Oratorio of an Oxygen Farmer - opera singer Ara Berberian to turn his private forest into a public preserve - Brief Article

American Forests, Summer, 2001 by Courtney Leatherman

A veteran of the Metropolitan Opera takes on a new role, singing the praises of his private urban forest, hoping to turn it into a public preserve.

Singing in the shower is for amateurs; Ara Berberian prefers the woods--more oxygen from all those leaves. And given his 20 years as a basso with the Metropolitan Opera, and his 20 acres of woodland just four miles outside Detroit, he's had lots of opportunities to practice his low notes where he likes.

But it was Berberian's spirit that dropped when he and his wife, Ginny, faced the prospect of selling their urban forest. Berberian, 70 and retired, couldn't afford to just hang onto the property any longer. But giving it up would be hard. His parents bought the place in 1953, putting a house on four acres hut leaving the rest mostly alone.

A road runs amid some 5,000 hardwoods--including 80 black walnuts--and a bridge crosses over the Rouge River, which intersects with the Franklin on the property. Otherwise, the land is undisturbed.

No other place in Southfield, Michigan, can, or wants to, make that claim. The suburb's motto is: "Southfield, the center of it all," and its 30-story office buildings, three expressways, and one six-lane highway are all about a mile from Berberian's woods.

"You can be 28 minutes from anything from where this acreage is," he says. "The Silver Dome, the casinos, the tunnels and the bridges." But on his acreage you can be just an instant from trillium, twin leaf, and trout lily. You can see red fox and blue heron, snapping turtles and cedar waxwings.

"It's unbelievable to think that in the midst of this overdeveloped community you can see this sanctuary, this reprieve, this respite," says Berberian.

"It's a small island," agrees Bob Grese, director of the University of Michigan's arboretum. The woodland, he says, has seen little disturbance and shows lots of the original botanical diversity. But when finances forced Berberian to contemplate selling his land, it was development, not biodiversity, that most folks were interested in. And each developer imagined a dozen houses or more.

"I realized that about 1,000 of my trees would be cut down," Berberian says. So he told a developer: No deal. "'I have constraints,' I told him. 'I have to think of the blood and sweat I've gone through to keep them healthy and you're going to come in and bludgeon the area."'

Instead, the Oakland Land Conservancy and neighborhood groups got involved. They had the land appraised (value: $2.4 million) and will apply for state grants to make it a preserve. The state owns the adjacent riparian buffers; adding this piece makes a greenway.

Gail Barber, head of one neighborhood group, intends to contribute at least $1,000 to the grant. When she met Berberian in his woods (he welcomes trespassers), "He told me how his trees warded off the toxic fumes of the 22,000 cars that went by," she says.

That's Berberian's favorite topic these days, and the way he interprets the value of his trees to others--like the appraiser who wanted to cut down a few black walnuts to assess their value.

As a life member of AMERICAN FORESTS, he explains, "I'm reading that a mature tree takes in carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and photosynthesizes it and stores it and transforms it into oxygen and gives off 24 pounds of oxygen--enough for a family of four." And it hit him: I am a farmer." An oxygen farmer.

"Even though I've had the pleasure of performing for so many years," he says of his stage roles, I feel the most important work I have is in front of me."

Courtney Leatherman is associate editor of American Forests.