Leaning Pines Arboretum :: Descriptive Essays

Leaning Pines Arboretum If you head up Via Carta, past Campus Market and the athletic fields, you will come to the Environmental Horticulture Unit. Go past the flower shop and through the green house, then take a left. You will find yourself at the Leaning Pines Arboretum, one of the many hidden treasures here at Cal Poly. A five acre plot of land is devoted to plants native to the five Mediterranean climates in the world, California, Australia, South Africa, Chile, and of course the Mediterranean Basin. The horticulture unit originally resided where the Sierra Madre and Yosemite dormitories now stand but was relocated to a larger piece of land, its present location, which allowed room for the arboretum to be created. Taking up about half the land area, the California garden was the original garden before the arboretum was expanded to include the four other regions. Aside from being the largest, the California garden is the most extensive collection as well. Within this garden, habitats come from all different regions of California except the Sierra Nevada range which is not a Mediterranean climate. They represent all the communities from Northern to Southern California such as native shrubs and grasses and coast live oak woodlands. The section of the garden that looks the most like my home in Marin County is a pond surrounded by redwoods with ferns and oxalis plants. This also happens to be the favorite collection of Chris Wassenberg. Chris Wassenberg is a Cal Poly graduate from the Environmental Horticulture program. All the horticulture students are required to do ten hours of work in the unit outside of class. Chris chose to work in the arboretum, volunteering on a weekly basis until his third quarter when he was hired for a part time position. Now, three years after his graduation in 2001, Chris still works in the arboretum in addition to his normal job. He has risen to a middle management position, overseeing student projects and grounds maintenance. The arboretum requires a lot of work form the students but it is not all maintenance.