A handful of administrators from WVU’s College of Applied Human Sciences got to play in the dirt Friday morning in Suncrest.
With perennials, vegetable plants, seeds, trowels, work gloves and mulch in the wheelbarrow, the green-thumb contingent dug in at the university Nursery School on Laurel Street.
The goal was to get a garden planted in time for fall, said Autumn Tooms Cyprès, dean of the college.
Call it a horticulture hello, the dean said, for the nursery school that is now officially and academically part of her college.
Save for that emergency squash-seed run to Smithfield Pa., the earth was turned with nary a furrow of the brow, the dean said.
The garden, the dean said, will be a living, learning laboratory for the young attendees of the nursery school.
When they return this fall, they’ll each get a magnifying glass and mission, Cyprès said.
The lesson plan, the dean said, begins with a question: “What do you see?”
Select items with the flying WVU logo will be interspersed among the plant life, she said, in an assignment designed to develop and hone critical listening skills and problem-solving skills.
Cyprès did the same thing back home in Arizona, where she began her career in education teaching high school chemistry and biology.
During one memorable, 116-degree day in the desert, she took her students out to the school parking lot, where they fried a carton of eggs, sunny side up, on the asphalt.
It was an act of academically seizing the day, the dean said.
Friday, she and her fellow academic sowers brought plants, cuttings and shoots from home, to make the flowering greenery even more personal.
“We’re all gardeners,” she said.
Someone suggested squash seeds, which no one brought, but someone else knew someone – who knew someone – with a connection.
“A little hardware store in Smithfield,” she said. “We got our squash seeds.”
If Friday was meant to be a team-building exercise, it wasn’t a very good one, laughed Nate Sorber, who is director of the college’s of School of Education.
That’s because the team was already built, he said.
“There was something about everyone out there pitching in,” he said.
“And it’s nice any time you can get away from the four walls of the university.”
