The homes throughout the Mixson Assembly neighborhood in Park Circle aren’t bordered with streets and sidewalks like most in Charleston. Instead, they open onto several beautifully landscaped public parks filled with an array of trees, flowers and plants.
The neighborhood is recognized as an arboretum, a botanical garden focused on trees and other “woody plantlife.” This kind of “community arboretum” is the only one of its kind in the state.
Mixson Assembly neighborhood president Trever Etminan and his neighbors embarked on a journey to gain that recognition about two years ago.
“We catalogued every single tree we have in the neighborhood,” he said. “It was about a six-month process, just counting trees and making sure we had the right species labels on each one. We worked with our community arborist to make sure they were all accurate.”
In September 2024, the neighborhood was approved by global group ArbNet.
Arbor diversity is key
The accuracy was important, because arboretum status isn’t just about having a lot of trees in one spot. It’s about diversity. A level 1 arboretum (what Mixson is recognized as), must feature at least 25 different woody species of plantlife. Mixson boasts more than 70, Etminan said, pushing closer to the tougher level 2 requirement of 100.
“If I had to make a guess, we have somewhere around 500 trees [in the neighborhood],” he said. “We may have even more if you start counting what people have added within their own property lines. We have probably 200 crape myrtles alone.
“And we still have identified little pockets in the neighborhood that the original developer didn’t take proper advantage of,” Etminan added. “That’s what we’re doing as a neighborhood — taking what the developer left us and identifying places where we can improve the community for residents. It’s more than just pretty stuff people like to look at.”
Investing in the future
Being recognized as a community arboretum is important to neighborhood leaders like Etminan because it offers an extra layer of protection for the area’s greenspaces against future development.
“You hear people talk about a forest, and they call it ‘undeveloped land,’ as if being bulldozed for a bunch of houses is the default,” said Keegan Robbins, a member of the Mixson HOA board. “Pushing back against that and being a community that has both lovely homes and lovely greenspaces for the people who live there is so important.
“A lot of the trees we’re planting today, we probably won’t see them fully grown,” he added. “But we’re planting them knowing that this community is going to benefit from having them for decades if not hundreds of years. That’s the dream.”
Etminan agreed.
“It’s essentially a nature museum,” he said. “And it’s right here in Park Circle. How many neighborhoods have something like this right outside their front door? If you spend enough time out here, just lingering, the sounds of the city start to melt away a little bit. You hear more of the wildlife, the birdsong. There are just not a lot of places, especially new developments in the Lowcountry, that have that. We are focused on bringing that back.”
Not stopping here
Mixson is already well on its way to reaching level 2 arboretum status, which offers further protections and some grant opportunities.
“We’re a level 1 arboretum right now, but there’s quite a few of those nationally,” Etminan said. “How many level 2s are there? Can we make it? Can we get there? The more we thought about it and the more we saw spaces across the neighborhood, we thought, we have the opportunity to grow for sure.”
Robbins said he was excited about the idea of growing the arboretum to level 2 status.
“It’s a milestone that will reflect how much we have grown the neighborhood, and that’s really exciting for me. We are already making progress.”
Ultimately, Etminan said, the goal is to identify new and creative sources of funding. Upkeep for more than half a dozen public parks and hundreds of individual trees gets expensive, he said.
“How do you upkeep all of this while keeping it affordable enough for people to actually live here?” he said. “We don’t want to price Mixson out of the Park Circle market, and that has become one of the current challenges.”
He said he hopes reaching level 2 arboretum status will help the community stand out and qualify for additional grant funding to further maintain the public spaces.
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