Nichols, Newly Elected President of PGMS, Listens to Bryn Mawr's Champion Trees

Click here for a list of Bryn Mawr's state-champion trees and their locations.

As a young man, Greg Nichols envisioned a career in government and pursued a degree in public administration at George Mason University. Landscaping was just a job, the work he did to put himself through college.

By the time he graduated, he realized that the discipline he had studied didn't really speak to him. Trees spoke to him. He listened, and his part-time job became his vocation.

For training in the profession, Nichols turned to the Professional Grounds Management Society (PGMS) and became an active member. Now, a couple of decades later, Nichols has been elected president of the 96-year-old organization, whose membership includes grounds managers of school districts, municipalities, colleges, hospitals and other institutions from all over the country.

Nichols, an assistant director of Bryn Mawr's Facilities Services Department, has been the College's grounds manager since January 2004.

He came to Bryn Mawr from Fairfax, Va., where he was a private contractor. One of his major clients was American University, and he developed a close relationship with the grounds director there.

"I got to know him very well, and I decided that he had a great job and I'd like to go in that direction," Nichols says.

Colleagues in PGMS helped him determine what skills and knowledge were important for a grounds manager at a small college and educate himself in those areas.

Working on Bryn Mawr's historic campus, whose grounds were designed by landscape-architecture pioneers Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, is deeply satisfying, he says.

"I get to spend a lot of time outdoors, but I also enjoy putting my left brain to work, seeing how a dynamic plant can complement a static building without hiding or overwhelming it."

Most of all, he relishes being able to develop a long-term relationship with Bryn Mawr's 3,750 trees, among them six state champions (the largest of their species on record in Pennsylvania).

"It's an honor to work with these trees," he says. "The community has a deep attachment to them, and my top priority is making sure they're properly maintained."

As he walks across campus, Nichols constantly surveys his charges for signs of diseases, wounds and decay. Since arriving at the College, he has instituted a thorough program of pruning designed to extend the life of the campus's lofty old arboreal giants and prevent future injury to the adolescents that will one day succeed them.

Occasionally, when a tree succumbs to old age and disease, Nichols has to make the tough call to cut it down.

"I hate having to remove a tree" he says. "But when it's threatening to fall down on people and buildings or spread infection to other trees on campus, it's got to be done."

Nichols is eager to share his enthusiasm for the profession and for Bryn Mawr's historic campus. Last summer, he sponsored the College's first horticultural intern: his nephew Christopher Nichols, a student at the University of Maine.

One of the intern's assignments was to help map the grounds for a Web site that he is developing with the aid of Anne Harding '10 and Amanda Cegielski '10, interns in the College's Summer Multimedia Development Institute. He hopes to have the site online next semester.

In the meantime, he'll be keeping an eye — and a couple of hands, and sometimes even a foot — on the trees.

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