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At first glance, it might have seemed an unusual meeting between Steve Jobs and David Muffly. Jobs was a world-renowned technologist billionaire, and Muffly an itinerant arborist whose passion was the soil. But if you transposed the timelines of their lives, you could locate a point of intersection.
As young men, both had been interested in tech — Muffly had earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford. Both found themselves residing in a countercultural living situation centered around trees, though Muffly remained in what he calls his “hippie commune” for years. And Steve Jobs spent only a short time in the Oregon-based All One Farm before heading home to California to become Steve Jobs. (Though the experience supposedly inspired him to name his company after the fruit picked at the commune.)
But at this first meeting in 2010, Muffly learned that he and Steve Jobs shared a love of trees, and in particular a passion for the foliage native to the pre-Silicon Valley landscape, before big tech companies showed up and changed it. The encounter would lead to Muffly becoming the senior arborist at Apple, Inc., in charge of choosing, locating and planting the 9,000 trees that justify Apple’s choice to call its 175-acre campus a park — and in making Apple Park a leaf-and-blossom tribute to the CEO who designed it but would not live to see it built. Or planted.
Muffly had come to the Cupertino office not long after receiving a cold call on his phone while working a $125 job pruning lemon trees in a Menlo Park backyard. The caller told him that Steve Jobs was interested in hiring an arborist for a new campus that Apple was planning.
Jobs loved to walk the rolling hills around a large satellite dish on Stanford’s campus. He admired the hundreds of native oaks along those paths, and asked his headhunters to find him the arborist responsible for them. They led him to Muffly. Muffly was a familiar sight in Palo Alto, where the local weekly described him riding on his bike, “towing a 15-foot ladder strapped to a trailer and attached by bungee cord.”
Within 20 minutes of meeting, it was clear that the arborist and the technologist were on the same wavelength about trees. Jobs told Muffly that he wanted to create a microcosm of old Silicon Valley, a landscape reenactment of the days when the cradle of digital disruption had more fruit trees than engineers. In one sense, the building would be an ecological preservation project; in another sense, it’d be a roman a clef written in soil, bark, and blossom. Muffly, who had been sensitive to the native growth of the region for years, got it immediately. “That’s what I’ve been doing — planting fruit trees, oak trees,” he said.
Several months later, in his second meeting with Jobs, Muffly actually saw what Apple had in mind. They chatted once again in Jobs’ conference room on the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop, repeating some themes of the first interview, when Jobs abruptly asked Muffly, “Have you seen it?”
Jobs took him to a room that had foam-core renderings of the proposed new Apple headquarters — a verdant space with lush greenery (80 percent of the space is landscaped) dominated by a huge ring-like building where 12,000 people would work. “I was like, whoa, this is crazy,” recalls Muffly. “And I’m looking at it and my brain is like, it’s the mothership!”
Then, suddenly, Jobs said he had to leave, and Muffly was alone in the room with the renderings. Muffly practices a lot of yoga, so he assumed a position on his knees and started staring at the images of the proposed campus. And he began to get a sense of the massiveness of the project — hundreds of architects and untold numbers of contractors would wind up working on the building, an edifice that might well become as iconic to California as the pyramids are to Egypt. But the campus itself was meant to be a statement on nature. And that would be his job. Yeah, there’s that building, he thought. But there’s a lot more trees than buildings. There’s going to be, like, 5,000 people making that building. And it’s going to be just me and my friends doing the trees.
“So right off the bat, I was like, Whoooaa. This is as real as it gets.”
Seven years after that meeting, Muffly recalls the scene in a drawl that would sound totally appropriate in a Cheech and Chong movie. (I met him in March in the course of researching a deep dive into Apple’s new campus.) The bearded 51-year-old is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a goofy smile. His boots are planted in the mud only feet from the now nearly completed building, which indeed is like the mother ship. He smiles beatifically at the memory.
Muffly’s assignment was part of the larger landscape design effort of the Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm The Olin Studio, known for its work at Columbus Circle and the Barnes Foundation. Olin might determine where the trees would go, but Muffly came up with the species list and the individual selections. Guided, of course, by Jobs’ vision.
