Intent upon educating students and the community on sustainable horticultural practices, EC students have recently come together to form the EC Horticulture Club.

“Their goal is to educate and to practice sustainable horticultural practices, and to learn more about growing edibles in the landscape,” Ron LaFond, environmental horticulture supervisor, said. “There is a big push for that.”

While demand for a horticulture club is nothing new, it’s only recently that students came together to organize one.

“I had students in the past say, ‘You know, there should be a horticulture club,’ so I say to them, ‘Start one,'” LaFond said. “It’s a student club, so I don’t think it’s up to faculty to start them, but I’m there as a faculty advisor.”

The club’s priority is education. The students would like to have guest speakers come in and hope to go on a variety of field trips.

We’re going to have speakers from different backgrounds come in, from chemistry to environmental restoration, Samson Lozano, 21, earth and biological sciences major, said. We want people to see this field as a career option.

“We want to educate in the natural sciences and prepare people for the future,” Lozano said, “Our goal is to educate the community about the environment, the world, environmental issues and food safety.”

Among the most basic lessons the club hopes to teach is the ability to grow plants, regardless of space.

“We find a lot of people say, ‘We don’t have a lot of space,'” Reginald Fagan, 56, horticulture major, said. “We want to be able to say, ‘You can grow stuff in containers. You can grow vertical gardens.’ We want to break that barrier.”

The club’s members also aspire to change peoples’ relationship to their food.

“We can get people reconnected back to growing and having control over their food,” Fagan said. “We want to give people a sense of stewardship.”

“Every citizen on this planet should, in some way, feel a connection, a responsibility,” he added. “If it’s not growing vegetables then maybe it’s growing flowers.”

Fagan hopes students feel welcome and comfortable approaching the club about horticultural questions.

“This is a campus place where you can come and learn certain things,” Fagan said. “We’re making sure there’s an area where people in wheelchairs can come and work. We want to make sure we integrate other groups, like students with disabilities, and the other clubs.”

Among the events currently planned by the club will be an Earth Day event.

“We’re going to put on an Earth Day program and have short, one day courses for the students and the community,” Fagan said. “We’re going to have compost workshops, and a whole array of workshops and vendors. The kick off is going to be on April 22.”

While the club is still growing out of its early stages, it hopes that such events and a positive reputation will aid recruitment.

“In forming the club, we are relying heavily on word of mouth,” Lozano said. “We created an email account and a facebook page, and we asked horticulture clubs of past times. We were also at Club Rush and we passed out fliers.”

The efforts seem to be paying off, and Lozano only expects their membership to grow.

“We have around twenty people and within a few months we expect there to be more,” Lozano said. “Some of our groundskeepers are honorary members. They have been a big help to us.

In the end, the club is focused upon spreading very basic, horticultural ideas.

“A lot of my students are backyard gardeners,” LaFond said. “They try to grow edibles and that’s a lot of what they are trying to push in the club – growing and using sustainable practices.”