Homegrown Diversity
By Krishna Ramanujan MA'01

When Irwin Goldman PhD'91 wants students to understand the relationship between the world's many plants and the different kinds of people who grow them, he brings them to the Eagle Heights Community Gardens.

The gardens, located on campus's far western fringes near the Eagle Heights student residences, are a unique and sometimes overlooked feature of campus. The stretch of land is carved into more than four hundred individual plots, which anyone with the zeal to garden can rent. With so many different hands tending the land, the gardens are host to an extraordinary array of exotic plants and foods, which make them a perfect living laboratory for Goldman's lectures on biodiversity.

Walking among the plots, the associate professor of horticulture can point out the curly-edged, dark-green kale leaves eaten in the northern United States. A few paces away, the kale's round-leafed southern counterpart, known as collard greens, grows in the garden of a Louisiana native. And, in a plot tended by a Chinese gardener, between rows of light green lettuces and staked, bushy tomato plants, Goldman finds mustard greens, which are a thinner, greener, Chinese equivalent of collard greens and kale.

But it's not just the variety of plants that Goldman wants his students to notice.

"To me, the most striking thing about [the gardens] is the diversity," he says. "At Eagle Heights, you have not only crop diversity, but human diversity."

Many of the people who garden at Eagle Heights live in the apartments across the street, an international community with students from more than sixty countries. Others are professors, staff members, or people from around Madison who love the land. The result is a rich mix of gardening styles and plants, representing ethnicities and tastes from around the world.

The eight-acre garden occupies one of the most beautiful natural areas on campus, lying on a rolling meadowland near the shore of Lake Mendota. One gets there by walking, biking, or driving west past Picnic Point along University Bay Drive, a route that passes by cattails and glistening views of the lake.

Each plot is about the length and width of a good-sized living room. The landscape of plots stretches out over a hill in a mosaic of bright greens and rich browns, punctuated by tall corn and yellow and orange sunflowers. Some plots are bordered with fences made of branches pulled from the thick green woods that surround the garden.

When gardeners were asked in a recent survey what they enjoyed most about cultivating the soil at Eagle Heights, it's no wonder that the natural setting was named first. "There's nothing as beautiful as walking into those gardens," says Daisy Shiffert, who tends plots with her spouse, David MS'01. "It's striking when you walk there and see all those beautiful colors under the sun. I think it enriches your life."

Not far behind the scenic beauty, though, are the connections and friendships that grow among the vines and branches.

"I've met so many gardeners now," says David Shiffert, who chairs the Eagle Heights garden committee. "You watch people from year to year just become more and more attached to their plots. The next year maybe they put up an umbrella for shade, or some structure, and really you watch it become part of them."

"There are literally thousands of former students out around the world who had their most satisfying experiences while at the UW in these gardens," says another gardener, Jim Guderyon '56, MS'59. "I see it as part of a continuing tradition."

In the next few pages, On Wisconsin introduces some of the people who share that tradition, exploring what they grow — and how they've grown — in their gardens.

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