Jobs knew his trees, too. “He had a better sense than most arborists,” says Muffly. “He could tell visually which ones looked like they had good structure.” On a visit to Jobs’ house in 2011, Muffly saw this in action. They were in Jobs’ backyard garden, and in a neighbor’s yard there were two varieties of trees that Muffly wanted Jobs to choose between. “There was a kind of tree that I wanted to use and one that was more common,” says Muffly. “I asked, Steve, which of those two trees do you prefer? He liked questions like that. And he looked up and he pointed to the one I wanted. I said, Thank you, Steve. That was a good answer.”
Muffly also convinced Jobs that in addition to the indigenous trees Jobs preferred, the campus should include other species that might thrive in drought conditions brought about by climate change. Because the trees they plant might well live a century or more, Muffly suggested they use native trees as the backbone of the ecosystem and then diversify to other oak genetics. “Like any good investor, you have to diversify your portfolio if you don’t know what’s coming down the pike,” he told Jobs.
As the campus came into shape, Muffly — who was granted full-time status as Apple’s senior arborist in 2011 — had to actually get the trees. This task was even harder because the arborist and his small team (he calls them his “elves”) needed more trees than originally estimated. When Jobs presented his plan to the Cupertino City Council in June 2011, he said that Apple would add to the 3,700 existing trees for a total of 6,000. But when Muffly began his work, he realized that nearly all the (non-indigenous) existing trees would have to go.
“It was all junk trees and parking lots here,” he says. “So it was a long process. Over the next year or so. I surveyed the trees and picked out about a hundred of them that I felt were worth moving. And we had to stretch to get a hundred out of the [roughly 4,000] existing trees.”
So not only did he need to supply all the trees, but the number also rose from Jobs’ original 6,000 to the current goal of 9,000. It was a special challenge to get larger trees on the perimeter to present a green border to the space. Muffly looked at the redwoods at some abandoned Christmas tree farms up on Skyline, but the soil was too rocky to grow them to Apple’s specifications. “So I sent all my little tree elves to help me, telling them we need big trees we can transport to the site. Next thing I know we’re finding these in two abandoned Christmas tree farms in the Mojave Desert, Yermo, and Adelanto. Who knew there were Christmas tree farms in the Mojave?” Apple actually bought the Yermo site.
Muffly is rhapsodic about how well the trees planted so far are taking to their new home. Apple did not truck in soil, but was able to use the earth it dug up for the foundation of the Ring, its giant underground parking lots, and the tunnels that funnel traffic to them. Muffly describes this as some of the finest tree-growing soils probably on the planet. Apple brought in top orchard consultants to check out the soil in the deep pits, and they determined that this was the same soil that had nurtured fertile orchards a century earlier. “I talked to old-timers who were around when this area was all prunes,” Muffly says, noting that one street bordering the campus is still called Pruneridge Avenue. “This very site had the biggest prune trees in the entire Valley of the Heart’s Delight, in the whole Santa Clara Valley.” As Jobs wished, the past would bloom once more.
As the buildings reach completion, the heavy planting work is only in its early stages. But when Muffly is done, he says, the park will be dotted with not only green oaks but also hundreds of fruit trees that will provide both magnificent blooms at different times of year and fresh food for the four-story Caffé Macs on campus. Though Jobs was specific about wanting apricots, Muffly wound up designing a sequentially ripening orchard. “We think maybe 20 percent of all the fruit that will be eaten here we’ll be able to grow,” he says, ticking off some of the 37 varieties: “Lots of plums, the apricots, persimmons, and then 17 varieties of apples and cherries.” Then he ticks off the varieties of apples. “Golden Delicious, we got Granny Smith, we got Gravenstein, we got Pink Lady…”
Wait a minute….No McIntosh apples?
Muffly cackles. “I didn’t think of that, that’s pretty good,” he says. “Unfortunately Macs don’t grow that well here, so I’m a little biased against them.”
I wonder what Steve Jobs would say about that.
