Among the TreesStories from Oregon State University’s Campus Arboretum.

Before I’d even reached the top of the tree, I could see evidence someone had been here before. A gallon-size plastic bag was fastened to a bough some 40 feet above me, just visible through the boughs of the giant sequoia.

One foot up the rope. Other foot up the rope. Handled ascender up the rope. Repeat. What appeared to be a bit of plywood wedged against a branch came into view.

When I reached the branch where my climbing rope looped over and back down, I secured myself directly to the trunk. Then I detached from the main climbing line and surveyed my surroundings.

“How high am I going?” I’d asked more than 100 feet below. “All the way to the top,” replied Jimmy Swingle, M.S. ’05, an OSU-affiliated wildlife biologist who had rigged the ropes in this tree — one of a trio of giants on the northern edge of the Memorial Union Quad.

Now I was so high that there were birds flying beneath me. The squeals of summer campers floated up. The MU itself was a colonnaded toy box.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: The Memorial Union Quad’s 130- to 140-feet-tall giant sequoias are 100 years old this year. Our tree-climbing guides were Jimmy Swingle, M.S. ’05, a U.S. Forest Service scientist (left) and Eric Forsman, ’72, M.S.’76, Ph.D. ’80, a retired U.S. Forest Service scientist (right). Our author, Katherine Cusumano, MFA ’24, makes her way up the trunk in search of student artifacts high in the canopy. High above ground, Eric Forsman offers encouragement. Photo by Brian Horne. Near the top of the tree, Cusumano found a seat offering a sweeping view of the MU Quad and a plastic bag that likely held the rumored notebook of student messages. Photos by Brian Horne and Darryl Lai

These sequoias celebrate their 100th birthday this year, which in sequoia years isn’t even that old. The low end of their typical lifespan is generally thought to be more than 1,000 years. A particularly ancient specimen of Sequoiadendron giganteum in California is estimated to have been 3,266 years old when it was logged in the early 20th century.

(Tree people love scientific names, because so-called common names often vary by region. Different species may share a name, or a common name might imply that a living entity is something that it is not. The Douglas-fir, for example, is not a fir.)

Four years ago, Emeritus, a sculpture by the artist John Grade, hung amid these three sequoias. Tens of thousands of tiny resin and reclaimed wood shapes, resembling conifer branchlets, dangled in a column, as though a fourth, ghostlike sequoia had grown in the vestibule created by the surrounding trees. During the sculpture’s installation, workers were said to have discovered signs that students had scaled at least one of the trees: a notebook filled with messages, a hammock.

I asked Swingle and Eric Forsman, ’72, M.S. ’76, Ph.D. ’80, to help me see whether there was any truth to the rumors. I’d taken their tree-climbing class in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences during my first year pursuing an MFA in nonfiction writing, learning to ascend fixed ropes into trees’ upper reaches. Now Forsman sat in an adjacent tree, roughly 10 feet higher than me. He called over from his perch that he recalled, as an undergraduate, seeing someone shouting across the quad from the upper branches of one of these sequoias.

Landscape architect A.D. Taylor suggested expanding campus green spaces rather than highlighting the school’s architecture. This photo from 1927, the year after he unveiled his plan, shows the MU Quad’s new trees. Photo courtesy of OSU Special Collections & Archives

Upon investigation, I found that the bit of plywood I’d seen as I climbed was a sort of seat, lashed to the tree with lengths of flimsy paracord and situated so that you’d be able to take in the sweeping view across campus below. The plastic bag flapped open above it. I suspected the notebook that had once been held inside had since fallen out.

It would have been too tidy a narrative, really, to find exactly what I was looking for. I decided I was OK with this parallel world above the university — and its student visitors — retaining some mystery.

Malcolm Anderson, ’09, an arborist who helped set up Emeritus, told me this sequoia wasn’t the only campus tree with signs of student occupation. In a different one, he found a climbing register, rope hammocks, a memorial to a student and “some other stuff that was a little more X-rated I am embarrassed to mention.” (Another mystery.)

This hidden ephemera seemed to represent the wilder edge of the university community’s relationship with campus flora — one premised on beauty and function alike, and that was codified in 2023, when the Oregon State grounds earned accreditation as an arboretum, or living museum of trees and other woody plants.

This hidden ephemera seemed to represent the wilder edge of the university community’s relationship with campus flora.

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Arboretum curator and horticulture instructor Dan Blanchard, M.S. ’23, said that during his time combing through university archives, he’d found Daily Barometer articles going back generations in which students praised the beauty of campus. The designation made it official.

