Centennial video series: Tony Martino, Rice’s first gardener

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

 Centennial video series: Tony Martino, Rice’s first gardener
Rice University’s weekly centennial videos run through Oct. 12 

The thousands of people who walk through Rice University’s 300-acre forested campus daily benefit from the labor of Tony Martino, an Italian immigrant and the school’s first gardener, who planted and cared for most of the big trees that we see today. Ron Smith, Rice’s grounds superintendent, said Martino also created the university’s perimeter hedge and planted the first flowers at Rice, literally helping build the new Rice Institute in the early days from the ground up.

Working with Centennial Historian Melissa Kean, video producer Brandon Martin takes a look at Martino and his horticultural legacy at Rice. Learn more about Martino in this story from a 2003 issue of “The Cornerstone,” a newsletter of the Rice Historical Society. For more information on Rice’s history, visit Kean’s blog at www.ricehistorycorner.com.

To help celebrate the university’s centennial Oct. 12, Rice University is producing weekly videos exploring the school’s unique history.

The video, available on YouTube at http://youtu.be/FdKhFYFEOF8, is also available to media in high quality and without music for editing purposes. For higher-quality video, contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

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To see other stories in the centennial video series, go to http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60D6D71E71B66B3D&feature=plcp.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is known for its “unconventional wisdom.” With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.