The Louisiana State Arboretum

MeeMom’s Classroom

The Dream for an Arboretum in Louisiana

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

When 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!

Courtesy of the Louisiana State Arboretum

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 outdoor 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.”

Courtesy of the Louisiana State Arboretum

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 rolling 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 property for the cause. These included Joel Guillory, Anthony Abdalla, and John Ellis Dupré—my great grandfather, Dulcie’s husband. “When you stand at that entryway,” said Robinson, “you’re standing at the highest place in Evangeline Parish.”

Courtesy of the Louisiana State Arboretum

“My daddy used to go to sheriff’s sales,” laughed my grandmother, Susan. “He’d pick up little pieces of land like that all around the parish. But that’s what got Mama involved.” In the year of the arboretum’s establishment, Dulcie Dupré served as the Secretary of the Arboretum Steering Committee, and in the years to follow she was appointed to the board by Governor Edwin Edwards and became a founding member of the Friends of the Louisiana State Arboretum, along with my grandmother.

“She really enjoyed writing letters and having meetings with people who were so interested in such a thing as this,” said my grandmother. “It came to be because people worked to have it. And it was about sharing it with others, you know—this wonderful little jewel that’s there … I’d go with her and help her, and I think without the arboretum, I wouldn’t have realized in such a real way our shared appreciation of nature.”

I was only two years old when my great-grandmother Dulcie died, and never had the opportunity to know her. But any time I’d go for ventures through the woods with my dad, he’d bring her name up—“You know who else loved to go on walks through the forest?” Her memory, for me, has always hovered in the tangled, brilliantly-ordered worlds beneath Louisiana’s trees. “I’ve always loved the earth,” she said in her Gazette interview. “[My husband and I] were farmers. We both had a deep, deep love of the earth. I don’t know how to express that. And of the woods, the forest.”

During the arboretum’s first thirty years in operation, Dupré devoted much of her life to advocating for its use and its betterment—particularly in the realms of education. Let it be part of [students’] education,” she told the interviewer. “And to teach them an appreciation of what we have.” She lobbied for legislation that promoted a curriculum in Conservation Education for Evangeline Parish school children, and frequently spoke to school and Scout groups encouraging them to visit.

Photo courtesy of the Louisiana State Arboretum

In 1992 Dupré was seventy-eight years old and had just had a stroke, when she realized she needed to oversee the final crucial component of her ideal arboretum. Since her visit to the Strybing Arboretum over twenty years before, she had dreamt of creating an outdoor classroom. Following her health scare, she wasted no time in creating the Louisiana State Arboretum Development Committee. “I appointed myself chairman, because I knew what I wanted to do,” she said in an interview in the Alexandria Town Talk in 1993. Partnering with fellow member of the Magnolia Garden Club Corine Roberie, she “bombarded” the Office of State Parks with telephone calls. By the end of the year, she had her classroom.

The Outdoor Conservation Education Classroom, now called The Dulcie D. Dupré Outdoor Classroom, features a collection of pine benches cut from beetle-damaged trees, arranged amphitheater-style around a permanent wooden podium and table. Over the last forty years, it has served as a memorable feature of the Arboretum, hosting hundreds of school groups, walking tours, awards ceremonies, and various other educational functions. It has been enjoyed by strangers, by local regulars, and by dozens and dozens of her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, and her great-great-grandchildren now, too.

For her dedication towards this project, Dupré was awarded the next year with an Unsolicited Citation as an Outstanding Conservationist by the Louisiana Garden Club Federation at their annual convention.

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Today, the part of the Arboretum that includes the old Dupré property and Dulcie’s classroom is now considered the “old section”. Largely unchanged, with its old wooden sign and its original plantings maintained, the roadside entrance lends a certain sense of nostalgia for those of us who have been visiting for over twenty years now.

Since 2009, though, most people enter the park via its six-thousand-square-foot J.D. “Prof” Lafleur Nature Center, with its interactive exhibitions on the Arboretum’s five distinct habitats and the species you might find there—all centered by a life-sized replica of an old-growth oak. The multi-billion dollar project that is the “new arboretum”—as many of the locals refer to it—is accessible only through Chicot State Park, and includes an additional six miles of trails and three hundred acres of land that were designated to connect the Nature Center to the old trail system.

Cared for by a small but passionate team of three full-time employees—today the State Arboretum’s six hundred acres are visited annually by roughly ten thousand people. Despite this, it still very much feels like one of Louisiana’s very best-kept secrets. Even on one of Chicot State Park’s busiest weekends in 2021 (Halloween weekend), my husband and I did not cross a single soul along the old Backbone Ridge Trail—a serenity that allowed us to see not one, but two white-tailed deer crossing over the pathway. The well-maintained trails lead from swampy cypress wetlands to pristine Cajun prairie to deep cut ravines and gulleys—all drenched in the quiet mystique of the old-growth forest’s canopy. Informational signage set subtly along the way gives names to the mysterious greenery that encloses you in: American Sycamore, Blackgum, Buttonbush, Devil’s Walkingstick, Horsesugar, Sassafras.

In January, the Friends of the Louisiana State Arboretum compiled its seventy-two signs, which document much of the plant life within the arboretum, into a book titled Louisiana’s Arboretum: A Selection of Woody Plants. In the book’s dedication, Louisiana naturalist Bill Fontenot writes of the arboretum’s trails:

“Wandering beneath these skyscrapers is as holy an experience as going to church! My work has taken me to hundreds of forests throughout the eastern U.S.—some with trees rivaling those of the Louisiana State Arboretum in size. But nowhere have I experienced so much plant and bird diversity in a single locale—and in a single day. Yes, there’s something very special going on at this arboretum. . .”

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

It’s been at least fifteen years since those spring days spent skipping school with my grandmother, and she doesn’t move quite as well as she used to. For this interview, I had originally imagined taking her along the short, paved walk from the old Arboretum entrance to “MeeMom’s School”. But when the time came, she was recovering from a recent surgery. We made plans to reschedule our stroll for a future date, and I headed out there on my own.

Stepping under that entryway still elicits that same rare feeling of oasis, of escape—as though you are leaving the rest of the world and its routines and obligations on the other side. I walked the quiet lane leading to the classroom, soaking in the silence, tuning into each feathery rustle. I settled into a seat in the back of the classroom, and I thought of my great grandmother’s words, delivered at the dedication of this spot thirty years ago: “When the problems of daily life, 1992, become overwhelming, drop everything, take a drive to the Arboretum, sit down, rest, be still, and pray. It’s as though the pain of the moment flows out, and God flows in.”

For more information on the Arboretum, including an interactive trail map and list of featured species, visit friendslaarb.org. The book Louisiana State Arboretum: A Selection of Woody Plants can be purchased on amazon.com.

Dulcie Dupré pictured leading a presentation on Caroline Dormon (whose framed photograph is featured) in her outdoor classroom in 1997. Pictured to her right are then-Chief of Operations for State Parks and now-President of the Friends of the Louisiana State Arboretum Jim Robinson.

Image courtesy of Robinson.