Courtesy of the garden’s website.

The Botanical Garden of the Piedmont in the spring.

If you leave Charlottesville High School at the end of the day, cross Melbourne Road, and walk past the sports stadium, you’ll see a white sign. Next to a picture of a pink flower, it reads Botanical Garden of the Piedmont. 

Not many CHS students know we have a botanical garden available just a minute from school, but the garden is an important resource. If you want to learn about the environment, earn volunteer hours, or just spend a little time relaxing in nature, the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont is a great place to visit.

Currently, the garden hosts events every week and has huge plans for expansion. However, it started small in 2011. The garden’s president, Jill Trischman-Marks, says “the idea of the botanical garden came up when the city of Charlottesville was doing a master plan for the east side of McIntire Park”. City Council organized community feedback sessions to plan what they would do with the land parcel that’s now the botanical garden. “One of the things that the community said they wanted was environmental education,” says Trischman-Marks.  “So the city selected the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont to [fulfill that role].” Since then, the garden has been building its programs and reach for over a decade, and Trischman-Marks says the organization has “expanded its mission to provide a vast array of types of programs.”

The botanical garden’s environmental education and tours are now every Saturday.

You can join lots of activities, such as butterfly walks, nature education, and art projects. For kids, a program called Explore to Read prints children’s books around the garden, to encourage reading and literacy from an early age. Trischman-Marks says the Explore to Read program exists “so reading and learning about nature becomes exploratory, and there’s discovery and fun involved in it”.

If you want to spend some time in nature and earn community service hours, the botanical garden is a great place to volunteer. The garden’s service coordinator, Whitney Zhang, says “when we’re thinking of ways to make the garden successful, volunteer work makes it a reality”. She shared that her position means she’s “the one reaching out to find the organizations and individuals who will help us on our volunteer work days. I’ve been surprised by how many are willing and happy to do that.”

If you’re interested in volunteering with the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont, the organization has several options you can choose from. One position is a Garden Guardian, by pitching in on weekend workdays, where volunteers manage invasive species, clear paths and take care of existing beds. If you enjoy working with people, you can also serve as a tour guide. After a short training, you can lead group tours through the beautiful garden and answer questions about their natural resources, programs and future plans. If you’re interested, you can contact Ms. Zhang at [email protected].

Many honor societies, including the NHS, require applicants to participate in community – why not earn your volunteer hours in a garden? Volunteers of all ages are welcome, so you can even organize groups to pitch in with you. The botanical garden also has no required minimum service time, which means you can contribute as many hours as you have open in your schedule.

If you’re interested in film, the botanical garden also hosts a photography contest each month. You can take a picture of any plant or animal in the garden, submit it on their website, and your photo might be publicly displayed as the organization’s banner.

In the future, the botanical garden plans to expand. Trischman-Marks is especially interested in building “indoor facilities, so that if we have rain events, we can still go on with our programs”. Reducing event cancellations will help the garden reach more people. Outside those buildings, the organization is working with local architects and designers to build a ‘discovery garden’. According to their website, this garden will include an outdoor classroom, and nearby, they plan to restore a natural stream.

Overall, the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont is a great resource. It’s only a minute walk from CHS, visiting after school can be relaxing, and on Saturdays you can attend arts and natural programs. “Even if you don’t consider yourself a gardener,” says the garden’s president, “the garden will hopefully make you feel at home, and want to come back to build the garden for the entire community.”