The Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College received the gift of Japanese Hackberry and Kurogane Holly tree seeds to propagate a tree at the historic museum on campus. The seeds originate from trees in Hiroshima, Japan, that survived the atomic bombing in 1945. The cataclysm destroyed much of the city, killing an estimated 140,000 people by the end of the year.
Green Legacy Hiroshima provided WC with the seeds as part of a program dedicated to dispersing seeds to peace organizations throughout the world. The College’s participation in the program comes during the Peace Resource Center’s 50th anniversary year and coincides with the 80th anniversary of the American military’s atomic bombings of Japan during World War II.
PRC Director Tanya Maus has been working with several members of the College’s agriculture program, including Emeritus Professor Monte Anderson, Associate Professor Jason Parrish and Wesley Nye from the Academic Farm, along with Vince Duggins, director of Physical Plant, to determine the most successful means for propagating a tree from seeds. Also, DayJah Davis, an agriculture student who interned at Asian Rural Institute in Tochigi last summer, helped Maus prepare the application to Green Legacy, and she, with fellow student Cora Seybold will also assist with the growing process.
“We have been aware of the Green Legacy Program for some time and are thankful for the global awareness that it creates regarding the need for nuclear abolition through the descendants of the trees, the hibaku jumoku, that survived the atomic bombings,” Maus said, noting she hopes to be able to plant a sampling grown from the seds on the PRC grounds by 2029.
PICTURED outside the Peace Resource Center are, from the left, Cora Seybold, Jason Parrish, JayJah Davis (holding the seeds) and Tanya Maus.
The connection between Wilmington College and Hiroshima’s hibaku jumoku trees started several years ago with an exhibit in the Quaker Heritage Center. Maus hearkened to the College’s hosting of Katy McCormick’s exhibition in 2022 titled Rooted Among the Ashes. It featured photographs of trees that survived some 77 years after the nuclear blasts. These survivor trees continue to signify the vulnerability of life in the face of nuclear threats. For more than a decade, McCormick examined Japan's A-bombed landscapes. Standing in school yards, temple grounds and city squares, the surviving trees are living memorials rooted among the ashes just below the surfaces of now-thriving cities.
The Peace Resource Center is the only academic center and archives in the United States wholly devoted to the human experience of nuclear war through the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The PRC works with Wilmington College student staff to carry out the preservation of historical materials and creates programming for the campus and community regarding the need for global peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons.
TOP PHOTO: Japanese Hackberry