Campus beautification days celebrate MCC’s unique arboretum
Since MCC’s arboretum committee is largely dependent on volunteers and students, it created campus beautification days. The monthly event connects volunteers and students to the campus arboretum during the COVID-19 pandemic, and, of course, for much needed pruning and garden maintenance.
The event happens one Friday a month for a couple of hours and is posted on the MCC’s website event board. Faculty direct and work alongside volunteers to maintain the arboretum.
When the arboretum was accredited in 2018, MCC was one of the few community colleges in the country to gain arboretum accreditation.
“We were actually only the fourth community college in the country to have an accredited arboretum,” said Sean Whitcomb, residential faculty in the life sciences department and one of the founders of the arboretum. “A few more have become accredited since that point. But we were kind of trailblazers in Arizona in terms of community colleges.”
The entire campus is actually an arboretum. Whitcomb explained, “Some colleges have a separate piece of land that’s been designated as an arboretum, but ours, we just consider it to be the entire campus because we have interesting plants all over campus.”
The arboretum was a long time in the making, but began to take shape in 2017 when Whitcomb was hired. He heard a lot of talk about the inventory of plant life on campus. For years, the faculty had been discussing the possibility of recognition for the unique plant life on campus, but no one had begun the application process.
The campus was already home to recognized gardens: the Rose Garden, the largest public rose garden in the Southwest, and the Xeriscape Garden. It became a natural progression to combine all the elements. Whitcomb and faculty thought, “Why not just tie that all together in one big overarching arboretum?”
Whitcomb began researching the accreditation process and realized they were already well on their way to being an arboretum. According to ArbNet, the interactive community of arboreta, to achieve level one accreditation requires a plan that defines the purpose of the arboretum, an organizational group dedicated to that plan, a collection of 25 species, arboretum staff or volunteers, and public access or events.
Whitcomb worked with a student and some other faculty members to complete an inventory of all the trees on campus, noting their precise locations and species. They used that information to create an online interactive map that identifies all the trees and cacti on campus.
The biggest aspect of the accreditation process is recording inventory to present. A lot of the groundwork for the inventory was done in 2015 by adjunct professor and member of the arboretum committee, Steve Priebe, and one of Priebe’s students.
According to Priebe, Peter Conden, the program director of the sustainable agriculture program, had already received the grant money from the Environmental Protection Agency by the end of Priebe’s first teaching semester.
“At the end of the semester he said, “‘How are you at plant ID?’” and I’m like, “‘Well, I’m pretty decent,’” Priebe continued,, “And so he put me together with a student, and he and I went through and identified and inventoried all the plants on campus.”
In 2016, Priebe and his student did a project on the Xeriscape Garden. It was in the Xeriscape Garden, which focuses on desert-adapted plants, that Priebe was invited to join Whitcomb’s accreditation project.
“We were working out there one day, and this guy walks by and starts chatting and it happens to be Sean Whitcomb, and so we started up a conversation with Sean and he says, “‘Oh, I’m interested in this,’” and we said, “‘We are too.’” Priebe said about gaining ArbNet accreditation.
Priebe told Whitcomb about the inventory project and they began to build on it. The faculty and a handful of students began to use GPS technology to tag and mark every tree’s location on campus. They used a Trimble unit, a land surveying technology used for field data collection, which communicates with 6-10 satellites to get exact locations.
Whitcomb then handled the data and created the base maps. A green dot was used for every recorded tree on Mesa Community College’s Interactive Arboretum Map. Clicking on the green dot pulls up a photo of the plant, along with its common and scientific name. They also physically marked every tree with a dog tag, printed with the same information.
The total inventory shows over 1200 trees on campus.
“I always ask my students every semester how many trees do you think there are on campus, and I’ll get estimates from anywhere from 20 to maybe 500 at the upper end, but no one ever–everyone is shocked that it’s that high,” said Whitcomb.
But getting accredited in 2018 wasn’t the end of the process. Though MCC is level one accredited, there are requirements and upkeep to maintain that status, like updating the campus map, inventory, paperwork, updating the dog tags, and continued day-to-day operations done by the maintenance staff.
An arboretum committee including faculty, staff and students meet a few times every semester to plan for new plants and their locations, as well as the upkeep of the current ones. Whitcomb explained, “We make sure the plants are installed correctly and we kind of go around campus every once in a while, and keep a detailed inventory.”
But there’s always a need for extra help and awareness, especially during a pandemic, when the majority of classes are online and the campus is mostly empty.
“In the spring of this year, we all went home for spring break on March 9, and by the end of the week we had been told not to come back to campus and it has remained that way. I have been on campus just about a handful of times to do…you know, when we get students together to do maintenance, to do pruning, weeding, things like that,” said Priebe.
The arboretum just wasn’t getting the attention it deserved on a bare campus.
“Unfortunately, it’s getting enjoyed much less because there’s not a lot of people on campus. There’s only a handful of classes that are meeting on campus and I’m teaching fully online, so I don’t even get to experience the benefits of the arboretum as I normally would. But one thing that we have been doing is that we’ve been holding the campus beautification events,” Whitcomb said.
Campus beautification events are a resource for students and volunteers to learn and appreciate how much work goes into maintaining an arboretum.
“A lot of people think you put a plant in the ground and it grows like magic, but it actually takes quite a bit of work, and so we have this beautiful resource on campus. The students that have shown up have gained a greater appreciation for the arboretum,” Whitcomb said.
The center of the campus is home to legacy trees that require a lot of water, but the committee is focused on xeriscape gardens, dry landscaping with a focus on desert adapted plants and minimal water use, for new projects.
Sustainability and water conservation awareness is prevalent throughout the program.
Just as the arboretum’s program is a nod to the future, so is it a testament to the past.
The arboretum is directly tied to and used by MCC’s sustainable agriculture and landscape horticulture programs, and they focus on teachings that were beginning to fade from the college curriculum.
“All of the community colleges had programs like this and slowly, one by one, they started to disappear,” Priebe said. “We have the enrollment in that particular program today because we’re the only campus that has a horticulture program or a sustainable agricultural program, and that’s all due to Peter Conden.”
Since the pandemic, the program is thriving, despite the heavy hybrid and online course load.
“Boom. What happened? Pandemic hits and everyone started growing their own food because they weren’t sure if the whole supply chain was gonna collapse,” Priebe observed. “Everyone is wanting their own little garden plot and returning to that agrarian lifestyle where you’re growing your own food or at least part of it.”
During the pandemic, the campus beautification days are a reminder of the importance of the arboretum, tying so many parts of the campus together, from agrarian past to sustainable future.
As Steve Priebe said, “When they see that there’s an arboretum in Mesa, AZ, a place where you can go out and look at and commune with nature and learn a little bit about trees if that’s what you want to do or just walk and have that forest bathing experience, you know that’s a feather in our cap. That’s a feather in Mesa, Arizona’s cap. Definitely in Mesa Community College’s cap.”
*Campus Beautification Days typically occur one Friday a month, and are masked and socially distanced. More information can be found on the campus event page
