PHOTO BY FIRSTNAME LAST Fall 2026 35 TOP: BRIAN HORNE; BOTTOM: OSU SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES by tHe time CampUS waS reCognized aS an arboretUm, tHe notion waS nearly a CentUry old. 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. 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. 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. “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, ↑ Jimmy Swingle (left) and Eric Forsman (right), served as our climbing guides. ↓ Members of the Class of 1913 planting elms on what’s now the Library Quad. Today these stand more than 100 feet tall.
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