Less than a month ago, the landscape behind Dodson Auditorium was upturned dirt and cement trucks. The area is now soft grass surrounded by an inlaid stone walkway.  Significant headway has already been made on the 2009 Class Gift Project less than two months after construction began. The grass has already been laid, and the brick pavers set down. All that remains is an extensive landscaping phase to transform a once-dingy lot into a University sanctuary.By recycling sod from one of the University’s practice football fields, Facility Services was able to cover the interior circle of the Dodson lot with its future green floor early last week. “We mobilized quickly to cut the sod from the field and movie it over here,” said Dennis Mitchell, campus landscape architect. “We’re very happy with the way it came out.”To protect the concrete space where the brick pavers engraved with the names of graduating seniors will go, a mulch ring was placed around the sanctuary’s pathway. “Instead of pulling the bricks up and putting them down again, we decided to put mulch down so we wouldn’t have that extra cost,”  said Student Government President Colorado Robertson.All the mulch for the sanctuary will be recycled from the debris collected after Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, one of the innovations the University has come up with to trim precious funds from the project’s budget.”It is a type of recycling,” Mitchell said. “Instead of buying new sod and mulch, we got to use something we already had.”SG is hoping to have 400 of the named bricks sold by Feb. 25 to facilitate the first laying of bricks by April 15.The funds generated from the tax-deductible bricks will be put to use for the class of 2010. “We’ll be doing that and some marketing and promotional materials to senior organizations, as well as the student body as a whole, to get them to want to leave their footprint and adopt a sense of pride in developing this space for future classes of LSU,” Robertson said.Because some of the grass patches are still a dull green-brown, Mitchell said the area needs to be constantly watered over the next few days. For the next few weeks, the lot will remain fallow while the sod is allowed to dig its root system into the ground. Facility Services is currently finishing up a list of plants to be included in the area and to schedule a day for students who want to participate in the landscaping.”This is a project that’s the first of its kind,” Mitchell said. “You’re starting to see now how it will take shape, but when you see students really start to use it you’ll really start to appreciate it.”—-Contact Adam Duvernay at [email protected]