Strolling by the Texas mountain laurel on the south side of Sadler Hall, it’s easy to appreciate the small tree’s purple blooms that smell like grape soda.

Less obvious is that fact that the tree’s bright red seeds are poisonous or that Native Americans used its wood to make spoons.

Those facts are part of a new Heritage Tree Tour that highlight general information, as well as little-known facts, about selected trees around campus. The tour, debuting this fall, will include laminated  maps that detail each tree’s Latin name, growing conditions, growth habits and various fun facts. The maps will be available on the first floor of Sadler Hall. An iPhone app is also in the works.

Related story:
Interesting facts from
the Heritage Tree Tour

The tour currently includes 14 trees, mainly in and around Sadler Hall and the Tom Brown/Pete Wright Residential Community, but plans call for branching out to include more types of trees.

The tour was the brainchild of Provost Nowell Donovan, sprouting from The Great Tree Ring, a larger initiative that nurtures and celebrates trees both locally and globally.

“People don’t realize there are more than 40 species of trees on campus,” Donovan says. “They know we have a beautiful campus with beautiful trees. We can make it educational as well. When  they  walk by a tree, they can learn more about it.”

Donovan enlisted environmental science students to develop the tree tour, and  workers in the TCU Physical Plant crafted signs that show the tree’s name and a corresponding number for tour-takers to reference on the map.

“It’s a fun way to walk around campus,” says Becky Richards, professor of professional practice in environmental science, who oversaw the students’ work on the tour.

“You can learn things, like that fact that pecan trees were once so prevalent that the early settlers thought nothing of chopping them down to harvest the nuts,” she says. “That’s a staggering fact these days.”

Students also measured each tree and calculated the amount of carbon dioxide its helps offset. Richards says the effort is the beginning of a more detailed inventory of TCU’s 2,700 or so trees.

“Ideally we’d like to measure the amount of carbon sequestration of every tree on campus,” she adds. “It would help because TCU is working to go carbon neutral.”

Faculty members are already working the tour into their curriculum. Stephanie Eady Sunico ‘07 MS, an instructor in environmental science, says the department is using the tree tour in freshmen-level labs.

“We talk to them about the natural ecosystem and get them to think about our sense of nature and the aesthetic,” Sunico says.

On the Web:
For information on the Great Tree Ring, go to brit.org
Download the Tree Map and a fact sheet
Related story: Interesting facts from the Heritage Tree Tour