CREDIT TK Fall 2026 37 ↑ 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. “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. 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.
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