A rock garden built stone by stone by a botany professor

The waterfalls and stone bridges at Slayton Arboretum weren’t ordered from a catalog. A botany professor and his family hauled and set most of that rock by hand.

It started as 14 acres George and Mary Slayton gave to Hillsdale College in 1922. By 1924 the first plantings were in, led by Professor Bertram A. Barber. Then Barber kept building. Crews excavated a pond in 1928. The next year brought a field station, a hillside rock garden, a waterfall, and a pump house — and the stonework came from Barber himself, his students, his brother Austin, and his father Robert. Two rustic cement bridges followed in the early 1930s. Late in the decade they cut an amphitheater into the bowl of a worked-out gravel pit.

It became a genuine destination. By the late 1930s the arboretum showed up on Michigan’s official points-of-interest lists, and on busy days as many as seven hundred people a day came to walk it.

What’s remarkable is how much survived. The rock gardens, the waterfalls, the gazebos, the amphitheater, and those handmade bridges are still there, largely intact, kept up and replanted over the years. The 14 acres sit right at the edge of campus, privately owned by the college but open to the public to wander, so you can stand on a bridge a professor poured in 1931 and watch water spill over stones his father stacked. Few campus gardens come with that kind of fingerprint on every rock.