Two sausage trees, indigenous to Africa, thrive on the south side of Moore Hall.
Have you ever found yourself stopped short by those mysterious trees dripping with odd-shaped fruit on the south side of Moore Hall? Or admired the stately symmetry of fig trees rising up from mounds of thick roots at the corners of Dickson Court?

Moore Hall’s sausage trees — kegelia Africana — and Dickson Court’s Moreton Bay fig trees — ficus macrophylla — are just two of the 522 genus/species listed in an online database of plants whose natural beauty is showcased on UCLA’s 419-acre campus.

The database, Campus Plants, resides on the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden website, but it excludes the more than 5,000 plants in the botanical garden. The database was created by professor emeritus Wayne Dollase of the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. He’s a mineralogist for whom the crystal Dollaseite was named in 1987 in recognition of his extensive research on the epidote-group mineral.
 
A grove of coral trees grace a terrace between the Franklin Murphy Sculpture Garden and Macgowan Hall.
As an assistant professor who first arrived on campus in 1966, Dollase came to know UCLA’s plants and their history during campus tours and from a 48-page booklet written by UCLA botanist Mathias that was available in the campus bookstore.

When Mathias’ pamphlet eventually went out of print, Dollase stepped in to create the online database, pulling in contributions from colleagues campuswide. The Department of Geography, for example, contributed a list of coastal sage scrub and chaparral hillside plants that grew near Parking Lot 11. Capital Programs provided archived landscape plans that captured the vision of UCLA’s first landscape architect, Ralph D. Cornell, who was responsible for the fig trees in Dickson Court among countless other botanical treasures.

The database is searchable by campus location and plant name and includes the genus/species of each plant, along with the family name and intriguing common names like she-oak, weeping wattle, bristly ox-tongue, and hens and chicks.
 
Chalk fingers are among the succulents in a rooftop garden at the Court of Sciences Student Center.
Search for Moore Hall, for example, and you’ll get a list of 22 trees and plants near that building, from the sausage trees to a giant bird of paradise at the building’s west entrance and a groundcover of lavender-flowered trailing lantana along steps northwest of Moore. The list also includes additional campus locations for each plant, as well as links to UCLA’s online campus map. There are no photos in the database, so you may have to play sleuth to locate specific plants around campus, using details from the database as clues.

As complex as the database has been to create and to maintain, it's clearly a labor of love for Dollase.

“Our campus boasts beautiful landscaping, ranging from the grand old deodar cedars at Royce Hall to the latest in water-wise landscaping found around the Court of Sciences Student Center,” Dollase wrote in an email.

“There is much to explore, including the blue-flowering jacarandas of the Sculpture Garden just south of the red-flowering coral trees at Mcgowan, palms in Bunche Hall and Boelter Hall interior courtyards, and exotic plantings at the Wooden Center second-floor balcony.”

His sage advice: “Take a few minutes now and then to watch our campus bloom.”
 
 
To see the database, click Campus Plants. If you have any additions or corrections, email Dollase. You may also enjoy this UCLA Today slide show of campus and botanical garden plants.