Tree Identification at Lafayette | Cultures of Nature Fall 2015

There are a ton of invasive trees on this campus! As Maggie and I were looking up the species of trees around us, I began looking more broadly and realized how disjointed our natural space looks. Once it clicks that most of the trees on this campus shouldn’t be here, the campus starts to look like a collage rather than a cohesive, logical space. I’ve always thought that the buildings were oddly placed and designed, but now I realize the trees are in kind of the same situation. Maggie and I did realize that the Japanese Cutleaf Maple and the Japanese Maple were right next to each other which had a little bit of cohesion, but then when I zoomed out to the space behind Colton Chapel, the continuity was lost again.

According to the Campus Tree Collection brochure, graduating classes established a tradition of planting a tree on their graduation day. I feel like the haphazardness of our tree selection and placement is probably partially due to this fact. If one or a few representatives from every class get to choose the type and location of tree, it is unlikely that it will follow any sort of master plan. It seems a little inefficient to dig up the invasive trees and replace them with native ones, but we should definitely put more thought into the tree selection and placement in the future.

Below are a few pictures of the trees we spotted. We definitely noticed a lack of bite marks and holes in the leaves of the invasive tree species.