Davey’s SEED campus to take training to new heights

Editor’s note: On July 23, Davey Tree opened its new campus for a media tour that allowed attendees to explore the research and training center, as well as the facilities located on its 200-acre property. This is part two of a two-part series exploring the space.

Davey Tree’s new SEED (Science, Employee Education and Development) Campus has left no leaf unturned in its quest to turn the old Oak Knolls Golf Course and the Franklin Elementary School grounds into a high-tech facility dedicated to research, personnel training and the innovative development of tree and plant care. 

The facility has several specialized training areas for personnel and at-height workers, including a 10,700-square-foot climbing center, a 50-foot high canopy walk, an outdoor non-energized, right-of-way utility line training area and abundant classroom space.

The climbing center

During a tour of the SEED Campus on July 23, Davey’s Senior Project Manager of Corporate Communications Jill Rebuck said the 10,700-square-foot indoor climbing center is the star of the facility. No other tree care company has such an elaborate indoor climbing structure that allows for year-round training in a controlled environment.

The plan to build an indoor truss climbing structure that simulates the challenging environments that tree care professionals encounter was set in motion five years ago when Davey’s Arborist Skills Trainer Tim Bushnell and Health and Safety Project Manager Alex Julius, along with other Davey personnel, journeyed to Mukwonago, Wisconsin, to visit ENSA’s (Education Now Safety Assured) at-height training facility to see if such a construct would be beneficial in the training of tree service professionals. 

ENSA is an organization that offers work-at-height training and safety classes for wind power, telecom and industrial markets, as well as, more recently, for arboriculture personnel. 

The team decided that they could, in fact, train tree care professionals on a metal structure, so while waiting at the airport for their flight back to Ohio, Julius sketched a climbing structure on a napkin, a design she thought would best suit the training of tree climbers. 

Davey Tree then partnered with ENSA to bring Julius’ sketch to life. 

As an ENSA-affiliated company, Davey Tree has access to any ENSA partner location in the country, and other ENSA affiliates have access to Davey Tree’s climbing facility.

The structure utilizes strong and versatile aluminum ModTruss components and has nine main towers that can be modified and reconfigured to suit training needs.

“It’s very functional to train on that for a number of reasons,” Bushnell said. “As trainers, one of the big reasons is, as we have our trainees getting up on the structure, they’re using their harnesses, they’re using their ropes, they’re using their lanyards and they’re gaining trust with that equipment as they get higher off the ground. And we’re able to see everything they’re doing. If these metal columns were tree trunks, we’re blind to the backside of those tree trunks.” 

Another benefit the structure offers is that it allows for a safety device to be attached to a student, which catches them if they become detached, a feature that isn’t available in the field. 

“I think the overall goal is giving people the opportunity to fail safely, without the usual risk of falls or other job site hazards. Here, it’s in a very controlled environment,” Julius said. “As trainers, it’s nice to have that predictability of a space, where, normally, we don’t know what trees we’re going to have, what the weather’s going to be like. We have a predictable outcome here by having a predictable space, which just makes it that much better for our field operations. So, that’s what I’m excited about.”

The climbing center sports a rubber floor, is climate controlled, and is a variable stress level environment.

“When we get into advanced training here, and we want to dial up that stress, we’ve got this kick-ass speaker up here that can fill this place with noise, and we can bring in chipper noises, we can bring in chainsaw noise, and we can make it so that you can’t really hear each other, and we can make them use the communication systems that we have wired into our helmets. We haven’t done that yet; we’re going to see how that goes with everybody else in the building,” Bushnell said. “But that ability’s going to be fun to use.”

The canopy walk

Lots of research has been done on trees that are reachable from the ground; far less has been done high up in their canopies, an area that Davey Tree was particularly interested in exploring; so, the company created a 50-foot high canopy walk amid a stand of old growth oak trees. The lofty walkway brings researchers and trainers up to eye level with the canopy and the trainees that may be hanging out in them.

The canopy walk will not only allow climbing instructors on the walkway, where they can easily communicate with students in the trees, but it will also give researchers the opportunity to study the biodiversity and ecosystem health of the forest from a different perspective.

Davey Tree’s Vice President of Research and Development Dan Herms said there’s nothing like the SEED Campus canopy walk anywhere in the world.

“If you’re familiar with the canopy walk at Holden Arboretum, which is a tourist attraction and an educational resource, ours is in much more intimate contact with the tree canopy, so we can touch leaves, we can put a photosynthesis chamber on leaves, we can hang traps. We wanted to be right there in the canopy; we wanted our head in the branches and the leaves. That will be an opportunity to do unique research,” Herms said. “And like many aspects of the campus, it also has multipurpose functionality. It will also have a training function, where you can have a climbing instructor on the canopy walk right next to a student in the tree, instead of yelling up from the ground.” 

