The Toomer’s Oaks are being pruned this week. Work crews removed dead branches from the sick trees Thursday morning to keep them from possibly falling on pedestrians. Work on the oaks is supposed to continue Friday. The removed branches are being kept in a campus storage facility. Video by Brian Brown. Related: Tomatoes growing at [...]

Among the Chinaberry seedlings and the Virginia Creeper, and, you know, the herbicide, nature has found a way in the root bed of the Toomer’s oak closest to College Street in the form of a tomato plant. How’d it get there? Who knows. Maybe a seed escaped from a litterbug’s Subway BLT wrapper. Or maybe [...]

Broken beaks and damaged wings and weathering weren’t the only things found wrong with the recently returned Toomer’s Corner eagle statues. The restoration process revealed that at some point likely in the 1960s, the beloved birds were tagged with red spray paint. We asked Lathan Company project manager Anthony Miller how he got it off… [...]

Cleaner, brighter, more muscle tone and wing definition, repaired beaks—the venerable ol’ eagles have returned to Toomer’s Corner. The two 350 pound marble statues were placed back atop their pillar perches at a media event Friday morning. We were there. We took video. Warm feelings all around. Before the big moment, I talked with Terry [...]

Just before the latest official update on the condition of the Toomer’s Oaks was released earlier this week, Auburn horticulturist Dr. Gary Keever conducted photosynthesis measurements on the leaves of a live oak in the parking lot of Comer Hall. The idea was “to get a baseline of what (the photosynthesis levels) of a relatively [...]

The Toomer’s Corner eagle statues will return to their perches sometime Thursday and will be officially unveiled Friday at 10 a.m. as part of A-Day weekend festivities, according to a source with The Lathan Company, the Mobile-based historic preservation company in charge of the statues’ restoration. In November, the marble statues were removed and sent to Washington D.C. for cleaning [...]

They appeared over the winter—two vertical fissures only on the southwest side of the Toomer’s Corner oak closest to College Street. They look like the marks left on a tree if it’s struck by lightning, except they don’t—lightning tracks start at the top of the tree and end at the bottom. The fissures on the [...]

Toomer’s Corner will soon be opening a branch in Cullman, ba dum chhh. But no, seriously—they won’t be related by blood or anything like the regularly rolled oak planted last year on Capitol Hill, but the Toomer’s Oaks will likely soon have a new namesake of sorts in north Alabama thanks to Cullman’s Rotary Club [...]

The tradition continues.

Gary Keever had to keep going back for more sugar. “We started off by mixing up 40 liters, 20 liters in each of the two containers, and thought we’d be lucky to get the trees to take up that volume,” Keever, an endowed professor in Auburn’s Department of Horticulture, said of the carbohydrate cocktail brewed for [...]