By the time campus was recognized as an arboretum, the notion was nearly a century old. Oregon State — then known as Oregon Agricultural College — had relocated from downtown Corvallis to its current location in 1889. Over the next 43 years, its surface area would bloom from just a few dozen acres to more than 500. (Today, the total area is just over 570 acres.) During this period of radical growth, the university administration commissioned landscape architects John C. Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to draft a plan for developing the grounds. Well before there was an arboretum to speak of — before there were sequoias on the MU Quad or even an MU at all — this plan advised thinning out existing trees and limiting planting around the building foundations to highlight the school’s architecture.

But in 1926, another landscape architect, A.D. Taylor, prescribed the opposite — suggesting, instead, expanding the green spaces and establishing a campus arboretum.

Members of the Class of 1913 planting elms on what’s now the Library Quad. Today these stand more than 100 feet tall. OSU Special Collections & Archives

“This simple planting scheme,” The O.A.C. Alumnus, a precursor to the Oregon Stater, trumpeted in 1927, “will do more to complete the architectural and landscape compositions than any other thing which might be done in the campus developments.”

The trees stayed. They opened their stomata, breathed in, breathed out. Decades passed as they reached toward the sun. Some of them did so quickly. After Liriodendron tulipifera, the tulip poplar, was planted southeast of Milam Hall by the Class of 1917, it could have grown as much as three feet each year. Others made more incremental gains. Pinus aristata, a species of bristlecone pine, can live for more than a millennium, but it grows at a glacial pace — sometimes just an inch per year.

And a rotating cast of faculty members and groundskeepers kept planting: Arthur Peck, who started as an instructor of floriculture and landscape gardening in 1908, planted hundreds of elm trees across campus. Don Martel, who took up a post as a professor of landscape architecture in 1947, set about documenting the campus plants and installing signs. (More recent attempts to identify the rhododendron species have proved tricky. Around 1959, the grounds crew began planting discards from the horticulture department’s breeding program; the parentage of many remains unclear to this day.) Patrick Breen, now an emeritus professor of horticulture, established a database of campus plants in 2005 and created a brochure mapping OSU’s notable trees.

An aerial photo of the Corvallis campus in 1944 when the trees of the MU Quad had just begun to fill out. OSU Special Collections & Archives

Still, the notion of the campus arboretum remained exactly that — an idea only. That is, until 2009, when Professor Ryan Contreras joined the Department of Horticulture. “I pretty much immediately said, ‘We need to be an arboretum,’” Contreras recalled. He was struck by the size and variety of trees. “There is more diversity on our campus than there is in many cities.”

“Many universities or colleges that have an arboretum or botanic garden — it’s not always the entire university. The entire campus.”

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In 2012, he hired an undergraduate intern — Keith Lukowski, a “crazy plant geek,” as Contreras described him — a North Carolina State University student who spent a summer in Corvallis cataloguing specimens. David Slifkin, a grounds maintenance worker, recalled seeing him traipsing across campus with notebook paper, mapping and sketching the plants by hand. (Later, Lukowski digitized these findings.)

Finally, numbers could illustrate the scale of the campus environment: 65,000 plants, he reported. 8,723 trees. 595 different species. And 7,376 rhododendrons. There are truly so many rhododendrons.

Despite the momentum he tried to generate, Contreras was surprised to find that the university administration wasn’t sold. 

“I said, ‘You know what? I’m just going to do it. Instead of it being a university-funded, university-sponsored idea, we’ll just do it from my lab,’” he recalled.

When Blanchard, who had a background in public horticulture, came to Oregon State in 2021, the arboretum became his project. Two years later, he presented his master’s thesis: “Developing Tools to Utilize the Oregon State University Woody Plant Collection and Establish a Campus Arboretum.”

In some ways, the arboretum designation enshrined the work that facilities crew and faculty had been doing for generations. “We’re plant lunatic nerds,” Todd Cross, the campus landscape manager, told me.

Todd Cross, campus landscape manager, tends a sapling in the campus nursery. He leads a team of self-described “plant lunatic nerds” working to keep the campus beautiful for generations to come. Photo by Kai Casey

To earn Level II certification from ArbNet requires paid staff management, at least 100 woody plants labeled with scientific names, public programs and a formal policy for adding and removing plants. “People have talked about the accreditation as momentum toward the future,” Contreras said. This future was one that reached beyond any individual human career, or even any human life — a future on tree time.

