A garden to commemorate friends

Concept art of the transformation garden

There are many reasons why you might want to create a garden. Gardens are spaces where nature and recreation come together to create a sense of calmness or a place to escape. Often gardens are covered with greenery (planned or natural), they have places to sit or things to see. They sometimes focus on growing food; or providing habitat for pollinators; or gathering together rare or native plants. Sometimes you create a garden because you want to make a statement, and sometimes you create a garden to preserve the past. But sometimes you create a garden because you have lost a friend and colleague. This is one of those gardens. 

Concept art of the transformation garden

The University of Ottawa has dozens of gardens, or at least green spaces that could be considered proto-gardens. Personally I don't ascribe to the idea that any patch of grass is considered a garden. I think that there needs to be some something that draws you to the space and gives you the possibility to commune with Nature. I often call grass lawns "dead green spaces" because they are so monocultured that they don't really prove to be a functional ecosystem.

This is a conversation I often had with my departed friend Eric. I would quibble about some inane space on campus and say that I wanted things to be better. And then he would challenge me to make something better happen.
Eric and another colleague, Kenza, both passed away last year. They were both professors in the same department. They were both beloved and well respected. To say that the news of their passing was devastating, would be an understatement of the highest order. You have to understand, university campuses really are small cities: small cities with a really young population. So death happens, sure... but not really that often.

Back in the Office of Campus Sustainability, we were bummed. Many of us knew Eric and Kenza... some of us had been in their classes. We didn't know exactly how to place our feelings but we knew that we wanted to do something. The difficulty of doing something memorial on a university campus is actually pretty difficult. And the only thing I could think of was Eric telling me that sometimes you have to make things happen. So we dreamt up the idea of making a garden to honour their memories. 

The tricky part about a garden like this is that you have to make sure that the garden isn't just another "dead green space", but that it stays true to the ideals that the department of geography and environmental studies. Luckily Holly, the campus sustainability coordinator from our office, had a plan.

Very quickly we zoned in on a good location, the Transformation garden between Simard and Hamelin. The garden is very simple rectangular lawn with a defined concrete curb. In the middle there is a beautiful sculpture of horses by Bruce Garner, and around the space there are benches and vines climbing on the walls. So we thought, how could we transform this space? It is already fairly nice; however, it lacks the magic ingredients to make it a garden. Rather, it is kind of a showroom for the sculpture.

Our second challenge was to figure out how are we going to fund the garden? Universities in Ontario have been going through a really bad funding cycle for years now and grounds programs across many campuses have been slashed in the hopes of preserving jobs and critical programming. So increasingly, campuses have been leaning on grants and external funding to cover new programs and infrastructure. We got very lucky because Holly was able to apply for a grant through the WWF which "supports creative ideas from students and educators on how to protect, restore, monitor, educate on and celebrate nature".

Perfect!
So we had a location, and we had a small budget to make something happen. Holly worked with the department and the families of Eric and Kenza to come up with a program that would make sense. The plan revolves around the idea of turning the "dead green space" into a functional pollinator garden. Our hope is that we can plant a small version of the garden now, and keep adding new plants every year to help evolve the space.

We starting planting the garden last week. Friends and colleagues of Eric and Kenza were invited to join us in getting the first plants into the ground, which were made up of a variety of native pollinator species. Holly created a parallelogram design that allows for some people to enjoy small patches of grass for sum bathing. We will water the garden and nurture the garden for the rest of the season. New benches were added around the space (from an unrelated project... but sometimes you get lucky). We will also add a plaque and an identification key for some of the plants.

My hope is that the garden will eventually become a living laboratory space used by the department for students to learn about pollinators, native plants, and recreational space. I would love to add more plants, a pollinator hotel, and some more seating space. Already someone has dragged a picnic table to the garden space so that they can enjoy lunch by the plants.

I know that this garden is hardly a substitute for the friends that we have lost. But I also know that they would be happy that a space got created that brings people together and helps the natural world thrive just a little bit more.

 ~jonathan rausseo - campus sustainability manager