One of Louisiana's earliest tree huggers was no barefoot campus radical, but a balding campus dignitary.
The trees Edwin Lewis Stephens, the first president of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, cherished most were quite an armful: 100-year- old live oaks. In 2001, the surviving 10 of 18 live oaks planted in 1901 at the campus entrance during Stephens' administration will be old enough to become members of the Live Oak Society.
Call it poetic justice.
Nearly 70 years ago, Stephens, in a Louisiana Conservation Review article, called for the society's creation. The article was titled "I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing," after a Walt Whitman poem.
Peppered with exclamation points and verses from Whitman and poets Sidney Lanier and Alfred Lord Tennyson, the 1934 essay and another in 1935 that established the society's constitution and bylaws declared that only the centenarian trees themselves could be members and hold offices.
That's right, the society's members are trees, not humans.
The organization, Stephens wrote, would promote the "culture, distribution and appreciation of the live oak." Branch groups would be allowed to form "wherever the F.L.O. (feeling for the live oak) was sufficiently expressed." Killing oaks, "Quercocide" - a word taken from the Latin name for live oaks, "Quercus virginiana" - was forbidden unless sanctioned by the Legislature.
"Thou shalt not kill!" Stephens wrote.
Acadiana boasted several charter members, including the Arnaud Breaux Oak in Cecilia, the society's first vice president and at the time the second largest member at 33 feet, 5 inches in circumference. Stephens concluded the bylaws with this note: "(signed) The Robert Martin Live Oak (seal)."With more than 3,000 members today, the Live Oak Society has flourished after a dormancy that ended in 1957, when the Louisiana Garden Club Federation took over. Stephens' name, however, appears now to have faded in conservation and preservation circles.
A botanist educated at LSU and New York University, Stephens was 27 when he became president of SLII.
Although he was an enthusiastic advocate of planting trees, which was done in abundance on the Lafayette campus, that was not necessarily what distinguished Stephens in tree preservation in Louisiana.
Decades before grass-roots tree preservation groups in Louisiana mobilized, Stephens had the foresight, as some describe it, to organize people - membership notwithstanding - to protect the trees and to recognize their value.
In one of his essays, Stephens mentioned forming a committee to lobby the Legislature.
"The Association (the original name) will doubtless appoint committees to promote legislation providing for such live oak conservation," he wrote in his 1934 Conservation article.
Despite the fanciful tone of Stephens' writing, people took his ideas seriously. So seriously, said the society's state chair Verlyn Bercegeay, that oak owners willingly shipped the unwieldy dues Stephens required for membership, 25 acorns.
Bercegeay insists that Stephens' intention was "tongue-in-cheek," and acorns are no longer required for membership. Tree measurements, however, are.
When many were preoccupied with going to the polls to vote for president on Nov. 7, ULL's grounds services manager John Broderick and UL's Center for Louisiana Studies director Glenn Conrad were stepping gingerly over bulging oak root knobs "doing the waist."
That's tree lingo for measuring with a tape the girths of the surviving Stephens oaks, or "Twentieth Century Oaks," as Stephens called them. The trees are measured four feet from the ground.
Broderick, with a bushy mustache and thin-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose, looked like a mid-19th century naturalist as he began a stiff-legged march to count paces from longest branch tip to longest branch tip. The exercise often landed him in the roar of impatient campus traffic on Johnston Street or University Avenue.
While Stephens was a pioneer in formally recognizing the oaks in Louisiana, he was also a man of his time, said Conrad, who himself has recorded the growth of oaks of all ages in the Acadiana area, including some of the society's charter members.
Stephens planted the Century Oaks in 1901, the same year
Theodore Roosevelt, who made conservation part of his domestic policy, became president of the United States.
By the time Stephens called for creation of the society in the mid- 30s, the conservation movement had long before taken root, inspired in part by literary figures. Societies dedicated to plant preservation thrived, Conrad and Broderick said.
Stephens kept a steady correspondence with contemporaries as interested in the oaks as he. That is probably why people took him seriously when he called for the society's establishment.
Although Stephens mentions in one of his Conservation articles that to preserve the trees is "ethical" - a point on which he does not elaborate - the essays were not environmental manifestos. Ideas such as planting and preserving trees as buffers against pollution or erosion did not gain momentum until the 1980s, said Baton Rouge Green's Lynn Morris. Nor do Stephens' essays discuss in detail whether Stephens was influenced by conservationists or societies.
With long meticulous lists of trees, measurements and locations, the essays rather lavishly praise the oaks' beauty, describe them as possessing human virtues such as wisdom, and lament that they were not valued as they should be, the primary motivations for the society's founding.
Though not noted in either Conservation essay, Conrad and Bercegeay said that Stephens feared that impending development, specifically road paving that began in the 1930s during Huey Long's administration, would spell the end of the oaks. In addition, Conrad said a sense of competition inspired Stephens. He thought Louisiana was virtually peerless among the Gulf Coast states in the number and sizes of its live oaks.
A tree's listing on the Live Oak Society registry is a mark of prestige, much as oak alleys were considered a status symbol to plantation owners. The practical effect, however, is to make people aware of where the oaks stand and to rouse in people a keen interest in the trees' well-being, Bercegeay and Conrad said.
Membership in the society does not mean that the trees are protected under law.
The Century Oaks were planted in January, a year after Stephens was named president of a campus more a flat expanse of cropland than verdant, manicured lawns and stately red brick buildings. Johnston and what was once Industrial Avenue, now University Avenue, were unpaved roads.
To the untrained eye, the oaks, now with vinelike, bright green fern that creeps the length of twisting branches, look like the work of a skilled artist's brush.
However, Conrad, a longtime sentinel of the oaks, and Broderick, an arborist who has monitored the trees for seven years, see trees in distress. Three years of drought, pavement and years of feet tramping on the delicate roots that lie just beneath the surface have taken a toll. Sunlight filters through foliage that should be so thick it blocks the sky. The trees aren't the giants that 100-year- old oaks can grow to be, either.
Stephens in his essays estimated that a 100-year-old oak could be 17 feet in circumference. The 20th-century oaks average 12 to 13 feet.
Still, Broderick's diligent mulching and watering have helped. The landmark Corner Oak, a Century Oak that stands where University and Johnston meet, is one example. Hemmed in by the two streets and sidewalk, its situation is particularly perilous, Conrad said. He measured that oak and a handful of other Century Oaks at random 10 years ago.
The moment of truth was on Election Day.
As the tape measure snapped a retreat, Conrad jotted down the Corner Oak's measurement on the Live Oak Society application and announced with obvious delight its progress. Ten years ago, the oak's girth was 12 feet, 8 inches. On Nov. 7, 2000, it had grown exactly one foot, Conrad said.
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