Ask The Advocate for Feb. 13, 2012

Making way for new trees

More trees were planted last month on Arbor Day at the Burden Center. This is the third year of the replanting project to replace trees destroyed during Hurricane Gustav.

We noticed a lot of land has been cleared near the Rural Life Museum where it runs along Interstate 10. What is being constructed there?

The land was cleared of dead trees killed during Hurricane Gustav to make way for new ones just planted Jan. 21, said Jeff Kuehny, director of the LSU AgCenter’s Burden Center.

Kuehny said the 10-acre area is very noticeable from Interstate 10 but is only a fraction of the roughly 150 acres of the Burden Woods that were damaged during the storm.

Gustav killed more than 1,000 trees on the 440-acre site when it struck only a week before the Burden Center was supposed to open four miles of hiking trails called Trees and Trails. “It was devastating,” Kuehny said.

The trails opened about three years ago and are now available for hikers and walkers from 8 a.m. to dusk, with the kiosk for the trail located behind the Ione Burden Conference Center.

The AgCenter hosts a tree planting each Louisiana Arbor Day, with the most recent one featuring 300 families planting 300 trees. The trees that were removed were ground up and used as mulch in the replanted area, Kuehny said.

Some trees in the most recently cleared area survived, but “there’s not that much left there, that’s why it looks so barren,” Kuehny said.

The Rural Life Museum is also on the site but makes up only about 5 acres of it, with the rest used as horticultural research for the AgCenter.

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