I keep an inventory of all the trees; there's about 2,700 on campus, not including forest areas. Some trees were probably here before the campus was.
- Name
- John Beauchamp
- Title
- Grounds manager, Homewood campus
- Department
- Grounds Services
- Divisions
As winter thaws into spring, John Beauchamp is facing the busiest season of the year at his job at Johns Hopkins. Everyone's spending more time outdoors, Alumni Weekend is around the corner, and then there's Commencement.
This is a time when the Homewood campus—which Beauchamp oversees as grounds manager—needs to be in peak form. "Everything hits at once," he says. "I'm going from snow removal to having the campus perfect."
Beauchamp and his team in Grounds Services serve as caretakers of all the outdoor areas of the 120-acre campus: the quads, gardens, lawns, walkways, alcoves, and patches of forest. In the winter, they're focused on clearing ice and snow; in early springtime, there's lots of mulching and bed cleanup to prep for the season of bloom.
"Our job is to maintain outdoor portions of the Homewood campus," Beauchamp says. "Everything from plants to hardscape—more or less anything outdoors."
