ROBERT HENDERSON ↑ A sunny day on the MU lawn with magnolias in bloom in the spring of 1970. 40 OregonStater.org StUdentS CyCled tHroUgH CampUS, every year arriving and departing, wHile tHe treeS Stayed pUt. 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. 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.” 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.
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