This year’s greenSPEAK UFV kicked off on Oct. 11 with local botanist Alan Reid’s guided walking tour, and spirits were high with an intimate group of 10 explorers made up of both students and faculty. In the past, Alan Reid has designed courses for the VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver to train workers to give tours themselves, and seems to be a walking encyclopedia of interesting plant facts. This was just one hint that tour takers were in for a treat.
The tour itself was so entertaining that it hardly felt like an hour, and included lots of hands-on experience with campus flora, staying true to Reid’s teaching style. Within the first 10 minutes guests were rubbing the undersides of willow leaves, and repeating to themselves, “Sedges have edges, rushes are round, grass has nodes from the top to the ground.” Scientific names, pharmaceutical uses, and defining characteristics were learned of the trees passed by, even those that looked mildly interesting at best. In fact, almost 10 metres away from the cafeteria is a Pacific yew tree, responsible for giving us taxol, a cancer fighting drug. Who knew that the trees absentmindedly passed each day on the way to class could have so much individual significance?
Not only that, the tour questioned how much we know about the history of UFV. It was shocking to learn that UFV has only around three gardeners between both campuses, fighting the good fight on our behalf. Most had also never heard of the head gardener Greg before, who recently retired, but through Reid’s dialogue it was easy to picture him. When he received gifts in the form of plants, which was often, he wouldn’t be able to find space, and ultimately ended up digging a hole on campus and placing a strange species anywhere he could fit it. Reid explained that’s the reason why there’s a member of Paulownia, the empress tree, near A and B building’s parking lot. Reid further denoted a major theme seen on the Abbotsford campus is that a majority of the species are drought tolerant due to the lack of water irrigation, an example being the swamp cypress, native to areas where we’d typically see alligators.
Along the way the group learned that the original “swamp” beside D building extended towards the C building parking lot, and how a committee was made by UFV to try and keep what we see now of the waterway intact. In a call to action Reid stressed that because of renovations needing to be done to the outside of D building, members of the “swamp” forest nearby could soon face similar danger of being damaged if not prioritized. If more students and faculty would get involved and care about the plants we have on our grounds, UFV culture would flourish just a little bit more. The guided walking tour stuck true to what I believe might be the greenSPEAK’s mission: to make campus goers question what they know about UFV, our community, and our world.
If you missed your chance to attend the guided walking tour, Reid has expressed that he would love to hear from students. Don’t be shy about reaching out to the dean’s office and suggesting more tours from our local botanist, even those around a theme like edible plants. Reid’s enthusiasm surrounding plants is nothing short of infectious, and as he would eloquently say, “Plants rule, animals drool!”
Chandy is a biology major/chemistry minor who's been a staff writer, Arts editor, and Managing Editor at The Cascade. She began writing in elementary school when she produced Tamagotchi fanfiction to show her peers at school -- she now lives in fear that this may have been her creative peak.
