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Terry Mock
and the
National Champion Green Buttonwood
By Heather Graulich, Staff Writer
The Palm Beach Post, June 3, 2001
Somehow it survived the hurricanes. Houses and roads were built around it. A hundred years ago, when nearly all of its kind were felled for charcoal or the button-making business that gave it its name, it survived.
"How this one went unnoticed, we'll never know," murmurs Terry Mock, gazing at the 51-foot tree that was supposed to have been reduced to stump long ago.
But maybe the tree didn't go unnoticed. Maybe Palm Beach's pioneers saw something special in this green buttonwood. It had, after all, already been standing on the island's north end for 400 years when Henry Flagler's railroad arrived.
So perhaps they looked upon the massive thing, saw the way its trunk spun out into five gnarled branches, its bark rippling like the muscles of Atlas, bearing up the world. Even then it must have looked as it does today, determined to hold its ground. And they left it alone.
For that, Terry Mock is grateful.
Mock is a West Palm Beach native and the executive director of the Champion Tree Project, an organization that hopes to identify the biggest, most hardy examples of America's trees and clone them.
The hope is that studying and propagating identical genetic versions of these trees will eventually help repopulate the nation's urban areas with tough cookies like the Palm Beach green buttonwood: trees that are strong enough to live log, healthy lives despite congestion, pollution and threats of disease.
The buttonwood, catalogued as the biggest of its kind in the United States and Mock's favorite, was the first in Florida to be cloned. A 15-foot sapling grown from a cutting of the tree was planted in March at the Dreyfoos School for the Arts in West Palm Beach, where officials agreed to create a "Living Library" of Florida's champion tree varieties on the campus.
"This tree isn't a freak," says Mock, slapping the buttonwood's thick trunk like the flank of a prize thoroughbred. "This is what trees used to look like. But 99.8 percent of the old-growth forest has been cut down."
"These trees are the largest, oldest organisms on the planet. They hold secrets. If we don't preserve these trees, they'll die and we'll never know."
Mock, a fourth generation Floridian, is the son of a civil engineer, who was the son of a Glades vegetable packing house manager. His family helped clear land of trees, not plant them. His father, Kenneth, saw the future even as he helped build more massive subdivisions.
"My dad warned me of the consequences, Mock says. "He saw the end of the era of resource exploitation."
So Mock went to the University of Florida and earned a degree in real estate and urban land studies.
He wanted to find ways to blend the need for new housing with environmental sensitivity. He later developed local subdivisions, such as Thousand Pines and The Hammock, that required no sod or irrigation.
His development projects waxed and waned, but his interest in urban reforestation continued to grow. Five years ago he teamed up with the Champion Tree Project, a fledgling program in Michigan started by a tree farmer and his teenage son.
One of the first things Mock did was get permission from the buttonwood's owners, Jerry and Michele Poklepovic, to take cuttings from the tree.
A few of them became new trees, and Mock soon realized he had found a calling, and a cause: to clone all of Florida's 172 champion trees and populate the state's cities and suburbs with their saplings.
He hopes to one day see nurseries selling the ChampTree™ brand of these trees, and downtown roads lined with genetic copies of the leafy beauties that once thrived in Florida.
"I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life," Mock says. "Making money doesn't have any excitement. But leaving a living legacy? That's awesome."
To contact the Champion Tree Project, send email to:
ChampTree@bigplanet.com
or visit the organization's website at
www.championtreeproject.org
TERRA: The Earth Restoration and Reforestation Alliance — www.championtrees.org — updated 8/14/2003