The life of a Stanford tree

As much of campus relaxed over spring break, the staff who care for Stanford’s 60,000+ trees — the woody plants, not the students — were busy planning, maintaining and documenting new growth.

Before a tree’s roots ever touch campus soil, details such as its location and species are carefully decided by the University’s Campus Planning and Design team. Drew Brown, who has been a landscape architect at Stanford for 12 years, says that both hardscapes, like buildings, and softscapes, like gardens and shrubbery, require a similar planning process.  

Whether they’re designing a department building or a community garden, the team begins by asking questions. According to Brown, some examples of questions that must get answered in the initial planning process include: “What’s it for? Who’s going to use it? What space is it going to take up, and how is it going to sit within [its] context?”

The design team then begins a circular process where different engineers, designers and landscapers develop sketches and present them to one another until a finalized plan is chosen.

The team often begins by focusing on a particular structure before shifting its focus to the surrounding vegetation. Brown and the team consider things like, “How does the landscape interact with that building? And how do people want to use it? What kinds of spaces do we want?” The landscapers decide if they want to plant a primarily native, exotic or mixed palette of trees, which dramatically change the feel of an area on campus.  

Brown cited the Computing and Data Science building (CoDa) as a recent project that has a particularly complex treescape. 

The glass and terracotta building near Main Quad was completed in January 2025 after five years of design and construction. According to the architects, the four sides of CoDa each have a specific function and level of sun exposure. The building’s utilitarian east side, shady north side and small seating areas all have distinct climates and purposes that need to be taken into account when selecting species. 

But designers don’t have to start from scratch. Coast live oaks, the most common tree species on campus, often serve as a foundation for younger growth at sites like CoDa. Leland Stanford was so dedicated to preserving these centuries-old oaks that the first men’s dormitory, Encina, was named after them. 

Using these historic oaks as guides, Brown’s team surveys trees that will thrive in an area’s sun, soil and water conditions. But the planners often go beyond biological concerns and consider what cultural and aesthetic stories a landscape can tell.

“We have ideas of trees that work pretty well on campus, but we’re always looking for variety; we want things that are going to bring a certain feel and character and provide enjoyment to people,” Brown said.  

Once the landscapers have chosen a species and location, the grounds crew begins the process of moving trees onto campus and acclimating them. Like much of the ground crew’s work, this is usually done over the summer when there’s less student traffic. As a result, students often aren’t aware of the work that goes into maintaining the university’s pristine campus, according to senior grounds manager Michael Gladden.

After planting is complete, Gladden’s team continues to work on pruning, watering and hazard assessment throughout the year. Over the last four years, they have been especially busy tending to trees that topple over during California’s recent volatile rainy periods.

The team also keeps a detailed database of the trees on campus, including information like species, age and history.

The database is kept private from the general community, but in 2005, engineering professor Ronald Bracewell publicized a series of photographs and historical context he spent over 50 years curating in a book titled “Trees of Stanford.”

Later, librarian John Rawlings moved much of the book’s information onto a website of the same name. Then, before his retirement in 2014, Rawlings transferred ownership of the site to its current editor, Sairus Patel ’91.

Patel didn’t always plan to document trees for a living. After getting his bachelor’s in computer science at Stanford, he informally studied computer fonts by talking to the professors who remained at the university after the master’s program in typography was discontinued. 

Although he didn’t formally study botany, Patel says that he’s long had a deep appreciation for nature. He spent his childhood among the blue agave plants in Mumbai, India, and after immigrating to the U.S., he “was delighted to find the nostalgic smell of those plants again at Stanford.” 

Now, Patel spends his days doing a mix of fieldwork, archival research, map making and web design to accurately present facts on plants such as blue agave to the public. He also gives guest lectures at environmental organizations throughout the Bay, in addition to teaching classes at Stanford, such as the introductory seminar BIO 20N: Peregrinations with Trees.

He describes the “Trees of Stanford” website as “a very curated subset that [he] identif[ies] and display[s] via maps, walks or talks. Campus has over 60,000 trees, so just one big public database would not be interesting to explicate certain historical points.”

On a typical day, Patel works to map all the trees in a single area of campus at a time, paying attention to the species and history of each specimen. In the citrus courtyard, where he has spent much of his time recently, he said, “there’s hundreds of kinds of citrus. I’d love to mark the exact location of every kind on the map, but right now, for some of them I just have a general group.”

Sometimes, Patel comes across surprising discoveries thanks to his dedication and the help of other botanists. After working for months to identify a species of persimmon in the citrus courtyard, a German botanist named Bruno Wallnöfer responded to his inquiry earlier this year. 

Wallnöfer revealed that the tree is a Palmer persimmon, native to northeastern Mexico and the single rarest known tree on campus. “It’s not known from the nursery trade in the U.S., as far as I know, and only present in a couple of botanical gardens in this country — except for Stanford’s specimen.” Patel says.

Alongside the newly-identified persimmon tree, Patel’s favorite campus specimens include the giant yucca tree outside of the Anderson Collection and the pineapple guava trees that produce tart, green fruits that he says are easy to mistake for leaves if you’re not paying attention.

Both Brown and Patel say that sharing their love of trees with other members of the Stanford community is one of their favorite parts of their job. 

Brown sometimes leads public talks and tours on the plants in different parts of campus. He said he enjoys asking about people’s favorite places on campus. “I think that there’s a lot of different hidden spots that people bring up, and you’re sort of surprised by them,” he said.

In addition to his teaching commitments, Patel also leads public tree walks. He says that visitors and students ask about two types of trees more than any other: the palms and the edible fruit trees. 

It’s his professors, mentors and fellow tree-lovers who taught Patel the value of passing his tree knowledge on to the public. “It’s good to have someone there who encourages you to look closely at what’s around you. You notice things others don’t, like the little pineapple guava fruits.”

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