2009 - Present: Reflective Garden

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Project Description

A reflective garden adjacent to the Library entrance with blueberries, gooseberries, and serviceberries as edible landscaping plants and a variety of pollinator plants that bloom in sucession over the growing season.

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Role in the Community

This project opened a way for faculty and students to interact and collaborate with facilities management to improve the campus landscape. Projects can now be approved through a formal project approval processes in design/build courses offered through the Art department and through independent faculty/student creative works. The garden also introduced the concept of edible landscaping and pollinator plants as an alternative to the industrial landscape model. As well, it provides a model for how to recycle biomass on campus by using leaves, wood chips, and coffee grounds as mulch materials that would normally be sent to the landfill.

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My role

The idea for this project began with a student who traveled abroad to study Japanese gardens and returned inspired to create a garden on the Pacific grounds. Though the student's proposal was well-researched, there was no mechanism to gain approval for a student project that would become a permanent fixture on the university grounds, so she was unable to realize her vision. Though her proposal was unsuccessful, her activities opened a crack in the door between academia and facilities management that I was able to follow up on by gradually building trust through the installation of small student/faculty projects over time. In order to insure that large-scale projects such as this could be completed at a professional level, I also encouraged the art department to include a project-based design course in their new program. This course is now a required course in the new design track and will be offered every spring.