On a Saturday morning in October, a small army of volunteers will gather in downtown Baton Rouge not to pick up litter but to pluck fuzzy green spheres out of the trees. The ball moss cleanup, hosted by the nonprofit Clean Pelican in partnership with Councilwoman Laurie Adams, the City Club of Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge Green, the LSU AgCenter and other community partners, begins at 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 10 at the City Club at 355 North Boulevard and runs until noon. From there, teams will fan out along North Boulevard and the surrounding downtown streets, reaching into the branches to remove ball moss by hand and seal it into bags.
The event is free and open to anyone, and organizers stress that no experience is required. Volunteers are asked to register in advance through a form linked by Clean Pelican. The work is unglamorous — pulling a plant off a tree limb and stuffing it into a sack — but the organizers frame it as a rare chance to do something tangible for the city's tree canopy in a single morning.
To understand why anyone would spend a Saturday bagging moss, it helps to know what ball moss actually is. The plant, Tillandsia recurvata, is a flowering species in the same genus as Spanish moss. It is an epiphyte, meaning it uses a tree for physical support without drawing nutrients from it. It photosynthesizes its own food and, as Baton Rouge Green puts it, does not deprive its host of a significant amount of water. It will happily grow on non-living things too — power lines, fence posts — which is a clue that it is not a parasite in the usual sense. A ball moss plant takes about three years to mature and flower, then blooms for roughly the next seven, and its seeds travel by wind, rain and animals.
In small amounts, that is harmless, even native and natural. The trouble comes with scale. When ball moss colonizes a tree heavily, it can shade out the foliage and crowd the buds, so the tree struggles to develop new branches or gather enough sunlight to feed itself. The added weight can snap small twigs and limbs, especially in rain or wind. Baton Rouge Green describes a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: a stressed or sickly tree may be more vulnerable to infestation, and the infestation then pushes the tree further into decline. Chris Cooper, a Baton Rouge Green program specialist who coordinates urban and community forestry, told The Advocate in 2021 that ball moss is "overstaying its welcome," and that in the urban environment "the majority of our trees are experiencing stress in some form or fashion." Once ball moss covers more than about half a tree's canopy, recovery can be nearly impossible. Limbs that break off under the added weight are usually already dead or dying, which leads some residents to blame the moss for killing the tree — though the real culprit is often the loss of sunlight the moss caused.
That is why the cleanup matters beyond the block where it happens. Ball moss spreads through the air, so an infestation on one property tends to become a problem for the neighbors. Baton Rouge Green's "Bag the Ball Moss" initiative, which this downtown cleanup builds on, makes the point bluntly: help all of Baton Rouge recover by addressing your own property first. The campaign, promoted on billboards donated by Lamar Advertising, urges residents and property owners to remove the plant by hand or with a focused stream from a garden hose — and, crucially, to bag the removed material rather than leaving it on the ground, where it can keep spreading.
The stakes are highest for the city's signature trees. Ball moss has been particularly hard on live oaks and crape myrtles, and the LSU campus, home to historic live oaks, has been among the affected areas. A dense colony can intercept a meaningful share of the water that ought to be reaching a tree's roots and branches, effectively creating drought-like conditions, while its bulk cracks limbs and its shade suppresses the foliage that keeps the tree alive.
The cleanup's host, Clean Pelican, is a relative newcomer to these battles. The nonprofit, a Keep Louisiana Beautiful affiliate, grew out of the frustration of Baton Rouge native Glenda Pollard, who began thinking hard about Louisiana's litter problem during long road trips to visit family out of state in 2020. Her credentials for the work were inherited: her mother had marched her and her siblings out to the family timberland on Sunday afternoons to pick litter out of ditches and along lumber roads, and her father owned the first commercial disposal company in Baton Rouge. "I wasn't afraid of a dirty business," Pollard told inRegister. "I guess you can say that we were early environmentalists." She assembled a board of Baton Rouge natives and partnered with the nonprofit Global Geospatial Institute to gamify litter collection using geographic information systems technology. By its own accounting for 2023–24, Clean Pelican logged 5,000 hours of anti-litter education, 3,000 volunteer hours through business-sponsored pickups, an anti-litter curriculum reaching 600 students at four East Baton Rouge Parish schools and local businesses, and the removal of 500 broken bus benches.
The partner organizations bring longer histories. Baton Rouge Green was founded in 1987 by a group of citizens under the leadership of Dr. Jed Morris and has spent nearly four decades working to restore the city's urban canopy and expand access to green space. The LSU AgCenter supplies the research behind much of the removal guidance. Councilwoman Laurie Adams framed the cleanup as civic as much as botanical. "Taking care of our city starts with taking care of the places we share," Adams said in a prepared statement. "Our trees are an important part of what makes Baton Rouge beautiful. When neighbors come together to volunteer, we're not only improving our streets and public spaces; we're building a stronger sense of pride and ownership in our city."
The meeting point itself is a piece of that shared city. The City Club of Baton Rouge occupies a three-story brick and masonry building at 355 North Boulevard, completed in the 1890s as a United States post office and long known as the Old Post Office. Its Italian Renaissance facade, heavy with terra cotta ornamentation, was called by its National Register nomination "one of the finest and most pretentious examples of turn-of-the-century Renaissance Revival architecture in the state." It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 9, 1980, and later designated a contributing property to the Downtown Baton Rouge Historic District. Volunteers will check in at a private club founded in the Gilded Age and then walk out to pull an air plant off the street trees.
It is, in the end, a modest act with a long tail. The seeds of a single unbagged pile can ride the wind to the next block, the next yard, the next stressed oak. Bagging them is how the city keeps the problem from starting over. Volunteers of all experience levels are welcome, and registration is available through Clean Pelican's sign-up form.