Louisiana State Arboretum (LAARB)

Established in 1961, the Louisiana State Arboretum was the first such area in the South and the first state-supported arboretum in the United States. The 600 acre site is the only Louisiana state-owned preservation area open to the public, providing a little over 5.5 miles of hiking trails along a Cypress-Tupelo Swamp, through a Bottomland Hardwood Forest and along ridges of a Beech-Magnolia Forest. In 1967, Horticulturist Nick A. Tuzzalino collected some of the first plants to be preserved for the arboretum’s herbarium. In the early 1980’s, Charles A. Allen, at that time a Botany graduate student, was hired to collect and preserve as many plant specimens as he could find and identify in the initial 300 acres open to the public. There are now about 600 specimens in the herbarium collection.