Student Scott Carus stands with a tomato plant in the rooftop garden he helped revitalize on top of South Campus Dining Hall, September 15th, 2014.
On the roof of the South Campus Dining Hall sits a garden. It can’t be seen from ground level, and many students don’t know it exists. But for Scott Carrus, it’s a home away from home.
When Carrus transferred to this university from Pace University last spring, the junior horticulture and crop production and education major was in search of a place to foster his love for gardening, he said.
So in March, Carrus reached out to students involved in the garden and met Allison Lilly, the sustainability and wellness coordinator who works with the garden. Carrus said meeting Lilly and these students allowed him to pursue his vision for the future of the garden.
“When I came here last year, I was interested in gardening and it wasn’t a fully functioning place,” Carrus said. “I just saw so much potential in it. There are a bunch of people working with the garden now; it’s not just me.”
The rooftop garden originally sat on top of the North Campus Dining Hall but was moved to the more spacious South Campus Dining Hall roof so more students could work at the same time, Lilly said. The garden’s existence is the result of a continued effort by students to keep it thriving, she added.
When Carrus showed interest in the garden last spring, many students who were involved were graduating, while the group of regular volunteers was dwindling. His first objective was to get more students involved.
“It’s really energizing to see somebody who is so passionate about the rooftop garden and also about reaching out to other students,” Lilly said. “It just gets everybody around him that much more engaged and enthusiastic about getting involved.”
Carrus helped run a yoga event on the roof last summer to draw more students to the garden. Noga Raviv, junior hearing and speech sciences major, participated in the yoga event and now volunteers regularly.
Raviv said Carrus’ passion for the project is contagious.
“The way he treats the garden, well, he lives for it,” Raviv said. “He has this internal drive that keeps him motivated, and it motivated us, too.”
Carrus said he has a group of six volunteers who regularly tend to the garden and attend meetings.
“We’re getting more and more volunteers every week,” he said. “Volunteers are able to do whatever they want. We’re really just there to help people do what they want to do.”
Aside from engaging more students, Carrus and his team are also refurbishing the garden. They are replacing the breaking wooden flowerpots on the roof with new plastic pots and painting them. Carrus also came to the garden with ideas for a potting station for individual planters so students can care for their own plants, Lilly said.
“He was really thinking hard about a lot of the different types of plants that we have up there, trying to consider what would be plants that people would be really excited to go visit or touch or smell or take care of,” Lilly said.
Carrus is also working with a landscape architecture major to redesign the rooftop garden to make it visible from ground level, such as by adding trees along the rim of the roof, Noga said.
While projects for the rooftop garden are partially funded by Dining Services and University Sustainability Fund grants, Lilly said students have been creative in repurposing resources, such as using plastic waste cans as planters, instead of purchasing new materials.
“[The students are] really focused on getting more people connected with the project and increasing the longevity and vitality of the garden,” Lilly said. “Sometimes that is lost on campus because there is so much turnover with students and people are looking to be the first, or starting something completely new, but we have some of these really tremendous and amazing gems on campus that need to be cared for.”
