A Tour through the Trees

Bascom, Observatory trees profiled in new campus tree walks

The most striking and historic trees that grace UW–Madison’s central campus provide the roots of a new educational experience, courtesy of two walking tours that showcase 70 trees.

The Environmental Management office has just completed the self-guided tours that loop around both Bascom Hill and Observatory Hill. Each stop is accented with posted signs that identify the names and origins of the trees. An informational brochure and route map is available for each walk.

These trees deserve the attention. For the past 150 years, innovative staff in the botany and horticulture departments have a made a very distinctive mark on the central campus. It has served as a natural laboratory for new cultivars, for rare and unusual trees, and trees with historic importance.

Daniel Einstein, environmental management coordinator, says the tours will help make this valuable landscape more accessible to the campus community and the public.

The project “enhances both the aesthetic beauty and the educational mission of the campus,” Einstein says, noting that many faculty use the campus landscape in their courses. One course, “Landscape Plants,” has been a mainstay in the horticulture department for decades, and relies heavily on campus tree specimens.

The Bascom Hill walk begins at the scenic overlook of Muir Knoll, then cuts across the hill to a collection of prize trees behind Birge Hall. The Observatory Hill walk starts on the north side of Van Hise Hall and travels west along the hill’s crest through some of the oldest trees on campus.

Points of interest include:

• A bur oak south of Washburn Observatory estimated nearly 300 years old, more than twice the age of the university. Known as “The President’s Tree,” it is one of the last remnants of the oak savannahs that once dominated pre-settlement Madison.
• The stately American elms of Bascom Hill. Most of the university’s 700 elms — along with most of the nation’s — have succumbed to Dutch Elm disease, but aggressive treatment of the Bascom elms have a small remnant population healthy.
• Site of the very first Autumn Purple White Ash, now a common cultivar in the United States. The cultivar was developed here by prominent horticulturist William Longenecker. A descendant of the original tree now grows in front of the Human Ecology building on Linden Drive.
• The Muir Locust, named after famous alumnus John Muir. The original tree was cut in 1953, but another black locust in Muir Knoll honors Muir’s legacy as father of the national park system. Muir received his first botany lesson under that original tree in 1863.

Einstein says the walks may help people see how many campus trees are an irreplaceable resource. Indirectly, that may help maintain their preservation as the campus continues to expand.

“The amount of green, open space and the diversity of trees on campus is truly special,” Einstein adds. “People will find value in recognizing when one or another example is not ‘just another tree.’ ”

The walks are one offshoot of a major inventory of nearly 7,000 landscape trees on campus, which will be used as a campus planning and landscape management tool. Brochures containing a map of each walk will be available at visitor information sites on campus.

For more information, contact Einstein at 265-3417.