Green is an abundant color on the University of Oregon campus. From the green adornment on The Duck’s shirt and hat to the signs and posters in and around the buildings on the 295-acre campus, green is a staple among the scenery.
It is easy to become bombarded with the color green on UO’s campus. Seeing the color so often, students might look past the most common source of the color — the trees that make up the majority of our landscape.
Becket DeChant is UO’s full-time arborist and has been an arborist for over 20 years. For the last six years, he’s been overseeing the trees around campus.
The University of Oregon is a living arboretum. Throughout the campus, students can find over 4,000 trees and 500 or more species of trees.
Mixed among those thousands of trees is one that stood for nearly 120 years.
On the corner of 13th Ave and University Street stood an over 110-foot Sitka spruce — a monolith of towering green, nearly in the center of campus. The lawn the tree stood in belongs to the Collier House, named for George Collier, an earlier physics and chemistry professor and his wife, Sybel. 
Mrs. Collier has also had a lasting impact on the campus.
Mrs. Collier was a trained botanist. As one of the first women in the field, she brought many trees to a campus that had only two standing when she arrived in 1886.
DeChant said the Spruce that was chopped down could have been a tree planted previously by Mrs. Collier.
The spruce was brought to the ground because of a disease throughout its trunk that DeChant discovered three years earlier. 
“It had an old wound on its west side,” DeChant said. “Three years ago, in checking in that wound, I was knocking on it and getting a really hollow sound,” DeChant said.
An exploratory hole confirmed the sound. Just behind the wound, a large cavity of rotten wood had developed.
The festering wound continued to grow.
“About two months ago, I came in from a weekend and someone had gone into the hole that I was monitoring all this from and had opened it up even further and pulled out a core that was about five feet tall,” DeChant said.
With the now gaping hole, DeChant was able to explore the decaying tree higher up than he could before. Through that exploration, DeChant could see the tree was beyond salvaging and posed a risk to the community around it.
The tree was “crumbly to at least 10 feet,” DeChant said.
A 110-foot tree perched on a dying trunk base/balanced on a mass of crumbling, rotten wood was a recipe for disaster that DeChant was focused on avoiding.
It’s noticeable when a staple of a green community comes down. The work that goes into keeping the greenery sustained and thriving is less noticeable. 
Of UO’s over 4,000 trees, DeChant says, “only about 24 are on constant monitoring,” for severe risk related to their health. However, DeChant reassures that “a thunderstorm could develop” and he’s “not going to lose sleep over it.”
DeChant spends most of his time keeping trees alive, not cutting them down.
“Every Monday, I come in and the first thing in my routine is to do a campus sweep. Figuring out what happened here the last couple of days, what’s changed, what’s moved,” DeChant said. 
DeChant said the campus sweepers are a big part of his job, “repeatedly going around and around” to look for changes in the trees. 
He doesn’t work alone. DeChant has a team of 11 groundskeepers, including a few student employees. “They’re like my eyes and ears out there,” DeChant said.
His work doesn’t stop when trees are chopped down, either.
With each tree that becomes destined for removal, DeChant looks at every aspect of how that tree could still be beneficial to the community that it helped oxygenate. 
From donating trees to indigenous tribes around Oregon, incorporating the wood into projects and buildings around campus or leaving logs behind to foster biodiversity and support the insects and animals that live amongst us, DeChant leaves no leaf unturned in exploring the use of every tree.
“Anything I take down I look for nesting or nesting opportunities,” Dechant said. 
As trees begin to decompose, the nutrients that were previously stored within them are then released, creating richer soil for other flora in the ecosystem while also becoming a new home to many wood-boring invertebrates. 
Mark Harmon, a professor at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry said, “In many cases, dead trees are more alive than living ones.”
DeChant hopes that the logs salvaged from the large Sitka spruce can become a vital part of the ecosystem around campus, just as other trees have.
As for the now empty spot where the Sitka spruce once stood, DeChant doesn’t have full control over what will go there, but he has a few ideas. 
“This site is so high profile that it is going to take a long time to make a decision as to what happens. My plan, short term, is to get that spot ready to replant in the fall, as a holding project,” DeChant said. 
The Campus Planning Committee will have the final say as to what the spot will look like in the long term.
As for the other trees around campus, the university has a Campus Tree Plan that explains long-term goals as the arboretum that is UOcontinues to grow.
An updated version of the campus tree plan is expected later in the year, as well as a “tree board”: a group of individuals that DeChant hopes can help keep the community informed about the efforts the university puts into every tree.
“For 100 years people [would] walk by and know that tree. Everybody going to class past the EMU has some kind of memory of that tree. You don’t get any more iconic than that. It’s such a hard thing to take away from people and you don’t want people thinking you’re yanking something thoughtlessly,” DeChant said.
 

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Eric Becker @ericbecker__

Allen Hall features a wood pillar taken from a tree that was removed during the expansion of the university. University of Oregon Arborists removed a Spruce tree near the EMU on DATE, 2023, at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon. (Eric Becker/Emerald)