Room to Grow
The Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum

By Maria Stalford

Rice University is already distinguished for having one of the country’s most beautiful university campuses. Thanks to the Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum, the campus is also set to become one of the region’s most ecologically rich. Only the third arboretum in Texas to be established on a university campus, the Lowrey Arboretum will serve as a resource for teaching and research as well as making the campus even more congenial.

The idea for the Lowrey Arboretum was born when a group, led by Lynn Lowrey’s daughter Patsy Anderson and her husband, Mike, along with Lowrey’s friend Charles Tapley ’54, formed a committee to brainstorm about possible tributes to Lowrey (1917–1997) and his impact on the horticultural community in Texas and beyond. They decided there could be no better way to honor him than by continuing his legacy of promoting the appreciation and study of native plants. Even though Lowrey himself did not have formal connections to Rice, the committee turned to Rice as a host for the arboretum because of the university’s special ability to maintain, develop, and benefit from the arboretum far into the future. Support from the community for the project has been remarkable, with more than half a million dollars already raised in gifts and pledges.

The arboretum began to take root on campus at a ceremonial tree planting in March 1999. The planting of two white oaks, two fringe trees, and a swamp chestnut tree near the track stadium inaugurated the arboretum’s living memorial to Lynn Lowrey. While arboretum plantings and developments were originally intended to remain clustered in this area northwest of the intersection of Main Street and University Boulevard, plans for the arboretum have grown to incorporate the entire campus. Rather than establishing a preserve set apart from the rest of the university, the arboretum will be incorporated, as much as possible, into all future landscape planning for university building and campus development. Enhancing all areas of campus with an infusion of diverse and flourishing plant life, the arboretum’s visually pleasing, carefully planned landscaping will be analogous to the varied but coordinated architecture of the campus’s buildings.

The arboretum’s plantings of woody plants native to Texas, the Gulf Coast of the United States, and northern Mexico will make the campus an even more lush and attractive natural setting, but the benefits to Rice will extend far beyond aesthetic appeal. “The arboretum will remind us to attend more to the plants in our environment and their importance in the overall ecology,” observes Kathleen Matthews, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences. “Because plants are crucial to life on earth, understanding and appreciating their role in their environment—whether for beauty or pleasure, for diversity of species, or for food—is an important contribution of the Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum at Rice.”

Rice has a great reputation in a number of fields, notes Tapley, and the arboretum significantly expands that range. “It puts the university in another field that is both amazing and humane,” he says. “Amazing in terms of what we might learn from it, and humane from what it can do psychologically and environmentally.”

Professors and students will need only step out their doors or log onto the Lowrey Arboretum’s new website to access the arboretum’s tremendous resources as a tool for teaching, learning, and research. Students in the plant diversity class taught by professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Paul Harcombe have been conducting a survey to identify and record vines, shrubs, and trees throughout the campus. This information is currently being compiled into a comprehensive map of plant life on campus, which will be available on the arboretum’s website at http://arboretum.rice.edu.

Working to identify and document campus plant life has been an invaluable learning experience for Harcombe’s students. “For a student trying to learn the names of things,” Harcombe explains, “there’s no substitute for seeing a live plant. Connecting abstract subject matter to physical objects that students can see and touch helps them to internalize and remember the concepts we discuss in the classroom.”
The class has opened students’ eyes to the richness of nature in their midst—a lesson that students will take with them far beyond their days at Rice. “I’m amazed at how many students indicated that they hadn’t paid any attention to the plants before,” Harcombe said. “But after taking the class, they noticed things whenever they were out walking, and they express a real sense of accomplishment in being able to identify common things they see.” Making detailed information about the arboretum accessible on the website will provide an opportunity for all to feel the same joy of exploration and discovery that Harcombe’s students experienced.

The arboretum’s potential as a teaching tool is not limited to the sciences. In particular, as Harcombe points out, the arboretum “will create habitats and settings that will make it easier to illustrate how nature contributes to a sense of place.” It will provide a hands-on model relevant to discussions of architecture, urban planning, and sustainable development, among other fields, and, in this way, the arboretum is particularly well suited to Rice and the university’s emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration. “This type of resource can bring together folks interested in different aspects of the arboretum across multiple disciplines,” Matthews explains. “In a larger institution, barriers to such interactions are often much higher.”

The arboretum project also will establish the Lowrey Collection at Fondren Library. It is a testament to Lynn Lowrey’s great impact on the plant community that four of the volumes in the collection are dedicated to him.