There’s a quiet revolution afoot at the University of Virginia, but it’s the lavender-scented kind. Guerrilla gardening put down roots on the school’s historic Grounds.
Officially, the landscape at UVa is a centrally planned feature and, theoretically, landscaping changes go before a committee. But in practice, that isn’t always the case.
Instead, professors and other university professionals sometimes take what they see as a boring yard or barren slope and add plantings.
“We are a community of creative and ingenious people who have their own ideas, so there’s always things that slip through the cracks, so to speak, and spring up, so it isn’t a hundred percent,” said Mary Hughes, the university landscape architect. “And I guess that makes the place interesting on a day-to-day basis.”
Art projects also appear on Grounds, though there’s a committee for them, too, Hughes said.
University officials are wary of students taking up guerilla gardening, because they typically leave after a few years, sometimes dumping the responsibility of caring for plantings on the university’s staff.
“Certainly there are cases where people have created very thoughtful, lovely plantings without getting permission per se or discussing,” Hughes said.
The English department has a couple of people who planted a garden, she said, calling it “very lovely.”
David Lerman, adviser to the Horticulture and Environmental Club at Piedmont Virginia Community College, said his group doesn’t do any guerilla gardening.
“It would be exciting to see more guerilla gardening,” he said. “I like reading about it, but we’re not actually doing it.”
Rampant guerrilla gardening at UVa isn’t encouraged, Hughes said, because the university is a public landscape with competing needs, but some of the school’s more than 1,100 acres in the Charlottesville area are more sensitive than others.
“The problem is that everybody wants to do everything as close to the Rotunda as possible,” Hughes joked.
In one guerilla garden, a professor and his assistant have shored up a slope with flowers, including iris.
And some guerilla gardens go for decades.
The University of Virginia Press, for example, is known for its elaborate guerilla garden. Not as much has been done since some of the founders retired, and the university provides the heaving lifting for things such as mulching, but it’s still a relatively well-known garden on Grounds.
In fact, that garden started with a bunch of guerilla conscription.
The director of the press at the time was married to a master gardener, and what started out as an herb garden by a few employees rapidly grew into much more.
“He’d never get away with it today,” former press employee Janet Anderson said, but he assigned press employees watering duty and had press employees out mowing the grass.
Anderson, who now does her guerrilla gardening with a group beautifying the Gordon Avenue branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, recalled how the press garden got its distinctive boatload of daffodils.
Across the street from the press, workers were building a dormitory, Anderson remembered. The existing front lawn was full of daffodils, which were going to be torn out. The foreman was planning to take them home to Richmond, but Anderson suggested they were sort of university property.
“He said, ‘If you want them, have them out of there by tomorrow,’” she recalled.
They dug trenches around the front and side of the press, she said.
“The whole press got in on that,” she said.
Since then, the daffodils, which can use the dividing, have become a source of bulbs for other plantings around the university.
“We were all delighted with it,” said Nancy Mills, a former press employee. “The press itself, the building, made you feel like home. It was just a warm place to work.”
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