Our capstone project was centered around revamping the Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden on campus, as well as focusing on creating a stronger sense of community around the green space. Going into the project, we decided to prioritize the regeneration of the garden, replacing the picnic benches and creating events for people to gather around, as well as creating a new website and updating the app for the garden through grants! While we were only able to manage one day of service in the garden, we had several wonderful volunteers arrive at the garden and help transform the space during the span of a couple of hours. During the volunteer day, we did a lot of spreading mulch, and weeding as well as removal of certain plants that had been originally planted! I think that the biggest takeaway for me during this day was the power behind large groups of people working together, the amount of work that was done in a single day was simply astounding! Everyone pitched in a small amount of work, and in the end we had managed to do what would have taken a small group of individuals months to do on their own.
After the introduction of quarantine, I think our group felt a little lost, the part of the project that I think we were the most comfortable with had been taken away. We all had some form of expressed interest in gardening and working with our hands, weeding and working in a garden was a form of rewarding labor and now that we were not allowed to be near one another, the volunteer days were no longer a viable option. I think it was sad to have to say goodbye to our work days because it was our primary method of creating a community through a shared experience of working in the garden together. We had planned to have coffee and donuts on chilly mornings, to create wind chimes and to generally decorate the garden more. We were working towards having different Hispanic clubs, sororities and fraternities collaborate with us on work days, to remind people that the garden was there and that it needed to be taken care of. I do think that the pandemic and social distancing has forced us to become more creative with the idea of community outside of the physical realm.
The easiest way to create a community is through the shared, typically physical, experience. Without that, we are asked to look elsewhere, and the online community has become especially vibrant during these times. Thus, similarly we had to turn online to our other goals, building a website and updating the app. No one in the group had very much experience with building a website, and so once it became our main focus, we were forced to come to a reckoning. Luckily, websites are very easy to build these days, or maybe we are fast learners, but we picked out a template and began to work! The website came together beautifully, and I think we are all very proud of where we are! We all worked on different aspects of the website, transfering old data from the previous website and adding in new information! Sam especially did a lot of wonderful work, diligently cracking the mystery of the website and making sure to stay in contact with our advisors through every step! Sam also did a great job making sure the grant was written perfectly, which we received miraculously! The funding from the grant was intended to help revamp the seating area as well as the website and the app, which I believe will be continuously worked on in the future!
In terms of pinpointing the way in which our capstone project works within the three spheres of sustainability, I think our project is very unique in the way that it touches on them individually. Within the ecology sphere, I think the gardens were meant to be a learning grounds for plants from Latin America. Each plant is native to some area in Latin America, and was built with the idea that we could learn from them and study their plant biology, all of the staff is extremely well versed in the plants and what they do. It only takes a second to ask one of our advisers what a plant is and immediately receive an excited response. In terms of the social sphere, as stated previously, we really wanted to expand on the idea of community with the garden. We felt like the garden needed more caretakers and more people interested in volunteering their time to maintain the space. We hoped to do this through events and creating a more welcoming space, but now I think that focus has been readjusted to creating a larger presence online! Finally, with the economics sphere, I think that this garden does a good job of proving the intrinsic value of green spaces, and the idea of learning from nature!
