CREDIT TK 36 OregonStater.org FAR LEFT: OSU SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES; ALL OTHERS: KAI CASEY ↑ Blanchard stands beneath one of the MU Quad’s giant sequoias. Planted in 1926, these trees celebrate their 100th birthday this year. "many UniverSitieS or CollegeS tHat Have an arboretUm or botaniC garden — it’S not alwayS tHe entire UniverSity. tHe entire CampUS." ↓ The students of Blanchard’s HORT 228 class demonstrate how campus serves as a living laboratory as they discuss its many unique rhododendrons. ↑ An aerial photo of the Corvallis campus in 1944 when the trees of the MU Quad had just begun to fill out. 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. Still, the notion of the campus arboretum remained exactly that — an idea only. That is, until 2009, when Professor Ryan Contreras joined the 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.” In 2012, he hired an undergraduate intern — Keith Lukowski, a
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