Garden news: L.A. County Arboretum taps new CEO

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The Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanical Garden today named Los Angeles native Richard Schulhof as its new chief executive. Schulhof trained as a landscape architect at UC Berkeley and previously headed Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge. He comes from Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Boston where for the last seven years he has served as deputy director.

“Southern California offers horticultural opportunities that are just unrivaled and I look forward to exploring that richness and making it available to an increasingly large segment of the community,” he said in a telephone interview. Schulhof will join the Arboretum in early October.

It has been a little more than a year since Mark Wourms, the Arboretum’s former chief executive, left to run Kentucky’s Bernheim Arboretum. Timothy Phillips, the Arboretum superintendent, has been the acting chief executive during the interim.

A national search led to Schulhof’s appointment, according to Russ Guiney, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, who praised the new chief executive’s “deep passion for the natural world, extensive institutional experience, and demonstrated scholarly expertise.”

Schulhof earned masters degrees in public garden administration from the University of Delaware and in forestry from Harvard.

He created new programs supporting science education in Boston and Los Angeles schools. Through collaboration with school districts and private foundations, his programs offered teacher training, field trips and in-class instruction. Working with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service, he launched programs interpreting historic landscapes.

-- Debra Prinzing (www.shedstyle.com)