In a shady nook of the Union College campus, where an old metal picnic table once was the central feature, an Asian garden now grows.
The garden is the culmination of art history instructor Nixi Cura's spring term seminar in Asian garden design. Nine students built it from a plan proposed by one of two competing student teams in the seminar, and they celebrated its completion with a reception earlier this month.
“I like all of it,” said Jeff Brais, a senior from Connecticut who was on the team whose plan wasn't selected by a panel of faculty judges. “This wasn't really my choice, but it turned out well, actually.”
Meanwhile, freshman Greta Murphy, also from Connecticut, and sophomore Guy Corey, of Mount Marion near Kingston, who both were on the winning design team, basked in the satisfaction of seeing their concept take root.
While Asian garden design seminar students in previous years have opted to design gardens in a more-urban Chinese style on a site amid a group of buildings, the class this year carried out their inspiration in a small clearing in a wooded area next to Jackson's Garden. A stream, Hans Groot's Kill, runs along the edge of the site and provides one of the four basic Japanese garden themes: water.
Corey was a fan of the spot, even before he joined the seminar and learned it was a candidate for conversion to an Asian garden.
“This is my personal favorite area,” he said. “It's tucked away.”
Now, with its meandering path and distinctive sections, Corey said visitors can come away from the garden with a variety of impressions.
“The garden is supposed to be like an assembly of landscape paintings,” he said.
Cura said the garden seminar offers a good opportunity to employ a signature academic approach that Union is cultivating. Called “converging technologies,” the approach aims to infuse more elements of liberal arts and humanities into scientific studies and vice versa.
Officially, the seminar is part of the college's art history program. But using engineering design principles and considering horticultural issues are just two ways that science becomes part of a course focused on aesthetic and cultural aspects of Asian garden design.
Cura said a collaborative approach also is an important hallmark of the seminar.
“Group projects are almost exclusively limited to the engineering school,” Cura said, and the collaborative nature of art is often overlooked in traditional western art history classes.
“They learn something about how art is made, and they learn something about how to work with other people, so I see the course as having fulfilled several goals in that way,” Cura said.
Union's landscape specialist, Connie Schmitz, who oversees the adjacent grounds, including Jackson's Garden, will take on the long-range stewardship for the Asian garden. And the students credit Schmitz with anticipating a potential pitfall in one part of their plan.
The original design included bamboo, a classic Asian plant that prospers as an invasive species in upstate New York.
“We asked Connie, and it was a flat-out 'no,' ” Murphy recalled.
Instead, the group planted hostas in that area and were pleased with the result, she said.
With Cura leaving the college, this particular product of the Asian garden design seminar may be the last — and the most enduring.
“I think that gave the construction a little bit of poignancy,” Cura said. “That garden is going to stay there in perpetuity.”