Pi Alpha Xi, founded in 1923, is the national honor society for floriculture, landscape horticulture and ornamental horticulture. Its mission is to promote scholarship, fellowship, professional leadership, and the enrichment of human life through plants. 

The purposes of this Honor Society are to recognize high scholarship, to foster good relationships among its members, to promote or to help the exchange of ideas among members of the professions, and to establish cordial relations among students, educators, and industry members.

Our chapter at OSU, Alpha Rho, is graduate students, undergraduate junior and seniors with a 3.0 GPA or higher, and faculty who have a strong interest in horticulture. We have an initiation banquet during spring term to induct these outstanding horticultural students into the national society. 

We host fundraisers to supply food to our audience during our seminar series and allow us to tour horticultural businesses, Extension centers, and experiment stations. Our chapter has adopted a mile stretch of Oak Creek that runs through campus and have helped remove invasive plants, trash, and tended to plants intended to restore a part of the bank. We also work with the Community Services Consortium (CSC) youth group to help with and present horticulture activities.

In The News

Youth explore OSU's work in plant breeding, sustainable horticultural production, and research thanks to Pi Alpha Xi volunteers.


Horticulture undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty were inducted into the Alpha Rho chapter of Pi Alpha Xi (PAX).