Walking onto the campus of Roseville High for the first time since May, something felt off. It didn’t fully click with me until the second day of school; the first full length school day of the year. Walking through the campus, the familiar shade cast by certain trees was missing. It felt… bare, empty.

The trees near the admin building at Roseville High have always meant a bit more to me than to other students. Walking onto school filled with the stresses and anxiety caused by loads of homework, projects and everyday life struggles; the trees were a bit of natural beauty that calmed me down – I would stop to “smell the roses” (metaphorically, of course, since the rose bushes were removed as well). It was the calm before the storm, the moment of peaceful bliss found in nature before going to class to work hard and deal with our daily stress.

Now, this might be just a minor inconvenience to most, perhaps not even an issue at all. However, I’m very saddened that these trees were removed from our campus.

Along with the removal of these few trees, the patches of bark by the JB Gale theater were also “improved”. Small flower beds were introduced into the bark, and I do appreciate the attempts to beautify by adding in scattered bunches of flowers however, students are stubborn and with the spread out flower beds, the bark is still easily accessible and thus will be considered another path to their next class.

The new landscaping changed the school; what used to be a refreshing walk through nature to get to my next class was ripped away and replaced with “flower beds”. If you ask me, those are no flower beds. Those are scattered bundles of two or three flowers awkwardly placed in the bark. Of course I understand that to do anything more than this would tighten our school’s budget, but may be my anger towards the tree removal is spreading onto the flower bed situation.

The front of our school, up until this year, had lovely rose bushes lining the steps to the front office. I remember my parents taking the obligatory first-day-of-high-school photo my freshman year, rose bushes in the background. I remember waiting after school with my friends, sitting on the steps next to the roses, just there to be easy on the eyes. I remember taking photos for homecoming using the roses as a background for my friends, posing for a photo shoot in front of them.

To walk onto the campus of Roseville High school, “Rose” being in the actual name of this establishment, and see the rose bushes gone as if they had never been there before; that made my heart drop.

The new landscaping has been referred to as “improvements” but when you take bits of charm out of our school, that in my mind is no improvement.

The effects of this new landscaping are not huge; this is not some life-changing occurrence that we cannot bounce back from. It’s merely an aesthetical choice, that affects some people’s emotions more than others.

I miss the trees, I miss the roses and when the topic comes up in casual conversation with my friends, they nod and utter phrases of agreement. It’s a small attempt to beautify our school, yet it took away something that students find beautiful and relaxing and just gave my senior year an interesting, unfamiliar start.

I’m already getting used to it, but I just do not see why it was necessary in the first place. If we students had an explanation, that would put some of my grudges to bed. Perhaps the plants were diseased, or made some sort of negative impact on students’ lives, I would be more understanding and forgiving. It just saddens me that a small piece of our home away from home was uprooted so bluntly.