Burden's Legacy

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 10, 2009 - Page: 1D

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Good ideas die hard.

Steele Burden, whose family gave more than 400 acres of land on either side of I-10 near Essen Lane to LSU, laid out a tree and shrub identification trail behind what is now the Burden Conference Center.

Over time, the plant identification markers got broken, stepped on, rotted.

When Pat Hegwood became director at Burden in 2000, the trails had fallen into disuse and were being reclaimed by the woods.

He turned to Baton Rouge Green “because they’re all about trees,” said Hegwood, reached at a conference by telephone. “I started working with Sue Heflin and Peggy Davis. They wrote grants, and Peggy organized volunteers. They spent thousands of hours working out there.”

Jeff Kuehny, an LSU AgCenter horticulturist, credits Heflin, then director of Baton Rouge Green, and Davis, the volunteer tree planting outfit’s program director and a landscape architect, with reviving Burden’s idea of a trail system to be used to educate children.

“When we got interested in it, it was a dream of Pat Hegwood to finish what Steele Burden had started,” Davis said.

What visitors to Trees and Trails, dedicated to Steele Burden over the weekend, will see is a work in progress.

It doesn’t have a finished, park look, and you will want to put a bottle of mosquito repellant in your pocket before leaving home. The 2.5 miles of crushed limestone trails look like other things Burden did in his life — a piece of work where the labor of people is evident.

“That was one of the hardest things for me to leave,” said Davis, who left Baton Rouge Green to become executive director of Hilltop Arboretum, another treasure deeded to LSU by a gifted amateur plants man, Emory Smith.

“We built those trails by hand with volunteers using machetes,” Davis said.

Then, before the Burden trails could be opened to the public in 2008, Hurricane Gustav laid waste to the old hardwood forest in the middle of some of the most expensive property in Baton Rouge. The land is roughly delineated by Essen Lane, Perkins Road and I-10. About 100 acres of the 440 acres are southwest of I-10 and home to the Burden Center, LSU Rural Life Museum, LSU AgCenter test plots and the All-American Selection Rose Garden.

The trails are open to the public from 8 a.m. to 30 minutes before sundown seven days a week. The entrance gate to Burden off Essen Lane closes at 5 p.m., but will open automatically to let visitors out who are leaving later than 5. The trailhead is near the Burden Conference Center which is across the road from the rose garden.