Margaret Missiaen · 2010 Honoree

For Margaret Missiaen, who grew up on a farm and majored in political science at Indiana University, joining the Peace Corps the year after President Kennedy was assassinated seemed like the natural thing to do. Ever since she was a young girl she had wanted to see the world but had traveled no further from home than Niagara Falls. For two years in rural Senegal she ran a social center where she taught girls who had never held a pencil how to write, gave them lessons in sewing and knitting, and organized files and records. She also became convinced that, by training young Americans in leadership, the Peace Corps was actually doing at least as much for our country as for the faraway places where volunteers served. Her own contributions to the community here on Capitol Hill are a case in point.

Beginning as many volunteers do with work in her children’s schools and her church, Margaret had a moment of clarity in 1991 when she attended an event sponsored by “Trees for the City,” a federal program to encourage urban forestry. She remembers thinking, “That’s for me.” Having grown up helping her mother raise vegetables on the family farm, Margaret knew she had a bit of a green thumb. She had grown tomatoes in her Capitol Hill yard, mint for tea in the desert of Senegal, papayas in their garden in Brasilia when her husband, Ed (also a Peace Corps volunteer who served in Colombia), was assigned there for four years as an agricultural officer at the embassy. And like Ed, she had worked for many years at the Department of Agriculture where she monitored agricultural conditions in African countries. City trees were something new but Margaret quickly became enthralled with them. 

Along with Becky Fredriksson and others in Trees for Capitol Hill, Margaret began organizing volunteers to plant trees in front of houses. They raised money, obtained permits, purchased trees wholesale and ensured that holes were dug for each one. Groups of volunteers would spend a Saturday morning planting from fifteen to twenty trees.

After she retired in 1996 Margaret became even more active. She and Ed joined Casey Trees—a non-profit organization funded by a bequest from philanthropist Betty Brown Casey—and as certified “Citizen Foresters” participated in the 2002 census that determined the status of every street tree in the city. Margaret’s passion for pruning began when she attended the first of a series of workshops conducted by Jim Adams, a horticulturalist who worked for the National Arboretum and lives on the Hill. For fifteen years Margaret has remained active in the winter—the gardeners’ off-season—by spending two or more mornings a week pruning young street trees with the goal of doing forty trees a week for ten weeks. Often accompanied by Ed, who pushes the wheelbarrow carrying tools and a small stepladder, she goes up and down the streets of the neighborhood, stopping at each young tree where she and Ed discuss pruning options. Then she carefully lops off a couple of limbs and bundles them into the wheelbarrow. She says she knows every trash can in the neighborhood where she can leave bundles of limbs. More importantly, she knows and cares about each individual tree.

Margaret has two sons, Chris and Michael, and although they no longer live here, both have helped her prune. Her grandson, Enzo, will be a year old in May.