The Grounds We Walk On: How groundskeepers and landscape architects shape UGA
Walking through the campus of the University of Georgia, one can expect to see hundreds of shrubs, flowers and trees throughout just about every square foot of the campus that isn’t occupied by sidewalks or buildings. Here is how this campus becomes the beautiful and green place people know and love.
By Caroline Gregor
Athens, Georgia
The day is young as groundskeepers make their journey to The University of Georgia at 6 a.m. with their rakes, hoes and leaf blowers in hand. The campus is quiet and the sun is still rising. Groundskeepers begin their work of pulling weeds, trimming bushes and planting flowers while no one watches so that students, employees and visitors arrive to groomed quads and clear sidewalks.
But what would UGA’s 767-acre campus look like if a team of 105 landscapers didn’t monitor all of it so closely? The plants on our campus are important for not only making it visually appealing, but they also make up so many small, yet significant, parts of students’ daily lives. The trees provide a safe place to relax and study, the green quads provide a place to kick a soccer ball or have a picnic, the nectar of the flowers and nuts in the trees provide food for the wildlife coexisting with the students on campus. In fact, UGA is recognized by The Arbor Day Foundation as a “significant tree campus” because of the many species of trees across the campus. So what would North Campus or Myers Quad look like Sunday after gameday if the workers weren’t on the scene cleaning up everything and caring for the grass the next day, just for it to be trashed again the following home game? However, despite the hard labor put in by the maintenance team of over 100 people, they are some of the lowest paid workers at UGA, according to a 2014 Flagpole Magazine article. Meanwhile, directors of grounds and landscape architects are average to highly paid faculty of UGA. Is UGA not being fair to the workers they count on so heavily to create the landscaping look they so badly desire?
Students that visit from other campuses are always in awe by the beauty of the greenery all over the campus, how anywhere that there isn’t a road or sidewalk, you will find flowers, bushes and trees blossoming and filling up all the spaces between buildings. While most colleges, of course, have quads and trees across their campus, UGA’s campus is unique in that it creates its own one-of-a-kind feel, almost as if it is its own beautiful, green world.
How academics of landscape contribute to UGA’s campus
UGA has a top ten nationally ranked College of Environment and Design, according to DesignIntelligence magazine’s “America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools.”, as seen in a UGA Today article. Since this program is so highly respectable, it’s not hard to believe that landscape, horticulture and maintenance are taken very seriously across the campus. Along with the groundskeepers, many professors work with the landscape on campus. David Nichols, associate professor in the College of Environment and Design and the director of the Founders Memorial Garden, explained how the Founders Memorial Garden commemorates the first garden club in the US, and the old brick house that can be found in the garden was home to the early beginnings of the landscape architecture program at UGA that started in mid-late 1920’s. Construction to make the garden what it is today began in 1939. The first areas that were built were the brick patio, the courtyard and the east side garden.
Paul MacGregor, horticulturist/curator of the Founders Memorial Garden, attended the University of Georgia for its College of Environment and Design, and has now been working with the garden for the past year. MacGregor explained how he had a full scholarship to attend Georgia Tech, but chose to go to UGA because of its prevalence in the landscape and horticulture world, and how this campus has so many gardens and great landscape architecture because of the program.
“Being a university that teaches horticulture and landscape architecture, well that’s why so many gardens are around campus — you have to make yourself useful and you have to have facilities in order for students to learn.” MacGregor said.
And students do learn in these facilities, such as Nathan Rhienheimer and Jon Qualls, both junior landscape architect students, explained how they were working in maintaining the Founders Garden to receive credit for their class taught by Brad Davis, an associate professor in the College of Environment and Design.
Without the hard work put in by professors and students, UGA would lose an important and unique aspect of the camps that provides students, employees and visitors with a beautiful place to study, walk or relax.
How the facilities management side contributes to UGA’s campus
Nestled a few blocks away from campus sits the grounds department building where the director of ground for UGA, Brett Ganas, can be found in his office. Ganas works directly with the team of over 105 grounds workers in assigning daily tasks and working with the landscape design on campus.
He said groundskeepers arrive at 6 a.m. every day to be assigned their tasks. As opposed to many people’s 9–5 schedule, grounds department workers have a 6–2:30 shift. The early start makes for ideal working conditions. Amongst their usual weekday schedule, these workers also report to campus on Sundays at the crack of dawn to clean up and restore the quads that thousands of dawg fans so recklessly abuse on Saturday home games.
“We try to get that done before church,” Ganas said. “So it looks presentable for people walking on campus in the afternoon.”
Ganas said workers are divided up into seven area crews: north campus, central campus, south campus and east campus crews. This way workers efficiently cover every square foot of campus that needs to be tended to simultaneously. Within these crews, the workers are then divided into skill levels, Gk1–3, one being the most skilled and experienced and three being newer workers.
Ganas also said that the growing period is from the start of spring until about August, so the groundskeepers are currently putting in even more work than usual at this time of year as they are constantly having to mow and fertilize grass, pull weeds and plant new shrubs and flowers. Aside from the warm temperatures and increased labor that comes with growing season, groundskeepers must face several other obstacles at this time of year.
Since spring time at UGA comes with graduation and an increased influx of visitors on campus, getting work done and maintaining the quads can become problematic. As students prepare to graduate in May, they normally take graduation photos on campus that many times include shots of them popping confetti cannons or bottles of champagne.
For example, UGA’s north campus currently has signs displayed that say “CONFETTI IS LITTER. Be kind to our campus. Please don’t use confetti while taking photos.”
Since people that take these photos many times do not clean up after the mess they create, this poses as yet another job for the groundskeepers-having to pick up tiny shreds of confetti in the grasses of north campus quads. And as usual, the work goes unnoticed and everything will appear to be perfect the next day.
While UGA relies so heavily on the grounds keeping department, Ganas explained that the budget designated by the university for grounds keeping “is not adequate” and that they are strictly budgeted for maintenance only- which means that any work that individual departments want done will have to be paid for by that department. Examples of this include the landscape work outside of Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and Terry College of Business.
However, while the individual grounds keepers may not receive much praise for their work, many people do notice the overall results of their work. As seen in Country Living, UGA’s campus was ranked number five in “25 of the Most Beautiful College Campuses In the South.”
While people walking through the campus of UGA may walk right past groundskeepers as if they are camouflaged in the shrubbery, maybe we should all take a moment to think- what would this school be like without these hard workers?
