Live Oaks Treasured in Garden District, Why Not on Staring Lane?

Excerpts from Advocate article dated January 17th, 2007: "Tree City Marks Arbor Day Events - People Learn How to Care for Live Oaks":

Steve Shurtz, city-parish landscape and forestry manager, gives a public seminar Saturday at BREC’s City Park Gallery on live oak care. 
Suzanne Schexnayder moved into Baton Rouge’s Garden District about 13 years ago. Now, she’s helping lead an effort to protect the live oak trees for which the 80-year-old neighborhood is known. “I tell people, ‘I want you to get emotionally involved with your trees,’” Schexnayder said to a group of about 10 gathered in The Gallery at City Park Saturday morning for a seminar on live oaks. The seminar was sponsored by the East Baton Rouge Tree and Landscape Commission as an Arbor Day event.

“Live oaks are a signature tree in Baton Rouge,” Davis [Peggy Davis, member of EBR Tree & Landscape Commission] said. “Live Oak TLC” was the topic of the talk by Steve Shurtz, city-parish manager of landscape and forestry.

Schexnayder talked about efforts underway in the Garden District neighborhood association to protect the district’s trees through a program that includes tree adoption. Eventually, she said, district members hope to establish a trust for care of the trees. “I have no background in anything green,” she said. A Vermilion Parish native, Schexnayder lived in Tallahassee, Fla., in the 1960s where already there were ordinances enacted to protect the city’s trees. “That impressed me,” she said. The other thing that impressed her was the attachment people had toward trees in the Garden District. The neighborhood was built in the 1920s and the live oaks that grace the area aren’t there by accident. “There was a foresighted contractor who planted them. Now, almost 100 years later, we have these huge, old trees,” she said. Since the association started its tree adoption program two months ago, already 61 have been adopted. “We haven’t had to twist anybody’s arm,” Schexnayder said.