Oregon State is not unique in having a campus arboretum. In fact, at the time that the core campus earned its certification, Peavy Arboretum, though not accredited, had belonged to the university for a century. What is special is its scope. “Many universities or colleges that have an arboretum or botanic garden — it’s not always the entire university, the entire campus,” Blanchard said. “Sometimes, it’s a section of campus. At some schools, it’s 15 miles away.”

You can probably envision this: There is the built environment of red brick and concrete sidewalk, and then there is nature. But at Oregon State, the arboretum certification challenged the idea that campus and nature were meaningfully distinct. I wondered if this is what the earliest campus planners were thinking when they rejected the idea of thinning out trees to make the buildings more visible. When they decided their duty was not to remove, but to “complete the architectural and landscape compositions.” This, I’d come to learn, was not strictly an aesthetic proposition.

On a hot afternoon in late May, I met Blanchard outside Community Hall. In 1889, when the college relocated, the 35 acres that surrounded us had been the college farm. Today, this area cradles some of the campus’s oldest trees. Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca,’ blue atlas cedars, behind us dated to 1892. The Elm Walk below us was planted with a mix of Ulmus americana and Ulmus x hollandica, American and Dutch hybrid elms, in 1905.

LEFT: Blanchard stands beneath one of the MU Quad’s giant sequoias. Planted in 1926, these trees celebrate their 100th birthday this year. RIGHT: The students of Blanchard’s HORT 228 class demonstrate how campus serves as a living laboratory as they discuss its many unique rhododendrons. Photos by Kai Casey

Since the fall of 2023, Blanchard has led more than 140 arboretum tours. His group sizes average around 50, he says, though during one family weekend tour, he counted 111 attendees. All told, he estimates that he’s guided about 7,000 people across the campus. He gets some repeat customers: “I learn something new every time,” Jennifer Killian, an assistant professor of practice in the College of Forestry, told me.

Blanchard’s path to botany was not a straight one. He’d planned to be a nurse, but as he neared the end of his degree, he began to have doubts. One day, sizing up his collection of some 175 house plants, his mom asked if he’d ever considered turning that interest into a career.

It was not such a leap. After all, he’d grown up in a Christmas tree-obsessed house. His family often had a tree for every room — even the bathroom. Blanchard still describes himself as a “conifer addict” and a “cone head” and in community college, earned the nickname “Dan the conifer man.” His collection of conifer cones comprises some 100 species and is spread across his office, his home in Eugene, and family homes in South Carolina and Florida.

We made our way past Moreland Hall, the original home of the College of Forestry, to the old tree nursery just behind the building. My department, the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, was tucked inside Moreland now. I often wrote about how people related to the natural world — and yet, as we walked, I observed how little time I had spent on campus looking up.

Blanchard beckoned me toward Sequoia sempervirens, a coast redwood, and pulled down a branch. “Redwoods have what are called ‘fog needles,’” he said. “See the ones that are on the stem, rather than on the branchlet?” As the trees grow to gargantuan heights, these needles allow them to drink in the fog that gathers around their upper reaches — by some estimates, contributing as much as 40% of their water intake. It struck me as such a perfect fact. I kept whispering to myself: “They eat the fog.”

Giant sequoia cones are surprisingly small and can stay on the tree for as many as 20 years — seeds tight inside — until unsealed by beetles, squirrels or fire. Photo by Kai Casey

But we also observed in other ways. Blanchard demonstrated the balloon-like shriek that gave one shrub, Bergenia cordifolia, its name: “pigsqueak.” Again and again, he asked me to smell — the first motor oil-scented flush of Asimina triloba, or pawpaw, which mellowed out into the comparatively gentler aroma of bell pepper; the peppery tang of Umbellularia californica, the California bay laurel — or to touch. Outside Cordley Hall, we stopped to survey an oddity: Gunnera tinctoria, Chilean rhubarb, an evil-looking shrub with enormous spiny leaves. I reached out, tentatively, a bit menaced by its covering of sharp spikes.

In one corner of an interior courtyard was a skinny pine about two stories high. Tiny serrano-shaped cones dangled from a few upper limbs. It was faintly yellowed around the edges. It was Wollemia nobilis, the Wollemi pine, a critically endangered species from Australia that had only been discovered in 1994 and is considered a living fossil — a plant that still looks the same as its predecessors in the fossil record.

