Preview of the upcoming teaching garden
By Nicholas Papini | Observer Contributor
Image courtesy of Christine Nelson
A new teaching garden, opening soon on the Gardner campus, will help students broaden their experience and make them more desirable to prospective employers. Thomas Montagno, Professor of Biology and Chair of the Natural Resources Program, described the proposal.
Students in horticulture and greenhouse management programs will interact with and learn to manage a greater variety of plants. Currently, the only plants that these students interact with are planted in pots. The teaching garden will give them the opportunity to learn to prune plants and how plants interact with their environments.
According to Montagno, plans for planting the beds include herb gardens, woody seedlings, perennials, annuals, pollinators, annual flowers, and hardy bulbs. The annual plants planned will include petunias, zinnias, marigolds, and snapdragons. Planned perennials include Rudbeckia (also known as black-eyed Susans), hollyhocks, delphinium, day lilies, and poppies. The herb garden will include lavender, oregano, basil, parsley, mint and more. Some of the trees currently planned will include apple trees, pear trees, and grape vines.
The teaching garden will be on the south side of the greenhouse, facing Green Street.
The garden will measure 34 by 89 feet and contain 12 raised beds that will measure 4 by 8 feet each.
The attached greenhouse will also have a state-of-the-art fence, which will have woody plants affixed to it using a horticultural method known as espalier. This means that the plants will be grown flat up against the fence and then formed into patterns along the fence as they grow.
When asked about the relatively unknown nature of this new expansion, Montagno said, “There’s always changes happening in all the programs a lot of the time.” He remarked that it is difficult to know what a given department is working on when you are not a member of it. The materials have been gathered and he and his co-leader Professor Pomeroy are waiting for a convenient day to begin building.
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