Carolina Alumni Review - July/August 2009

e top of a family tree of people who kept the natural campus in the public eye and among the University’s priorities. Among his students were William Lanier Hunt ’ 30, who pushed Coker’s dream of a botanical garden and gave the land that birthed it in 1966; Henry Totten ’ 13, for 50 years a botany professor and a keeper of the Arboretum; and Ritchie Bell ’ 43, director of the N.C. Botanical Garden in its formative years.

“From the perspective of the present, he was a very minent scientist — he came here not only to establish trees, but he came here to establish a botany program that was to become one of the best in the country over time,” said Peter White, current director of the botanical garden.

Coker also started the University’s herbarium, a museum collection of more than 700,000 specimens that constitutes the fundamental understanding of botany in North Carolina.

The campus as Coker found it was flush with the trees that grew here naturally. Today it is immeasurably enriched through the joy he took in scattering plantings native to the region but not the immediate area — such as various cypresses — beyond the borders of the Arb.

On a return to

South Carolina in

1910, he visited the grave of the 18th- century botanist

Thomas Walter and looked in vain for traces of what he believed was one of the first botanical gardens in the country. In 1920 Coker planted the namesake Walter’s pine. Close to the rear of Spencer dorm, it grew into what botanists say is one of the most magnificent specimens in the Southeast.

t s

Library, is a 20th-century development and was planted in straight rows, or allees — willow oaks outside the walks and white oaks inside — in the 1920s.

The persimmon was there first, it was allowed to tay, and now it is the only tree outside the columns of oaks. It may be very, very old, and, because its fruit was prized, one could speculate that townspeople had discovered it long before Polk Place was built.

The persimmon’s inevitable decline reminds us that while some will stand for 200 years or more, the lifespan of most is much shorter — the massive oak that shades the Old Well is not either of the two that were there in 1930. Most of the Polk Place oaks are reaching the end of their cycle and can be expected to decline at roughly the same time.

A study of UNC’s tree landscape completed earlier
this year recommends more of a
mix of species within the Polk
quadrangle — but it also says the
planting in rows should be
maintained because that arrange-
ment dates to Polk’s beginning.
Campus arborist Tom Bythell
says there will be visual growing
pains exacerbated by the loyalty
to row planting: “You’re going to
have a couple of decades when
it’s all a mishmash.”

For now the Polk oaks are he palace guard whose discipline makes the persimmon easy to spot not far off the end of Murphey Hall.

Arborists warn that the live oaks (queued up on the right side of the photo at right) and willow oaks of Polk Place could decline at roughly the same time. Something for alumni to think about: Is it better to replace them as they die or take them all down and start new allees with young trees of the same age and size? At bottom right, librarian Jeffrey Beam is the unofficial guardian of the Northern catalpa tree, which serves as the living symbol of a turning point in tree protection (he’s seen here with another of his favorites, an American elm between Peabody and Phillips halls). At bottom left, the catalpa’s spectacular late spring bloom.

Persimmon

t

Oddball: The persimmon

It is somewhat scraggly looking, way past its fruit-bear- ing years. What is it doing there, a few feet out of step with the perfectly aligned oaks? It is, in fact, dying.

In the beginning there was McCorkle Place, between he well and Franklin Street, and except for the rows of cherry trees that line the walkways courtesy of the class of 1928, arborists have worked to preserve the random, forest-like arrangement of trees old and new there.

But Polk Place, between South Building and Wilson

stark gray concrete

Cause celebre:
The Northern catalpa

Its location far outside the old historic grounds is the key factor in its celebrity.
Nobody knows whether it was
planted or sprang naturally. It
does what it can to dress up the
of the Kenan chemistry labs that

form its backdrop. Tall and stately, the Northern catalpa bides its time until mid-May, when like a burst of fireworks it breaks out in white tubular flowers, ruffled on the edges, spotted purple inside.

That’s what caught Jeffrey Beam’s eye from his window in Coker Hall. If you plant and tend trees at Carolina, or if you assault one, you know who Beam is. A librarian and the keeper of a long e-mail list of the other campus tree watchdogs, he considers the catalpa “family.”

He’d watched an allee of swamp cypress — just the kind of tree Coker would have planted — go down next to the site of the new Caudill chemistry labs after he’d been assured they would be preserved.