As we approached, Blanchard gasped. The tree had only ever produced male cones before, but now, he thought he could make out the beginnings of small, round female cones. It was some kind of magic to see it progress — to understand that the trees’ own ancient time scale intersects, briefly, with our own.

When Stacy Allison came to Oregon State in 1976, it was with the intention of becoming a nutritionist. Quickly, this ambition was derailed. She lived with a few avid rock climbers, and under cover of darkness, she joined them in climbing Pseudotsuga menziesii, Douglas-firs, on campus. She practiced rappelling techniques, using only ropes and slings. “We did it at night,” she told me, “when we wouldn’t get caught. I wasn’t the only one; we were not very good rule-followers.”

When she joined a climber friend on a trip to Zion National Park, she became hooked. In 1978, Allison left Oregon State, in part to pursue climbing and mountaineering. In 1988, she became the first American woman to summit Mount Everest. The Douglas-fir where she learned to rappel is now gone, but based on the evidence of visitors in the upper reaches of the sequoias on campus, the spirit of these nighttime expeditions lives on.

A crescent moon shines above campus trees the night of the Apollo 11 moon landing, July 20, 1969. Photo courtesy of OSU Special Collections & Archives

Though climbing the trees is not quite what he has in mind, Cross, the landscape manager, is a big advocate of people getting up close with campus nature. He encourages students to walk on the grass, to find secret hideouts beneath the rhododendrons, to fasten slacklines and hammocks between the trees (taking care, of course, to protect the trunks with padding).

Again and again as I spoke with the self-described plantsmen on campus, they called campus a “living laboratory.” It seemed obvious — in fact, fundamental to the promise of a land-grant university — that the grounds would function as an extension of the classroom itself.

In 2023, around the time that the arboretum was coming into being, I signed up for Swingle and Forsman’s tree-climbing class. In the spirit of the living laboratory, most students were there to advance their research — studying marbled murrelets, for example, or forest pathology and mycology. I was, too, in that I had a grandiose vision of being like Richard Preston, climbing redwoods for The New Yorker, but I had some obvious limitations, like how I was terrified of heights.

Week after week, we practiced climbing techniques, rain or shine. We spur-climbed Douglas-firs in Peavy Arboretum. Near the end of the term, we climbed a pair of old-growth trees on Marys Peak, topping out around 170 feet above the forest floor — so high that the trees swayed gently in the wind as we clung to them like birds on a reed.

I saw a link between this kind of interaction with the campus and the demands of the ArbNet accreditation. Institutions are required to offer a certain amount of public programming, in a sense generating interactions between people and place. It wasn’t always strictly physical. Blanchard worked with a horticulture therapy certificate student, Susannah Prenoveau, to establish a campus nature club and enroll Oregon State in Campus Nature Rx, a network of universities that use green spaces on campus to promote mental health.

A sunny day on the MU lawn with magnolias in bloom in the spring of 1970. Photos by Robert Henderson

Prenoveau cited a litany of benefits to spending time outdoors: improved gut health, lower blood pressure, social and emotional wellness. “If you spend any time in nature, or outside,” Prenoveau said, “most people say they feel better.” Research from the College of Forestry’s HEAL Lab supports this theory: A 2021 survey found that people who maintained or increased their time outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic were more likely to report higher levels of wellbeing. Next spring, OSU will break ground on a new healing garden in an unused quadrant behind Wiegand Hall, making it one of only a small number of universities in the country with such a facility. 

The campus environment doesn’t only have individual benefits, though. The horticulture department maintains close ties to the Oregon nursery industry, Contreras told me. The grounds crew is constantly introducing new plants to the campus collection — adding to its diversity and, in the process, increasing its resilience to disease, drought, heat. Forestry researchers have also been studying assisted migration — the intentional planting of trees outside of their native range as the climate grows warmer and more unpredictable. The trees are helping us prepare for the future, whatever it might look like.

Students cycled through campus, every year arriving and departing, while the trees stayed put.

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And each time I spoke with a plantsman, I asked how working with trees affected their sense of time. “Trees tie you to the past,” Slifkin said. They appeared permanent, immovable; students cycled through campus, every year arriving and departing, while the trees stayed put.

But their lives inched forward, too, each year stacking another ring, each year stretching closer to the sun, getting a little closer to producing a new cone, offering a fresh fruit for a student to pick, almost without thought, on their way to class, a silent tether between the human and nonhuman worlds.

