Jensen Kugler

Copy Editor

On Friday, Sept. 13, the Office of Sustainability hosted its first Wooster Garden Party of the school year in the campus garden across the street from Williams Hall. The event encouraged the campus community to connect with nature in a fun and tangible way.

This was the office’s second time hosting a garden party, and the event has expanded, boasting larger attendance and vibrant music. Like last semester’s garden party, the recent festivities involved tending to the garden and the addition of a few specific tasks.

Students and community members were able to take home their own bouquets of flowers and fresh produce that they had planted in the spring. If anyone got particularly hungry while working, they were sufficiently covered by a generous spread of snacks and mocktails. That was not the only place participants could find food. Since the campus garden does not use pesticides, it was safe for people to harvest a veggie and pop it right in their mouth!

“I had a great time at the Garden Party. I got to eat yummy food and drink fancy mocktails,” Michelina Guerra ’26 said. “I picked fresh, ripe tomatoes off the vine and took them home to cook some delicious pasta pomodoro. I got to connect with others who share my love of nature.”

Director of Campus Sustainability Brian Webb explained that the Garden Party was designed to connect students with the process of food production and an experience with gardening. Making gardening a fun, social activity for the community helps introduce science and sustainability to students in a personal context. He believes that gardening is a powerful force that has a personal and spiritual value in addition to ecological resonance. 

“We are so divorced from where our food comes from in our society, and gardening is a really valuable act that connects us to the land,” Webb said. “It creates a more intimate experience to our eating that I think can enrich us.”

Webb also commented on the sustainability of home gardening, adding, “[There is a] lower carbon footprint, lower pollution when you’re doing home gardening. So anytime we can do more production of food locally, or production even at our own homes, that’s gonna be a positive from an environmental perspective.” 

The campus garden is home to a wide variety of plants that each play a valuable role in preserving and cultivating biodiversity. For example, the perennial flowers encourage pollinators like bees to inhabit the area surrounding the garden and help the native flora reproduce through the process of pollination. Seeds from towering sunflowers also feed native wildlife, like birds and insects, that live in the garden.

Because the garden impacts local ecology, it was important when planting to consider how each individual plant would fit into Wooster’s larger ecosystem. Non-native plants, or invasive species, impede on natural processes and cause ecological damage. Plants in the campus garden were specifically chosen because they are considered native species, meaning that they are naturally found in the provided ecological region. 

Even with the confines of cultivating native plants, students and faculty have had the freedom to nurture specific flora for enjoyment. 

“The sunflowers we grew just because we’ve discovered over the years that students just love sunflowers,” said associate professor and program chair of environmental studies Matthew Mariola.“They love looking at them, they love hanging out in them and they love harvesting them.”

Along with the perennial pollinator flowers, there are plots of annual flowers, standard vegetables and a Three Sisters plot. For those unfamiliar, the sisters in question are corn, beans and squash. Several Indigenous communities across the Americas plant the three crops together because the corn acts as a growth support for the beans that convert nitrogen in the atmosphere into nitrates for the soil and the squash shade the roots to prevent evaporation thus keeping the dirt moist. The inclusion of a Three Sisters plot diversifies the growing systems within the garden and also holds a cultural history that students across disciplines can learn from, making the garden a valuable teaching tool.

The garden provides a space to experience the environment firsthand and contextualizes the importance of sustainability. 

“I think sustainability matters because it has to matter,” Guerra said. “If you attend The College of Wooster, ignorance is a choice. Here you have so many resources and education is so available.”

For more information on future events, follow @woogreenscots on Instagram and check out Party for the Planet on Sept. 27.