UGA course maps out genetic lineage of iconic Sanford Stadium hedges

ATHENS, Ga. — The iconic hedges at the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium recently got a major ancestry test.

Researcher James Leebens-Mack of UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, with some help from his students, found that the same family of hedges have stood tall for 95 years.

When they were removed from the stadium for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 to make room for a soccer field, it had been close to 70 years since the original hedges were planted.

Clippings were taken and kept in nurseries, then replanted after the Olympic games.

Leebens-Mack and his students confirmed that today’s hedges are from the same stock as the original ones with nearly identical genomes.

“This work on the Sanford Stadium hedges is helping us understand their history while filling in a gap in the availability of high-quality genome sequences across the flowering plant tree of life,” Leebens-Mack said.

“They’re the sons and daughters of the original hedges,” the late UGA head coach Vince Dooley once said.

The hedges were removed a second time in 2017 for the construction of a new locker room and scoreboard in the west endzone.

Each bush was numbered so it could be replanted in the same spot where it had been dug up.