Escapes
MARCH 2022 68
THE
MILES
HISTORY OF THE SOUTH’S ...
FIRST STATE
A R B O R E T U M // 7 1
W A L KS I N T H E WO O DS I WOULD WALK 400
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B E S T- K E P T S E C R E T S
MeeMom’s Classroom THE DREAM FOR AN ARBORETUM IN LOUISIANA
By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
W
hen I was a child, staring out of the window of my social studies classroom at the height of Louisiana’s preciously-brief spring, certain monotonous schooldays were interrupted by the intercom: “Mrs. Kathy [or Therese, or Jackie, or Kim], would you send Jordan to the office? Mrs. Susan’s here to get her.” Stepping into the hallway, I’d join four or five of my other LaHaye cousins en route to the school’s exit, elated. Mommee was checking us out of school! I don’t remember how many times exactly our grandmother did this for us, but there were always sugary snacks involved, and often more of us than could legally fit into her vehicle. Piled all together in our plaid and our polos, we’d drive the twenty minutes across Evangeline Parish to her favorite place: the Louisiana State Arboretum. Down the trails we’d go, paired by age, Mommee leading the way—yelling out over our chatter to point out the towering beech trees, the splotches of Christmas lichens, the vines of trailing muscadine. “Leaves of three, don’t touch me,” she’d remind us of the plentiful poison ivy, and every now and then she’d stop and have us listen for birdsongs. High for an afternoon on the freedom from our rigid Catholic school routines, we reveled in the fresh air and the hilly wilderness—utterly grateful for the day, and for her. On our way back to the car, we’d always stop for a minute to sit on the benches of the out68
M A R 2 2 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
Photos courtesy of the Louisiana State Arboretum.
door classroom we’d call “MeeMom’s School”. “It’s been such a big part of our life,” said my grandmother, Susan LaHaye, of the arboretum when I visited her recently. “I would take my children, and I took y’all. It’s a wonderful place… And it brought me a little richness that I never would have known with my mom.” Her mother Dulcie Dupré (or “MeeMom” as we called her) was intimately involved in the creation of the arboretum from its beginnings, with a dream mirroring naturalist and educator Caroline Dormon’s: Louisiana should have a state arboretum. In an interview published in The Ville Platte Gazette in November 1992, Dupré articulated this aspiration, which was spurred during a visit to San Francisco’s Strybing Arboretum (now the San Francisco Botanical Garden) decades before: “I walked out of there, and said ‘I’m going home and building one.’” The Louisiana State Arboretum’s genesis can be traced back to a State Park and Recreation Commission meeting in 1957, when Rotarian and retired principal from Ville Platte J.D. “Prof” Lafleur conducted a presentation on Chicot State Park’s magnificent, centuries-old trees. In attendance was Mrs. A.G. “Sudie” Lawton, a close friend and collaborator of Caroline Dormon, who had been advocating for an arboretum for decades at that time. Lafleur’s lecture drew Lawton, a board member of the Commission, to Evangeline Parish to see the place he described. When she saw the old-growth trees, the roll-
ing hills, and the diversity of plants and wildlife flourishing in the swamps, hardwood forests, and prairielands of the property—she knew that it was the perfect location for Dormon’s vision to be realized. Four years later, in May of 1961, 301 acres of Chicot State Park were set aside by the State Parks and Recreation Commission and Louisiana State Parks to create the first state-supported arboretum in the United States. “The original site was picked by Prof,” said Jim Robinson, a naturalist who served as the Manager of the Arboretum for twenty five years until his retirement, and currently serves as the President of the Friends of the Louisiana State Arboretum. “Prof had been associated with Chicot Park for so many years, and he knew where the prettiest parts of the park were. And it was awesome. There’s the deeply-dissected ridges, narrow ridges. You find a lot of plant diversity when you have those changes in elevation. And so, they laid out the trails.” Dormon was invited to serve as a consultant for the project, and she collaborated with Lafleur to develop the area into a destination for regional and national botanists, horticulturalists, students, and tourists—connecting with organizations throughout the state for support and funding. In April, 1964, the Louisiana State Arboretum was officially dedicated as a preservation area for trees and shrubs native to the region. To create a roadside entry, the organizers had to reach out to private landowners, who gladly donated their