A photosynthesis chamber is a portable machine about the size of a shoe box that is placed around a leaf to measure the carbon dioxide levels of a leaf. The machine’s process allows researchers to deduce the photosynthetic rate of a tree in an effort to create a controlled environment that allows for accurate data collection.

The non-energized, right-of-way utility line training area

The SEED Campus’ outdoor non-energized, right-of-way utility line training area is another space, along with the indoor climbing center, that allows students from outside the tree care industry to train at the SEED Campus. 

This space includes non-energized wired poles and non-wired poles that facilitate training in a controlled environment for three main disciplines for tree care professionals and utility company personnel: pole climbing, removing fallen trees and branches from power lines and preventing struck-by incidents from occurring.

“One of the training courses that we are well known for is our Wires Under Tension training,” Director of Employee Development, Eastern Utility Services Autumn Dickerson said. “Working with power companies, we’re constantly being called for hurricane restoration, ice storms. And when those storms roll through, the trees never fall perfectly on the power lines. So with our Wires Under Tension course, what happens is we are teaching the teams how to safely release the trees while releasing the wire in a safer manner, instead of, too often, when there’s all that tension from the trees, if we just cut it down, wires will fly up and a lot of injuries have happened in the past with that.”

Classrooms

The SEED Campus’ main training center building has four classrooms, much more than its previous classroom space. This is where employee training programs will take place, such as the month-long Davey Institute of Tree Sciences training program, which features training in tree and plant care, biological sciences, safety and management techniques. Students will have access to the SEED Campus facilities outside of the main building, such as the greenhouse and the nursery.

The arboretum

Outside of planned tours, the SEED Campus training and research facility is closed to the general public; however, the arboretum and some green spaces are slated to open to the public in a couple of years for education, events and general touring. That won’t happen until a roundabout gets installed at the entrance of the SEED Campus on OH-43. At that time, the campus will have an official main entrance constructed, as well as a parking lot for visitors to the arboretum. Construction on the roundabout is scheduled to begin next year and be completed in 2027. 

“The arboretum will be open to the public. Plants will be labeled. People can come in, see the plants, see what the names are, what they like, to see if they want to get one for their landscape or property. It will just be a nice place to walk,” Herms said. “That will be kind of a gift that we give to the community.”

The arboretum is located near the entrance at OH-43, where the fairway of the number one tee was back when it was the Oak Knolls Golf Course. It’s the highest elevation on the property and provides a beautiful panoramic view of the campus grounds and the main training center facility in the distance.

A half-mile long walkway winds through the arboretum, which begins at what Arboretum Curator Shawn Fitzgerald calls the native garden, a space designed for native Ohio plants, like buckeyes trees and blueberry bushes, and many other indigenous varieties of flora.

Further up the trail is a colorful garden intended for plants that bloom in the summer, like azalea, viburnum, forsythia, hydrangea, butterfly bush and several varieties of spirea. 

There’s also a conifer bed that Fitzgerald said includes eastern red cedar, white pine and pretty much any conifer you can think of.

The arboretum will soon be applying for Arbnet certification through the Arboretum Accreditation Program, which offers several benefits for arboreta, including funding, collaboration and knowledge-sharing opportunities. The campus arboretum will be applying for tier four certification.

“To meet that prerequisite, we have to have 500 different woody species here, and we’ve had 500 on the list, but we’ve lost some, and we couldn’t purchase some, so it’s going to take a couple of years to get that 500 up to snuff,” Fitzgerald said.

Up until December, the arboretum had experienced a loss of flora due to deer browsing and buck rubbing, a problem that destroyed many of the facility’s roses and azaleas; however, it has been solved with a repellent that contains sheep fat. Fitzgerald said, now, every time they plant something, they have to apply the deer repellent. 

Bill the goose dog

The campus’ irrigation pond was specifically constructed to catch and manage storm water, which gets channeled to the pond by a watershed that spans over half of the property. Herms said the pond also supplements the campus’ water needs.  

“Our wells don’t produce enough water to irrigate the campus, especially now that we’ve been irrigating so much. We’ve planted over 30,000 plants in the arboretum. They all have to be watered, trees and shrubs, to get them established. That will change as they become established, but the irrigation demands, especially when it was so hot, the well just can’t keep up,” Herms said. “We have a pump that will pull enough water out of the pond to meet that demand. We also use that water for our greenhouse.”

When Geoffrey Blind, the superintendent for campus grounds, saw the pond, he knew it would attract geese that would pollute the pond water with their droppings, so he hired a goose dog to chase them away. 

Bill is an 8-year-old Border Collie that worked as a goose dog early in life, but had worked on a sheep farm for the past 6 years, until he was purchased by Davey Tree from a breeder in Virginia in October 2024. The campus employees that encounter Bill on a day-to-day basis just love him; the geese, not so much.

“The birds just don’t like the dog,” Blind said. “When I see people around campus and they see me, they don’t ask me how I’m doing. The first thing they say is, ‘How’s Bill doing?’ He’s very popular with the whole company. He’s got an employee number and everything.”