The Baylor Tree Stories Project
Welcome!
What would Baylor be without trees? Over 3,000 leafy limbed members of campus clean and supply our air, cool us down on hot days, harbor birdsong and skittering squirrels, shelter our conversation, celebration, and contemplation, and expand our hearts and imaginations with their beauty. Baylor is in turn committed to tending this campus forest. The Baylor Tree Stories aspire to grow this culture of care by tying these trees to our experiences and education. Each story is by a Baylor student and linked to a tree on Baylor’s tree map for the campus and public to enjoy.
The first Tree Stories were planted in 2025 by students in a class taught by Dr. Joshua King for English and Environmental Humanities. As more classes contribute, we hope a canopy of stories will spread across campus, encouraging affection for our arboreal neighbors at Baylor and beyond.
Baylor Tree Stories is a collaboration between Environmental Humanities, the Office of Sustainability, and other contributing departments and classes.
Tree Stories Listed by Class (Click Links to See on Map)
Students in this class journey through over 1,000 years of reflection on trees by writers connected to the British Isles. Trees feature in and shape these authors’ diverse views of nature and human experience—from the relationship of creation to God, to the interconnection of living things, to family trees and belonging, to the beauty and vulnerability of environments, and more. Over the semester, each student visits and writes meditatively about a campus tree. Their resulting Tree Stories open by taking root in observations about their chosen tree, branch into connections to their experiences and class readings, and leaf out into a creative response to their tree that takes inspiration from their reading and can be pursued through multiple media forms. Thanks to Dr. Sarah VerPloeg, Office of Sustainability, and Hector Marines-Chio, Regional Urban Forester, for their assistance with this project.