Summer thyme and the garden continues to grow
By Holly Luka, MNS Intern, with Becky Phillips
A wrinkle in thyme: put your toes on the month and your shadow casts the time. |
The Horticulture and Landscape Architecture Display Garden project has just completed Phase Two, a sun garden. Phase One, a shade garden, was completed last summer. The display garden replaces three old greenhouses razed two years ago between the French Administration Building and the Ensminger Pavilion, on Wilson Road.
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Phil Waite is the project director. Waite integrates the project into his classes—allowing students to design the layout, plant vegetation and build structures for the display garden.
“It provides a fabulous avenue for students to design and get real experience,” Waite said. “It’s the difference between figuring it out on paper and actually doing it.”
Students focus on sustainability while designing and building each phase of the garden. They have kept the old concrete walls of the original greenhouse, letting them define the garden’s perimeter. Concrete greenhouse pathways were also retained, and concrete they cut out was recycled to build planters and benches.
One of the focal point of the garden’s sunny courtyard is a “human-powered” sundial made of colored stones. Caroline Pearson-Mims, garden manager for the display garden, said the students came up with the idea and design for the sundial.
“If you stand with your toes at the top of the (current) month of the year, your shadow should show the approximate time,” she said. “I also just realized the irony of the plants I just placed there--that’s thyme planted around it,” she laughed.
Take a Video Tour of the Horticulture and Landscape Architecture Garden
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