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When you live in a city like Gainesville, you tend to take the beauty of plants and trees for granted. This is sometimes called the Tree City, and when you fly over the city about the only thing you can see is the tree cover, except for an occasional mall and GRU’s electrical and water treatment plants.

However, the University of Florida campus was not always so beautiful. That it is today is in large part due to a man named Noel Lake. Noel died last week at the age of eighty-one. A memorial service will be held for him at 2 p.m. this coming Sunday at Trinity United Methodist Church.

For 33 years, in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, Noel was superintendent of grounds at UF, and, for most of those years, the only landscape architect in the university’s employ. If you look around and see the soaring oaks, the stately palms, the ubiquitous azaleas, the hedges, the walkways, the brick curbing, the little plazas and a forested campus peopled by a hundred different tree specimens, you will see the legacy of Noel Lake.

Noel hated to introduce into the campus exotic plants that needed tremendous amounts of water or that shriveled back at the first cold snap. He tried to use native trees and plants that could stand the vagaries of North Central Florida weather, where we still have seasons and some occasional very long droughts.

It was my good fortune to work with Noel on the construction of Weimer Hall on the UF campus, and it was a real education in landscape design. Noel understood that no matter where you put walkways, students are going to take shortcuts and make their own paths. So he designed the walkways where he thought students would walk, then planted hedges to keep them from walking anywhere else.

The upside down U’s covered with white PVC pipe are the bicycle racks that Noel himself designed. They are everywhere on this campus, and so attractive and utilitarian that they have been copied on other campuses throughout the US.

Noel was quiet and self-effacing. If you would see him in a crowd of workmen, you would be unable to distinguish him in dress or demeanor from the persons who worked under him. He is a man who needs no tombstone or memorial plaque. The grandeur of the plant life on the UF campus is his eternal marker.

This is Radio Ralph with a comment at mid-week for AM 850.