East Mall
The East Mall1 provides the most important green space at UNLV and connects the University with the 200-year-old tradition of American campus design inspired by Thomas Jefferson.
Purpose and scope of the collection
The East Mall combines with the North and Xeric Garden to form the Arboretum Core and create the green heart of campus. Moyer Student Union and Pida Plaza anchor the south end of the MalI, while the Judy Bayley Theater and Artemus Ham Hall anchor the north. The Mall serves as a site for many student functions, such as afternoon concerts and organizational recruiting, as well as campus tours, receptions, and conferences.
The Mall is preserved as one of the most important heritage spaces at UNLV. It links the university’s landscape design to the 200-year-old campus design tradition created by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia: academic buildings surrounding a green lawn to create an “academical village”, a community of scholars. The Mall is preserved as a grassy tree-lined open space, where Arboretum plantings provide a backdrop to these events and daily movement of students, faculty, and staff. The Mall also hosts many of the oldest trees on campus because it provides a place where trees can grow relatively undisturbed and attain their true size and form. For management purposes, the Mall (and Arboretum Core) also includes landscaped areas of adjacent buildings.
Collection - specific interpretations of this policy and special
- Maintain the grassy tree-lined open character of the Mall.
- Prevent further incursions of pavement into the central turf areas.
- Minimize disturbance of mature trees within and adjacent to the central turf area.
- Replace trees with the same species whenever possible, but take advantage of new construction to increase species diversity.
- Wholesale changes to either the design or the planting plan are not permitted.
- All trees should be accessioned as individuals. Outside the Core, accession individual trees when they are part of a limited population of the species on campus.
- Only a few individual shrubs of each species should be accessioned, but they should be from different parts of the campus.
Programs supported by the collection
- UNLV Biology: BIO 345 Urban Horticulture, BIO 422 Taxonomy of Vascular Plants, BIO 426 Plant Anatomy, BIO 442 Principles of Plant Physiology
- UNLV Landscape Architecture: AAL 246 Plant Materials, AAL 355 History of Landscape Architecture, second through fifth-year design studios (AAL 284, AAL 286, AAL 384, AAL 386, AAL 484, AAL 486, AAL 494, AAL 496)
- CCSN Ornamental Horticulture: OH 103 Ornamental Plant Identification, OH 107B Landscape Materials, OH 203 Introduction to Plant Pathology and Landscape Pests, OH 205 Landscape Planning/Design, OH 213B Drought Tolerant Landscape Plant Identification
Collection data
Type of collection: Landscape
Year established:
Guidelines created: March 2006
Last revised: March 2006
Proposed by: 2003 Land Range Planning Team
Location: East side of campus
Size: TBD
Amenities: Pida Plaza, Alumni Grove, Rose Garden, Amphitheater, Sculpture Garden, Bayley-Ham Plaza/Claes Oldenburg “Flashlight” Sculpture
Last inventoried: in progress
Number of species: n/a
Number of specimens: n/a
1 Referred to as the North-South or Academic Mall in the 2002 Long-Range Plan
