Hilltop Arboretum's Master Plan
Delicate improvements to the Baton Rouge oasis
Emory and Annette Smith lived simply in a small house with a kitchen window overlooking Highland Road below. They entered their woods, today part of Hilltop Arboretum, by stepping out their front door. At the back of the house, a large plate glass window looked into a ravine that drained much of their farm and supported native plants.
Decades later, Arboretum visitors can make their way through a gap between an admin building and a small library meeting room. They walk over a bridge, to a pathway that takes them into manicured woods of native trees and shrubs. A pond in front of a wood-floored, open-air pavilion the size of a skating rink would be new to the Smiths, as would a grassy hill sculpted to make an amphitheater.
Annette died in 1980. Emory died at Hilltop in the spring of 1988 at the age of 96. He bequeathed his 14-acre farm and nascent arboretum and meadow to LSU with no written instructions for how he’d like to see the property developed.
In the last years of his life though, Emory gathered friends and plant-collecting cohorts into what became Friends of Hilltop, a group that to this day oversees the arboretum with LSU’s Robert S. Reich School of Landscape Architecture. Reich was among Emory’s companions on plant collecting expeditions in the Feliciana parishes and Mississippi. Together, the group, officially organized in 1982, worked with the university to see that Hilltop became a “complete arboretum of native Southern trees, shrubs and wildflowers and to encourage its free and effective use by both the University and the general public.”
Formation of the Friends was a formal introduction of Hilltop to the public. Native plant gardeners, neighbors, and friends had been visiting Emory and Annette for years. Emory left plants for sale on tables near the house. Buyers paid on the honor system. The arrangement made it possible for Emory and Annette to devote their attention to an ongoing game of Scrabble.
Visitors find public bathrooms, an air-conditioned all-purpose education building and auditorium and the pavilion, additions that would amaze Emory though he’d recognize a meadow about the size of the one he fashioned to encourage native wildflowers to grow.
The Smiths would likely welcome the sight and sound of the crowds who flood the arboretum’s grounds for the October PlantFest, a celebration of the return of fall and the promise of a break from summer’s heat. (It happens this year on October 5 & 6.)
Emory and Annette bought the land that became Hilltop, six and a half miles south of LSU, in 1929. The name Hilltop came from the couple’s land sitting a heady 30 to 40 feet above Bayou Fountain on the other side of Highland Road. The Smiths and their two daughters had lived on Florida Street in Baton Rouge, making the trek to Hilltop by car for picnics, winter fires, walking the woods, and gardening.
In Hilltop: My Story, Emory writes of an oppressive upbringing in Iowa, a domineering father, and a religion that dampened his spirit. He met free-spirited Annette at a religious school in Iowa. The couple moved to a farm in Mississippi after school and, eventually, to Baton Rouge. Unable to make a go of farming, Emory took a job at the post office, later transferring to the P.O. at LSU.
By the time the Smiths got around to building a house and shed at Hilltop, veterans returning from World War II were getting first dibs on building supplies. Emory salvaged wood and roofing from a derelict tenant house and got a hardware store owner—a veteran just starting in business—to sell him some lumber. Emory was never able to buy more than 10 pounds of nails at a time and had to scrounge plumbing and electrical supplies.
Emory Smith may not have left his intentions for the place in the form of a master plan, but after reading his book, one knows Smith found a place of peace in nature at Hilltop.
Emory Smith may not have left his intentions for the place in the form of a master plan, but after reading his book, one knows Smith found a place of peace in nature at Hilltop.
On walks through their woods and meadow, Emory and Annette found native plants they liked. Influenced by Clair A. Brown’s Louisiana Trees and Shrubs, Emory began a study that would take him on plant collecting trips; he eventually opened a small nursery specializing in native ornamentals.
Over the years, an accommodation grew between the Smiths and their neighbors. On a walk with his daughter during Prohibition days, Emory found a neighboring farmer’s unattended but perking liquor still in a briar patch. Emory knew one of Baton Rouge’s biggest bootleggers operated an illegal liquor business unmolested. Emory and his daughter walked on.
As subdivisions grew up around Hilltop, neighborhood children crept onto the land. Emory and Annette welcomed them, offering children’s prices on plants for Mother’s Day. With the run of the place, they were mindful not to pick flowers, dig, or be too noisy near the house. The Smiths began identifying trees with small signs to satisfy the curiosity of their young visitors.
“The children from the nearby residential subdivision have never failed to call on us at Halloween,” Smith wrote. “They cut across the shortest way, which means a long walk through the dark woods, a greater thrill than any treat they might get. We never give candy as a treat, but pecans, oranges, and kumquats from our trees, with a few red apples from the store for brighter color.”
The accommodation of neighbors continues. During plant sales and big events at Hilltop, visitors are asked not to park on Highland Road for reasons of traffic safety. That means a neighboring subdivision gets the overflow, which has led to cars being parked on the grass between street and sidewalk in front of houses near Hilltop’s back gate.
Just before the arboretum’s big fall plant sale, “No Parking” signs sprout from the grassy strips on wiry legs. The arboretum posts parking instructions on its website. For private events of more than 40 people, a shuttle is required.
