Defining the Garden

Students to present projects in “Views of the Garden: A Symposium”

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Seven DePauw students will be presenting on the importance of gardening in their final class projects, just four days after the People’s Climate March outside the White House.

The presentations exhibit students’ final projects for the Honors Scholar class The Need for Roots: Gardens and Belonging, taught by Classical studies Professor James Wells.

According to the course’s syllabus, the course examines “the history of the garden as figure of literary and artistic imagination and as a source of food, work of art, retreat, display of wealth and power, site of meditation and worship, site of resistance.”

While Wells scheduled the class readings, the course was largely coordinated by the students themselves. “This course was totally designed by students,” Wells said. “I mean, I came up with the calendar and the texts, but the only thing I had in the syllabus were guidelines on participation.”

Although he spends most of his day at DePauw teaching Greek in the Classics department, Wells brings his own gardening experience to the class.

“While we talk about Classics somewhat, a lot of his experience in permaculture is much more pertinent. Especially to some of the discussions we’re having now,” Sophomore Joshua Selke, a student in the class, said. Permaculture is a system of agriculture designed to utilize the sustainable patterns seen in natural ecosystems.

To expand the impact of the course, Wells reached out to the Sustainable Leadership Program (SLP) to help plan his course. Like any other DePauw class, the course includes a variety of readings for students to take home, but The Need for Roots also features a service component: before the end of the class, students are required to log seven volunteer hours at the Campus Farm.

Office for Sustainability Coordinator and Campus Farm Manager, Malorie Imhoff sends out potential volunteer hours to the students each week to help out at the Campus Farm. Students help to plant, harvest, and prepare the farm for the season.

“We are trying to integrate what we do here in SLP more with what classes are doing as well, so it was a cool opportunity to merge the two,” Imhoff said.

Imhoff hopes that more classes like The Need for Roots will sprout up and utilize the Campus Farm. “I think this is definitely the start of something bigger, because I think the more we are able to understand class requirements, and people's schedules, and all this, it’s easier for us to be able to work with different classes and try to make what we’re doing relate to what’s happening in class too and make it a real world example,” Imhoff said.

However, some student projects expanded beyond the limits of Greencastle. Selke will be presenting his project called “Humans of Gardening.” The project features a variety of Indiana residents of various identities who involve themselves with gardening or nature in some way. Selke takes pictures of them and records their story.

The people he interviewed came from a variety of different backgrounds and personalities, but they all have one thing in common: gardens. “I talked to someone recently who had just gotten out of the military, had PTSD, and worked with gardening to, kind of, free his mind, and kind of be able to control something when his mind was being uncontrollable for him,” Selke said.

Selke hopes to take what he learned from this project and pursue it further, photographing people of different identities while he travels abroad next year.

Selke and the six other students will be presenting their work on Wednesday at 4:15 in Watson forum. A banquet of garden-based vegetables and foods will be provided for the event.