The University S Arboretum Is Running a Very Successful Volunteer Program Called Adopt

September 5, 2012

The university’s Arboretum is running a very successful volunteer program called “Adopt a Garden,” which has allowed several areas around campus to be beautified by plants and flowers, which are planted and maintained by students, faculty, staff and external organizations.

The program was initiated a year and a half ago, and there have been 10,000 hours of volunteer time contributed between June 2011 and June 2012 alone, says Carin Celebuski, the Aboretum’s volunteer coordinator.

The Aboretum falls under the helm of Facilities Management, and works closely with the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture.

Individuals, groups and organizations have all participated in the program, whereby they were allotted a particular area to garden. The plants and tools are provided by the Arboretum.

Celebuski works to provide volunteers with meaningful projects that serve a dual purpose of providing them with a fulfilling experience and helping to beef up the campus’ flora.

“There are a lot of individuals and groups on campus who want to work on the landscape in some way. There were some staff members who wanted to beautify the areas right outside of their offices,” she explains.

One of the program’s first projects and largest success stories to date is the development of the garden at Taliaferro Hall.

Robert Daly, director at the Maryland China Initiative, which is housed in that building, reached out to the Arboretum to find out how he could work to beautify the area outside his office. For the last year, Daly has been maintaining that garden, as well as the plants at the entrance of his building.

“For me it’s been great because I like to garden, I can’t stand just being behind the desk all day long so I get up whenever I have time, I get some of the tools they’ve given me and weed it and do whatever needs to be done,” Daly said. “It’s nice to do something physical and sometimes I’ll just go out in the middle of the day for ten minutes and I can still get a lot of dandelions up and get a real break, so I like that.”

Daly said he appreciates the program’s usefulness and hopes more students and staff get involved.

“It makes the campus far nicer. More and more areas are getting beautiful plants put in all the time, but we don’t have the personnel to maintain them so there are a lot of weeds, a lot of crabgrass, a lot of sedge. So we need something like this program.”

Another project was undertaken by the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity.

“They adopted the new Mitchell garden which is a pretty intensively planted and ornamental garden right in front of the Mitchell building. Up until about a year ago, they just used to park trucks up there, there were no plants or anything,” Celebuski said.

“So that was all planted and Alpha Phi Omega has been maintaining it since then.”

Close to home, the Horsey Garden located at the Service Building has been adopted by our very own Facilities Planning department, headed by Director Brenda Testa.

Noting that the landscaping services staff has been reduced in recent times, Celebuski says this means that there is less time to devote to caring for decorative spaces around the campus.

That’s where the “Adopt a Garden” program is so useful, she says.

“The tendency of landscape service sine we have fewer and fewer people is to not intensively plant things, to go with more things like lawns that you could just mow, but people like that less well than they like intensively planted and beautiful and flowering plants,” she says.

“So people are taking on that task themselves. They’re saying, ‘Ok we understand that but we’re going to take on the extra work that these highly ornamental plants require.’”

Celebuski encourages students, faculty and staff to get involved in the program, which she says can be a useful relaxation tool. “It is just great really, it stretches the resources of landscape services and you wouldn’t believe the comments people make. They’re like, ‘I’ve just spent all day in the lab and this is just getting rid of my stress.’ It is completely a de-stressing experience to work in a garden, so that’s why I’m trying to convince people to do it,” she says.

Anyone interested in participating in the Adopt a Garden program can send an email to arboretumfm.umd.edu