It’s that time of year at IU: new flowers are planted around campus to welcome the start of spring.
Seven full-time staff get up as early as 5 a.m. to start working, planting around 25,000 pansies in the span of about a week.
“They [students] leave for spring break and come back and spring has sprung on IU’s campus,” said Tristan Johnson, director of landscape services at IU.
Flower and plant seedlings come from all over the country, Johnson said. They also get tulip bulbs from the Netherlands. Seeds ordered at the beginning of every school year arrive in January for IU to plant and nurture in the campus’s two greenhouses.
“Every flower that you see on campus gets grown right here on site,” he said. “They [workers] see it start as just a little sprout, and then they get to watch it all the way through the whole year. They get to water it every day. They get to see it all the way through the end of its life.”
Johnson said IU grows approximately 55,000 plants and flowers per year. They’ll reorder about 80 percent of the flowers that consistently do well and experiment with the other 20 percent. Vinca, for example, hasn’t survived well, but pansies have.
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“March can be so weird in southern Indiana, it can be snowing one day, it can be 75 degrees the next,” he said. “Pansies are one of the few varieties out there that can stand up to those really cold temperatures. And so they really are an ideal species to kind of give that early color pop that everybody really wants to see. They've been waiting all winter to see that.”
New flowers this year include hybridized Rudbeckias and sunflowers, as well as edible sweet potato vines.
“We plant sweet potato vines, which are strictly ornamental. You can't eat the tuber,” said Mike Gregory, nursery general supervisor. “But now someone's developed ornamental sweet potato vines that actually grow an edible sweet potato tuber in the ground. So when we pull them out in the fall, we'll have sweet potatoes.”
For the current fiscal year, IU budgeted $3.7 million for Landscape Services, which includes snow removal, equipment, and payroll. A beautiful campus not only helps attract students, but some landscapers also say it reduces stress and enhances pride in the university.
Mia Williams, the university’s landscape architect for almost 30 years, works with a team a year in advance to decide what flowers and plants to order and where to put them. Her goal is to emphasize IU’s natural woodland environment.
“We work as a group to determine what types of plants will be tough enough to survive life on a campus and have that visual impact that will engage people and cause people to maybe smile, or, you know, have a better day on a tough day, or just have a moment of relaxation,” she said.
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Williams said she bases her designs on what her provider says about the plants’ size and color. She also considers how much water and sunshine a flower needs and tries to plant flowers similar needs together.
“You use that to build a bed that grows,” she said. “Like at sample gates, you notice we always have height in the center of the bed, and then it sort of cascades down, and then we have trailers that kind of spill out of the beds. So we always want a combination of those factors in our designs.”
Around graduation in May, the team will take out the pansies and replace them with summer annuals, such as begonias, that last until the fall. Gregory said the pansies get composted over the span of three years.
“Right now, the crew is out top dressing the beds with the flowers from three years ago,” Gregory said. “So there's a cycle, and they really grow well on that compost, so nothing really goes to waste here.”
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