On a recent sunny morning, students from University of Maryland professor Diana Cochran’s environmental horticulture class traveled along the Metro Green and Yellow lines taking soil samples and observing stations in collaboration with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.
The students are creating a glossary of plants and example plantings based on different station environments. Their work will help WMATA beautify its stations with plants that are native to the area.
The glossary is intended to help WMATA personnel know what plants would thrive in different circumstances, Cochran, who is an assistant clinical professor in the agricultural and natural resources college, said. The students’ work is focused on low maintenance plants, she added.
“That’s the idea, that [WMATA] can look at this easily and know that this is going to work for their site,” Cochran said.
WMATA reached out to this university’s Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability to help investigate using native plants at stations, according to Emily Judson, the senior program coordinator of WMATA’s energy and environment team, who accompanied the class on its trip earlier this month.
PALS works with local agencies to address sustainability issues by connecting the agencies with faculty and sometimes incorporating classes, PALS program director Kim Fisher said.
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Cochran has worked on other PALS projects before and welcomed the chance to have her students work with real sites, she said.
“That’s what I like about this project,” Cochran said. “It makes [students] think about a lot of the things that we learn about in class and how you put those into reality.”
Hannah Moore, a senior environmental horticulture major in the class, said she likes the hands-on aspect of the project. A lot of her class projects are theoretical and do not yield real results, she explained.
“I feel like it’s really cool to be able to be working with the WMATA people through PALS, to just actually make a difference,” Moore said.
The class also hopes to plant a demo plot for WMATA at the end of the semester, but they’re still working the details out, Cochran said.
Cochran said the ultimate goal is for WMATA to use the students’ work to conduct plantings even in areas the students didn’t look at.
The glossary won’t be specific to certain stations, but can be adapted to different environmental conditions, Cochran added.
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During a site visit earlier this month, the class traveled to the West Hyattsville Metro Station to take soil samples and observed the Huntington and King Street-Old Town Metro stations.
Michael Thomas, Alexandria’s landscape supervisor in the west region at WMATA, was at the Huntington and King Street-Old Town Metro stations with the students.
He emphasized the need for plantings to be low maintenance because the region he covers has a lot of stations. It is also important for the stations to look good for their customers, he said.
“You know, when you get up in the morning you want to feel good about riding this system,” Thomas said. “Metro is supposed to be one of the best systems in the world.”
Moore enjoys having a positive impact on the local community through her class project, she said.
“A big thing that I love about doing these projects and doing plant science like this is that I can interact with people in my community, interact with people that interact with the environment and do these hands-on experiences where I feel like I’m seeing the difference that I am making,” Moore said.