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Among the Trees

Oregon State Campus Arboretum Field Guide

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Drag or swipe to explore the field guide

87 Feet

Dawn Redwood

Metasequoia glyptostroboides

Origin

Planted northeast of Community Hall, they grew from rare seeds brought from China in 1948. Once thought to be extinct, this ancient tree was rediscovered growing in China in the 1940s and is now known as a “living fossil.” The tree flourished in Oregon during the Miocene epoch, about 25 to 5 million years ago, and is the official state fossil. A newer dawn redwood was planted just northeast of this tree on June 4, 1991, to memorialize student protesters killed in Tiananmen Square.

40 Feet

Trysting Tree II (Gray Poplar)

Populus x canescens

Origin

The original Trysting Tree was planted next to Community Hall by George Coote, a horticulture faculty member, sometime between 1880 and 1885. He landscaped the first 35 acres of the current campus. Known as a meeting place for lovers, the Trysting Tree inspired engagements, a mention in OSU’s official anthem and more than a little administrative angst. In 1898, the Board of Regents trained bright lights on it to discourage nighttime rendezvous. After the original tree was lost to disease in 1986, a cutting planted nearby became Trysting Tree II. It’s now recognized as an Oregon Heritage Tree, and (just in case) a third Trysting Tree is growing as well.

23 Feet

Big-leaf Magnolia

Magnolia macrophylla

Origin

This medium-sized deciduous understory tree is native to the southeastern U.S.; ours grows behind Shepard Hall. Its massive white flowers are a showstopper in the spring. “Its leaves always look like a shirt thrown over a clothesline,” arboretum curator Dan Blanchard said, drawing on a description Professor Ryan Contreras often uses. David Slifkin, a grounds maintenance worker, considers Magnolia ernestii, an endangered yellow lily tree, his greatest contribution to the campus’s extensive magnolia collection.

110 Feet

Dutch Hybrid Elm

Ulmus x hollandica (cultivar unknown)

Origin

In 1905, the “Elm Walk,” or “Elm Allée,” was planted on lower campus between 11th and 15th Streets by students under the direction of George Coote. Originally, the walk featured alternating Dutch hybrid and American elms. But the Dutch hybrids grew quickly, so in 1927 the American elms were replanted outside the Women’s Building. Grounds crews dug trenches around them, built crates to protect them, and then hauled them on carts — despite the fact that they were already taller than the building! Every spring, thousands of evening grosbeaks visit campus to feast on the elms’ fruit. Although removal of the Elm Walk was first recommended in 1909, the university chose to keep the trees, preserving an iconic campus landscape.

135 Feet

MU Giant Sequoias

Sequoiadendron giganteum

Origin

Planted together in the Memorial Union Quad in 1926, these three giant sequoias celebrate their 100th birthday this year. Their lower limbs have been intentionally allowed to grow to the ground, creating the feeling of stepping into a living vestibule. Giant sequoias have extraordinarily thick, spongy bark — up to 2 feet thick — that helps protect them from wildfires. The trees can live more than 3,000 years, and their cones can remain on their branches for up to 20 years before releasing seeds. Native to California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, giant sequoias are the largest tree species on Earth.

60 Feet

Apollo 14 Moon Tree (Douglas-Fir)

Pseudotsuga menziesii

Origin

Grown from a seed that orbited the moon in 1971 in the personal kit of astronaut Stuart Roosa, a former U.S. Forest Service smoke jumper. Planted in 1976 outside the Peavy Forest Science Center as part of the U.S. bicentennial celebrations. Seeds from the Apollo 14 mission showed no effects from their zero-gravity excursion. In 2022, a new batch went up with Artemis I.

10–20 Feet

Campus Rhododendron Collection

Rhododendron occidentale, Rhododendron ‘Loderi hybrid’ and others

Origin

OSU’s rhododendron collection began in 1938, when Professor Arthur L. Peck planted nearly 300 plants in front of the Memorial Union. Emblematic of spring and early summer on the Corvallis campus. In the 1960s and early 1970s, campus grounds crews planted discards from the university’s breeding program. Each year, grounds workers plant 50 to 100 new rhododendrons.

70 Feet

Oregon White Oak

Quercus garryana

Origin

Considered the oldest tree on campus, this oak outside Magruder Hall dates to about 1673 — 103 years before the Declaration of Independence and 186 years before Oregon became a state. Due to its historical significance, it was named a Corvallis Heritage Tree.

Arboretum Illustrations by The Mountbird Studio

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Request a tour, see a map and support the program by going to the OSU Campus Arboretum website.