Grabbing a Bite with Cambridge Day: Ronnit Bendavid-Val

This is the latest in a series of conversations with some of our many noteworthy neighbors — people who call the city home or head this way to work or study. We grab a bite, talk shop, learn more about why Cambridge, and shoot the proverbial … well, you know.

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I met Ronnit Bendavid-Val, vice president of Horticulture & Landscape for Mount Auburn Cemetery, on a recent Friday morning at Sofra, across the street from the cemetery’s formidable black wrought iron fence. The cafe was abuzz, with clusters of customers enjoying a mid-morning meal or browsing its shelves and coolers, and a Middle Eastern soundtrack adding to the vibe.

I snagged two of the few remaining seats (stools, actually) along with a cappuccino and a chocolate earthquake cookie (rationalized as seismic fuel for the interview). Bendavid-Val got coffee and tahini croissant.

She tells me she came to Mount Auburn thanks to a former colleague who had been an arborist apprentice there decades earlier who told a recruiter about her. She had never seen the place, but before her interview with the site’s trustees, she drove up and gave herself two hours to roam the grounds on a June afternoon. “I walked in and I was actually completely overwhelmed,” she says as if still in awe. “I remember exactly what path I walked on. I was looking up and I was like, ‘Oh my God. Could I actually work here?’” 

She describes the trees as particularly magnificent. Not the monuments, not the chapels. “I’m a plant person,” she observes. “I would not come for the architecture. I’d come for the landscape.” And the gravestones? “Mount Auburn is an amazing place as a landscape and a cemetery … But my love is with the horticulture. It’s just my love.”

She is clear about the mission of the cemetery. “Our first priority is to maintain the respect and dignity of the families that are there to visit their loved ones because it’s still an active cemetery,” she said. But isn’t the cemetery adding outdoor yoga to its offerings? “Yoga and forest bathing and meditation are a different kind of programming, [all done] in a class framework. It’s not just like come do your own yoga whenever you want,” she counters. Recreationalists, forewarned.

Clarifying things seems to be an implicit part of Bendavid-Val’s position. Ask any Cambridge resident, for instance, to locate the property and they will say it’s within city limits, on the west side of town. “Cambridge considers Mount Auburn their own,” she laughs, “and Watertown considers Mount Auburn their own.” (The same might be said of Sofra.) The exact boundary , she explains, cuts through one of the cemetery’s lakes and gives Watertown a significantly larger share (93%) of the roughly 175 acres.

The boundless outdoors

Boundaries, it seems, have rarely set limits on Bendavid-Val’s life. Thanks to her father’s career in international development, she crossed national and cultural lines frequently, moving from locations in the United States to Israel, Thailand, the Netherlands and back. “I don’t have any one particular place that was home,” she observes without regret. What seems to have shaped her most was her family’s love of the outdoors. “When we were kids, we were always outdoors. We did family hikes and between third grade and fourth grade, we did a camping trip across the United States from California to Maryland,” she remembers with a grin. “We had a square back station wagon and a trailer on the back, and we set up a tent every night.”

After high school, she opted for a summer program in Israel working in the avocado orchards. “It really made me realize that I wanted to pursue that kind of (outdoor existence) as a life direction,” she says. She stayed in country for college and a master’s in agronomy from the respected Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of Agriculture.  

I take a few gulps of cappuccino while I try to decipher her description of her thesis on mycorrhizal fungi. Mycorri-what? My cookie will have to wait. I am quietly relieved when she says, “It has nothing to do with what I’m doing now.”

Time of transition 

She came to Mount Auburn in October 2022, post-pandemic. The organization had hired a  new president just a year earlier and was in transition, with related turnover that she describes without drama. “You lose people, you gain people. It’s part of a new culture and a new leadership. Anywhere.” 

She has learned at previous jobs not to make major changes until a number of seasons have passed. “When you work with plants, they are living organisms and you have to go through seasons. You can’t understand the way a landscape works in the spring if all you’ve seen is the fall. If you get it wrong, you can cause unintentional damage that takes twice as long to recover from.”

She started her career in Israel, running a plant propagation nursery in Israel. She applied for the Peace Corps but for mostly personal reasons headed to New York City. “I was not really an American at that point,” Bendavid-Val says. “I didn’t really understand how things worked here anymore. So, I didn’t even get the whole bureaucracy piece for a long time. I just kind of went there and did my thing.” 

Her “thing” included a series of positions with the New York City Parks Department, beginning with a horticulture crew in Morningside Park to her final appointment as citywide director of horticulture, with a two-and-a-half-year detour upstate running an organic farm inside a drug-treatment program. Then she directed horticulture and park operations at the privately managed, much celebrated High Line in New York (“It wasn’t a good fit,” she says; she likes being operational, and public service suits her). During COVID-19 she was director of horticulture for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “An absolute nightmare” she mutters, remembering what it was like to work at a gated garden in the middle of Brooklyn, where the living collection could not be left alone (“We had to bring people into work … We couldn’t let the plants die”).

At this point, our cappuccinos are almost gone, and we’ve barely talked about her work at Mount Auburn. 

She tells me the biggest shift in what she does has come from climate change. “We used to think it was just gonna be the greenhouse effect, remember? All that meant is it would get warmer. And we now understand that it’s everything. It’s temperature, it’s rain events, it’s drought, it’s erosion, it’s flash floods, it’s ash in the air from forest fires. It’s completely unpredictable.”

The horticultural calendar — winter cleanup, spring planting, pruning — doesn’t change, but the margins do, she says. Newly planted trees that used to be watered only in dry weeks now need it every week which, for Mount Auburn, might mean a new salary line just for that. With all these changes in mind, her staff has begun what she calls “a master plan for the trees,” a canopy resiliency plan that can remain flexible as the climate continues to shift.

Earlier this year, she led Mount Auburn to becoming the first cemetery to eliminate gas-powered hand tools. She has also implemented a citizen-science program that feeds phenological data and monarch and dragonfly counts into national databases. In the future, she’s hoping to link Mount Auburn and Fresh Pond into a working wildlife corridor; and Mount Auburn will celebrate its 200th anniversary five years from now, for which a planning group has already formed. 

More immediately, she cannot wait for the winter light show, a major event for Mount Auburn that draws thousands to the grounds after dark. Her department manages it, so every year, she and her crew walk the landscape with the artistic team from Masary Studios, reviewing every cable map and hangs what goes in the trees. “It’s the only light show I have ever seen or been a part of that I can actually say is beautiful and is installed with thought and care for the landscape,” she says.

Bendavid-Val’s cappuccino is now gone (as is mine), an obvious sign that this reporter has kept her more than long enough. “Me and my staff consider ourselves to be stewards of the landscape,” she says as we finish talking. “Many people came before us; many people will come after us. It’s our job to keep it as healthy and wholesome, and even enhance that health and wholesomeness.” We say goodbye and she crosses Mount Auburn and heads back through the black iron gate. 

Susanne Beck is a freelance journalist and long-time contributor to Cambridge Day.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

A stronger

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