates the intro to each species.
34 CityTREES
