Penn State Intercom......April
24, 2003
Alumni Center landscaping project
an educational labor of love for students
By Gary W. Cramer
Public Information
An excruciatingly protracted winter has left many Pennsylvania gardening and landscaping fans itching to get their hands dirty with outdoor improvement projects. Few are digging with the zeal — and under the deadline pressure — of Penn State students who have a scant 18 hours to turn an unremarkable lawn into a campus showpiece.
The rush job is just the beginning of a long-range sprucing up of the green space around the Hintz Family Alumni Center on the University Park campus. By the time the last spade of earth is tossed for this semester, 40 to 50 landscape contracting students from the College of Agricultural Sciences and landscape architecture students from the College of Arts and Architecture will have been involved in the education- and service-oriented effort, with many more to come in semesters ahead.
Cherished as an oasis in the midst of the academic buildings that dominate that part of campus, the lawn abutting the oldest portion of the center -- what once was the house of University presidents -- has nevertheless fallen behind the times since the structure sprouted a very modern addition, complete with its own enclosed and tidy lawn, in 2001. Included in the lawn's new spring wardrobe will be many bits of small foliage and a large Japanese maple being shipped from Oregon, walkways weaving throughout the space, a brick patio and a circular stone patio.
The nitty-gritty
outdoor work on the 
edge
of the property closest to Electrical Engineering East and West, and around
the lawn's existing gazebo and "Olympic Wannabes" bronze sculpture of
children at play, began April 10, with the first of just six three-hour
installments of labor from students and Office of Physical Plant landscape
maintenance experts.
What they accomplish before the semester's end will be phase one of a five-phase plan to thoroughly upgrade the landscaping at the center using private donations to support the vision of current and future students for the space. Upcoming phases will address improvements to the existing small pond and other corners of the lawn, as well as to the narrow area between the center and Engineering Units A-E.
For anyone who wants to watch the progress as it is made, the Alumni Association offers a Web cam view of the project, among other on-campus views, at http://www.alumni.psu.edu/hub/.
Most of the students at work this semester, like Matt Conlin, are juniors taking Horticulture 464 (Landscape Construction) under the tutelage of Dan Stearns, associate professor of landscape contracting, and Martin McGann, assistant professor of landscape contracting. Starting with an Office of Physical Plant design, the students spent nearly 12 weeks planning for the supplies and labor needs of the project -- their first big construction experience within the major -- before finally getting to break ground on it.
"I personally like it because you're outside," said Conlin as he and his fellow majors scraped up wheelbarrow loads of sod with picks and tore scraggly vines from the perimeter of the lawn on the first day of on-site duty. "I hate being inside. I think the best part of it is working with our classmates."
Stearns said that the Alumni Center project is the most complicated of any of the many off- and on-campus jobs ever tackled for the classes.
"That's good for the students," he noted. "Most of them love this -- spending three weeks outside after working so long in the studio. You see them developing leadership out here that might not have been obvious in the studio."
Dean Baim, a recent convert to the landscape contracting major who has worked in the profession already, added that the variety of chores involved in the project -- hardscaping, curbing, planting, grading, mulching, irrigation -- contributes to its educational value.
According to other students, like Andrea Surface, there's another primo aspect to the job -- future bragging rights.
"We'll bring our kids here someday and say 'look at what we did our junior year,'" she predicted. "Wouldn't it be awesome if our kids went here?"
Gary W. Cramer can be reached at gwc104@psu.edu.