Security guards kept watch over the Toomer’s Oaks over the weekend, preventing, among other things, the trunks of the trees from being ravaged by souvenir seekers. But once the barricades came down for the final rolling, it was ever oak for itself. And the fans swarmed.
“Have you seen the trunk?” Auburn horticulture professor Gary “Toomer’s Oaks” Keever said late Monday afternoon while watching the weekend’s toilet paper being removed from the oaks. “Everything that can be pried off has been removed. It looks like a pack of squirrels have gone up and down them for ten years with their claws just pulling everything off.”
The bottom six feet of both trees, but especially the oak closest to College Street, are currently darker than the bark toward the tops of the trees. “That’s (the bottom half of the trees) exposed wood that was protected from the light.”
Also gone? The green rhizomic shoots that remained after Thursday’s harvesting.
“There’s not a speck of green in either bed.”
When asked, if the lack of vegetation was the result of people picking it from the beds, he replied “Absolutely.”
Keever says a security guard will be back at the corner tonight, not to keep fans from taking things from the trees but to keep them from adding to them.
“I think people would come out here and try to roll them (if there wasn’t security guard),” Keever says. “To say they’d thrown the last roll.”
Keever says there will be some residual toilet paper in the trees when they’re cut down Tuesday morning.
Related: Final sunset over the Toomer’s Oaks.
More on the the Toomer’s Oaks: That tree in the old picture of Toomer’s Corner is not one of the Toomer’s Oaks / Toomer’s Corner rollings didn’t start with Punt, Bama, Punt, says History / Did Auburn students celebrate Bear Bryant’s death by rolling Toomer’s Corner?
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