April 12th, 1961 is known in history as the day when the first human, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, journeyed into outer space to complete an orbit around our Planet. He was the first one to see how alive, how beautiful and how fragile is our Mother Earth. Short 108 minutes away in space made Yuri miss his Home like a son missing his mother.
April 12th, 2019 became a special day in the history of our Graduate Student Society (GSS), as we launched our Pilot Gardening Project on the 3rd floor balcony of the College of Environmental Studies (CES). With this initial, small yet caring, gesture we put our hands and hearts together to care for the leafy friends at our CES Home.
The Project itself was preceded with an exciting team-building activity organized by Dr. Nathan Stewart Hensley. We not only found out that Nathan has a twin brother (!!) but also learned how to time-manage ourselves as a team to achieve a common goal. Does being fast mean doing the job at your highest capacity? Is being slow necessarily such a bad thing? Nathan challenged our perception of “fast=good” and “slow=bad” and recommended to book-worm over Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s book “The Slow Professor” (2016).
By that time, young seedlings and adult plants were awaiting for our arrival on the 3rd floor balcony. Not even the drizzling rain or naughty midges could stop GSS gardening enthusiasts that day. Divided up in smaller teams, GSS bees worked on getting the soil ready, preparing the pots, planting, watering and labeling the plants in their newly built homes. One of the youngest seedlings, Mr. Banana (Taiwan Banana #5 玉山蕉), travelled all the way from Taiwan Banana Research Institute in Pingtung to become a “banana” of GSS eye. What made this Project even more special in the “passing-on-CES-tradition” sense is that about a dozen of the newly replanted adult plants once belonged to Dr. Cara Lin Bridgeman. Having been loved and cared for by Timothy Seekings for almost 2 years, the plants were now generously donated to GSS. Thus, in warm memory of Dr. Cara Lin, her plants paved the way for the future GSS Community Garden.
As the new leafy inhabitants are getting accustomed in their new homes with the help of GSS members, preparations are already on the way for a bigger gardening project dedicated to CES 10th Anniversary in the Fall of 2019.
We strongly believe that any act of consciousness, care and kindness – however local or however small – is big and meaningful enough for our Mother Earth. Either glowing in the outer space or feeling dark and moist in our hands, our Earth is ours to love and protect.
NRES GSS
108/04/15
Acknowledgements: NRES GSS would like to acknowledge generous support and assistance in the form of organic soil and plant labels provided to us by Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, Taiwan Council of Agriculture.