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The UT Gardens are a fantastic and unique resource on campus that do not receive the recognition they deserve. Although demand for casual green spaces has skyrocketed among sustainably-minded college students, the relevance of having the State Botanical Gardens of Tennessee on UT’s campus cannot be understated, as it is anything but a casual privilege.

Given the existence of such a prime landscape as well as the demonstrated student demand for more, the most pertinent question is not what we should be doing more of. We already have those answers. The question is what stands in the way. Ultimately, the roadblock is the same as what plagues most change-makers on campus: failure of administration to adequately support its students.

While I deeply believe that pocket parks and green spaces should be maximized at every opportunity, I am faced with the hard reality that while students support this, the powers that be do not prioritize these initiatives. I am incredibly familiar with these realities from my experiences as an intern for the UT Gardens, the landscape design student intern for Facilities Services and a plant sciences major in the Sustainable Landscape Design concentration.

Working in these spaces I heard pitches from students constantly for the purpose of sustainable garden creation, but consistently financial reality was not addressed. I tried my best to sneak in native plants at any opportunity and was fortunate enough to design, create and install a section of the gardens based upon the principles of sustainable practice.

Garden creation is work I am intimately familiar with, and I remain desperate to find ways to follow through on these grand ideals.

Creation of environmentally engaged gardens requires extensive site preparation (money), sourcing of appropriate plant materials (money), a workforce for installation (money) and management plans to ensure long term success (way more money). Many of the sustainable practices that we desire require significant education and training. This requires extreme departure from how landscapes are traditionally maintained, a style that is financially supported.

Without a completely overhauled allocation of resources, many of these exciting gardens will ultimately fall by the wayside if ever created, as the existing tasks required to manage UT landscapes are extensive, to say the least.

Access to the UT Gardens is a legitimate concern. Trust me, I hated the 20-minute walk between the main campus and agriculture campus. Walking over the hot, ugly bridge between classes was a pain. The unreliable Ag campus shuttle — two buses on a good day — yielded limited advantage during short class changes. This is a failure of the system and those that organize it. There are opportunities here to add a bus or two dedicated to this route frequented by myself and the many garden visitors, making it a space which students from main campus can reliably enjoy.

If you believe garden spaces should take higher priority on our campus, then we must continue to advocate for our interests and recognize who is limiting these opportunities.

Please thank a landscaper or UT Gardens employee if you get a chance. Their job is much harder than you may realize. You can also get involved by volunteering at the UT Gardens, joining organizations like SPEAK or the GROW Lab, which manage gardens, taking a course to become more informed or advocating directly to administration for differently allocated resources to support UT Gardens or Design Services within Facilities Services.

If these options don’t appeal to you, seeds are cheap, and this is your campus.

Wyatt Hester graduated from the University of Tennessee in 2023 with a degree in plant sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].

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