Complaints about loud music for wedding receptions and parties vary with the kind of music. “We have a Hilltop representative who monitors the sound with a decibel meter,” said Hilltop director Peggy Davis Coates. Party organizers sign an event contract saying they will adhere to the Friends of the Hilltop’s policy and 10 pm music curfew, said Coates.
Friends ‘til the end
Neil Odenwald, former director of LSU’s school of landscape architecture and a friend of the Smiths, was instrumental in Emory Smith’s donating Hilltop to LSU.
Friends of Hilltop came from Smith’s desire for a “complete arboretum of native Southern trees, shrubs and wildflowers” to be used freely “by both the University and the general public,” states the preface of Hilltop: My Story.
[Read this: An interview with Dr. Neil Odenwald, co-founder of the Southern Garden Symposium.]
“Big projects require a meeting of the minds,” said Odenwald, a former member of the Hilltop board. You have to consider things like: “How many more buildings would you want and still be a nature preserve? That’s why you have goals.”
For Friends of Hilltop board president Chris Werner, a retired dentist, Hilltop’s goals are embodied in a master plan by the Cambridge firm of Reed-Hilderbrand, which incorporates years of work by Baton Rouge landscape architects Jon Emerson and Wayne Womack.
The master plan, finalized in 2009, called for improvements such as moving a hill made from pond spoil to the back of the meadow to carry the eye, a design technique for creating flow through a landscape. The front of the hill was scooped out to make an amphitheater.
“The Smiths’ house will be torn down eventually,” said Werner. The board decided that rot and termites ruled out rehabilitating the house. The site will eventually feature an Emory Smith Glade oriented to a view of what Smith called the “cathedral,” an arc of towering trees over a small open space above Highland Road and a view of the ravine approximating the one seen from the Smiths’ picture window, which will be reworked to accommodate new collections of native plants.
Still to come is a barn at the back of Hilltop, behind the present pavilion. The barn will replace Emory’s shed where volunteers now store their tools near the arboretum’s entrance. Early discussions included incorporating an apartment into the barn for visiting scholars and lecturers. Also in the plans is a greenhouse approximately twenty by thirty feet next to the new barn.
Van Cox knows Hilltop as a student, as an interim director of the school of landscape architecture at LSU, and as a board member. He sees the barn and greenhouse as support structures for Hilltop’s Hodge Podge volunteers who raise and grow out many of the natives sold at the arboretum’s annual PlantFest event. Horticulture and landscape architecture students would work in the greenhouse, Cox said.
[You might like: Hodge Podge: Hilltop Arboretum's volunteers lunch, laugh—and sometimes even work—to keep Emory Smith's native plant nursery alive.]
Other plans include removing lawn along the length of Highland Road in front of Hilltop to plant oaks, palmetto, and viburnum. The arboretum’s driveway will be narrowed and live oaks planted to shade the approach to Hilltop.
Peggy Davis Coates came to Hilltop as executive director from Baton Rouge Green in 2007. She has a master’s degree in landscape architecture from LSU and a master’s in urban forestry from Southern University. She manages an annual budget of about $165,000. Most of Hilltop’s money comes from plant sales, bequests and donations, as well as its programming, events, and memberships.
The university pays Hilltop’s electrical bill and provides maintenance and janitorial services which Davis says is appreciated after wedding receptions, plant sales and children’s day camps. The school of landscape architecture pays part of Coates’ salary.
According to Coates, at this phase of the master plan’s enactment, emphasis is on establishing native wildflowers and grasses in the meadow and rehabilitating the ravines that drain some of the fourteen acres with plant collections.
“We knew we were building a lot,” she said, “but we’ve shifted to site improvement now that we have an air-conditioned auditorium.”
The structure’s official name is the Imogene Newsom Brown Education Facility, which includes the Beverly Brown Coates Auditorium. The auditorium can seat seventy-five and may be used as a space for receptions, corporate retreats, meetings, and talks. LSU students use part of the building as a classroom and to work on projects.
Most of what you see at Hilltop was done before the master plan. The education/auditorium building and a courtyard were built with 270 individual donations. Courtyard construction included a donation by Susan and Burt Turner. The courtyard includes a collection of pineland savannah plants watered by a drip irrigation system from a cistern that captures rain water from the roof of the education/auditorium building.
The admin building, library, restrooms and Margaret Holmes Brown pavilion pre-date the master plan and were built with 200 separate donations including a donation by the Dudley Coates family (no relation to Peggy Davis Coates) for the pavilion.
“We are implementing the master plan systematically and slowly,” Coates said. “We’ve broken the plan into parts. We have to raise money and get LSU facility planning’s oversight for each part.”
LSU’s Robert S. Reich School of Landscape Architecture’s director Mark Boyer, Davis’ supervisor and a member of the Hilltop board, believes that Hilltop is a resource for Louisiana, a place where “native plants can be studied by our students and the public,” he said. “It’s a place where you can go as a respite from life in the city.”
Emory Smith, who had fled busy Florida Street with its “shrill honking of horns and loud screeching of brakes” in the early 1950s, agreed: “Our farm on the hill above Highland Road gave me space and freedom,” Smith wrote. “Soon, I would find the most interesting work I had ever attempted.”