Mechanical engineering senior Colin Raby was on his way to a meeting in the fall of 2021 when he noticed a fallen satsuma next to Coates Hall on LSU’s campus. Feeling peckish, he stopped to pick it up.
It had fallen from a barely 6-foot satsuma tree, one of at least 50 trees planted in 2015 as part of a Student Government initiative, providing a bite for many students like Raby. LSU’s campus is home to at least eight different species of fruit trees ranging from satsumas to loquats to figs.
However, an LSU professor discovered the high mortality rate of young trees and frequently changing tree population on campus as he started a project in 2011 to catalogue every tree on campus. Now, campus has about 17 satsuma trees, he said.
Raby helped author a Student Government proposal in November 2022 to plant more fruit trees with additional money appropriated for tree maintenance to avoid the trees dying in their young years.
“Fresh off the tree is as good or better than anything you can get on campus,” Raby said.
Maurice Wolcott, an LSU professor, started a project in 2011 for him and his students to map every tree on LSU’s campus as part of his geographic informations systems class. After gathering data throughout the years and updating it, he’s fully finished mapping nearly two-thirds of campus.
“I took this up to have a suitable semester project field project for my class,” Wolcott said. “What I’m doing right now is just to put it all together and finish it.”
With Wolcott’s current findings, he has mapped 18 pecan trees, 17 satsuma trees, seven fig trees, two kumquat trees, one loquat tree, two pawpaw trees, two native mulberry trees and one lemon tree.
He originally started the project after seeing the damage Hurricane Gustav did to campus in 2008, especially to trees. So many trees were damaged in Gustav that the urban forest for LSU changed, Wolcott said.
“It’s an urban forest,” he said. “It’s constantly changing. They’re adding some trees, and they’re taking some trees out.”
Campus has undergone many changes since 2011, so places like the University Recreation Center, which was renovated and expanded in 2017, had to be updated due to the planting of new trees, he said. Wolcott also noticed that trees die for various reasons.
They can get struck by lightning, wind can break them, or trees may be removed for building a new parking lot, he said.Young trees, especially, have a high mortality rate, he said.
“Let’s be honest, young trees have a tough life on the LSU campus,” Wolcott said. “There’s just there’s a lot of things that can go wrong.”
If someone uses weed killer too close to the base of a young tree, the tree can die, Wolcott said, and young trees may also get hit by lawnmowers.
Some trees also get their fruit stripped by hungry tailgaters on gameday weekend. One satsuma tree by the Five Dining Hall was loaded with fruit, but after an Ole Miss game one year, the tree’s fruit was all gone.
He finds joy in mapping and updating his systems.
“I enjoy it when the weather’s nice,” he said. “We reached a point in July that I said, ‘I really don’t want to be out here. Boy, it’s hot.’ But the weather we’ve been having — it’s really nice to get out and walk around and work on this.”
Bob Mirabello is a horticulture professor at LSU and loves the diversity of different plants on campus. However, he wants to make sure that trees planted on campus are sustainable with minimal management so that they’re more likely to survive.
“There’s a huge issue with the management that we have to address, because Landscape Services just not capable of maintaining a campus orchard,” Mirabello said. “They just don’t have the manpower to do that.”
He has planted some of the fruit trees on campus. One is a pomegranate tree that doesn’t produce fruit due to LSU’s climate.
Most of the fruit trees on campus require a lot of sun, which is harder to find unless you go to the outskirts of campus, Mirabello said. He believes that an edible landscape is wonderful in theory.
“It’s a wonderful idea,” he said. “And like I said, it’s a little more challenging to make that work, but in theory, once those satsumas are up and going, it’s going to be nice.”
Raby said that after 2015, many of the satsuma trees died after they were planted because the initiative didn’t provide money for tree maintenance.
Raby wrote a bill for Student Government in November 2022 to plant and maintain 50 more fruit trees in Spring 2023, allocating a total of $13,000 for the project to create a sustainable, edible landscape. The bill budgeted for five years of maintenance for the trees. It fully passed every chamber, and he is now working with Facility Services, Landscape Services and Planning, Design and Construction.
“The hope is that through properly maintenancing it with the right soils and everything like that, it will actually survive and live and continue producing fruit for hopefully another 50 years or so,” Raby said.
Raby said the bill in 2015 only allocated $3,000 toward buying the trees and didn’t reserve any money toward maintenance of the trees. This new bill will buy 34 satsuma trees from four different species, 16 kumquat trees from two different species and 12 fig trees from four different species ranging from purple and gold colors to provide school spirit.
“The beautiful falls wayside to the pragmatic,” Raby said. “To reinstitute some beauty and taste across campus is never a bad thing.”
Social work junior Mavi Pace is a senator in Student Government and watched the proposal be presented in the chamber, she said. Pace said she voted in favor.
After hearing from Raby about the numerous fruit trees on campus, Pace said she finds herself seeking out fruit trees, and she eventually found the satsuma tree in front of Coates – the same tree that sparked Raby’s efforts in the proposal.
“That’s something that I think will be really important, especially with the placing of the new trees, is making sure that the students do know they’re there because as cool as they are, if no one knows about them, then they really won’t serve their purpose,” Pace said.
