The Urban and Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) located at 1541 Campus Road recently replaced its grass lawn with a new garden holding plants native to Southern California. According to Graham Luethe (senior), the project began with a proposal Fall 2023 after his internship with The Urban Homestead, an urban farm in Pasadena, the previous summer.
The garden is currently a finalist in a competition to be a part of Southern California tour of native gardens through the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants. Luethe said it is an incredible opportunity for Occidental to be recognized by the greater community of sustainability advocates.
“They’ve been doing this native plant tour for the past 20 years, where they tour all these properties throughout LA that highlight good native gardens,” Luethe said. “It’s very much a community dialogue about how everyone can strive to be better.”
According to Luethe, he was inspired to start the project after seeing the urban gardens at The Urban Homestead and questioning why the UEPI House did not have something similar on their property. Luethe said he gained support from UEPI Program Directors Sharon Cech and Rosa Romero in order to receive the funding required for a project like this.
“I used the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Turf Rebate Program which gave us $13,500 to take out the lawn and replace it,” Luethe said. “Anyone can get [the grant] if you live on a residential property in LA. You can go online and apply for money based on the amount of space in your yard and then they’ll give you a certain amount of money per square foot of land.”
Luethe said after receiving the grant from LADWP and approval from Occidental Facilities, he, along with Cech and Romero, connected the curriculum of one of the college courses, UEP 247, to the installation of the garden. The class, Sustainable Oxy: Urban Agriculture and Sustainable Landscape Practicum, focused around teaching students about food issues and maintaining sustainable gardens, according to Luethe.
“I think for me one of the most rewarding things is seeing the students become really passionate about this work,” Romero said. “We wanted people to understand why we were doing this and hopefully start a bigger movement of folks really understanding what they can do with a small space.”
Owen Lee (senior) was one of the students who worked on the planning and landscaping of the garden. Lee said he was very inspired by the process and was surprised at how quickly something like this could be pulled off.
“[The native garden] was just a big grass lawn like many of the other houses around here at first,” Lee said. “By just looking at those, it was hard to imagine what it could become. But it turned into this beautiful garden with all of these awesome ecosystem services.”
One of the founders of The Urban Homestead, Justin Dervaes, assisted with the development of the native garden. According to Dervaes, he was called in by Romero to help out.
“Without the students, it would have been a lot harder,” Dervaes said. “We moved about 18,000 pounds of rocks in just a couple of hours.”
Romero said Dervaes was an essential part of the process, and that The Urban Homestead contributed a lot of supplies and knowledge to the students carrying out the project.
“Urban Homestead is an amazing farm based out of a small piece of land,” Romero said. “I think Justin is an expert on how to get the maximum amount of plants and production out of a small space. Urban Homestead was a great partner here.”
Siana Park-Pearson ’24 has been working for UEPI since her first year at Occidental and was hired by Romero as the Farm to Classroom Project Coordinator after she graduated.
“I’m just really proud of seeing all the students coming out to do this and really visualize what UEPI stands for,” Park-Pearson said. “There’s very few native spaces on campus that haven’t been student-initiated, so having one that is more in the community is important.”
Associate Director of Sustainability Alison Linder said landscaping is a substantial part of sustainability. Linder said native plants are extremely beneficial to the environment and the land that they are planted in.
“They provide a native habitat so all the local pollinators and wildlife can benefit from the garden,” Linder said. “The other main benefit is water sustainability. The plants did require watering initially, but once they’re established, they use a fraction of the water [of] any conventional garden.”
Cech said the native garden has been a valuable community engagement activity, as well as being an incredible example of a student-initiated project.
“This is something that really brings together our students, our partners and our work here at the Center for Community Food and Resilience,” Cech said.
Luethe said this project is important to him because of the visibility it brings to alternative landscaping styles and the support it gives to pollinators and other native species.
“Through urbanization and climate change, all of these native species are threatened,” Luethe said. “It’s an important opportunity to not only support the pollinators, but also teach the fellow humans and people at Oxy what a native landscape looks like here and what benefits we can get out of it.”
Contact Izzy Shotwell at shotwell@oxy.edu
