Campus beautification: doing more with less
Released: August 18, 2003
One big reason why prospective students and their parents choose a college is the impression they get when seeing the campus and its green space for the first time.
Caring for UW-Whitewater’s 407 acres of green space is a team of nine grounds workers and Steven Bertagnolli, building and grounds supervisor since November 2000. Bertagnolli’s job is to oversee the entire grounds operation, snow removal, fleet maintenance, moving and hauling of furniture and delivery and pickup of surplus property. But his personal passion as a gardener and self-taught landscape designer has been put to the test with shrinking staff, and aging equipment. Bertagnolli and his team have learned to care and maintain the green space creatively - doing more with less.
“We normally spend between $3,000 and $4,000 annually for flowers,” Bertagnolli said. “We don’t have the money, so we spent several hundred dollars, bought seed and turned the annual beds into wild flower beds.” Bertagnolli was modestly accurate when he said that the wildflower beds are going to be gorgeous.
Taking the premise one step further, the grounds team not only grows annuals and perennials from seed in their own makeshift greenhouse and nursery, but they bring perennials cuttings from their own homes.
“My employees have started bringing in plants from home,” Bertagnolli added. “They are dividing (plants) from their houses, their parents houses, their grandmother’s and grandfather’s houses.”
A master gardener, Bertagnolli has brought in over 3,000 perennial cuttings from his own home. Primarily hostas and prairie plants, they will someday be used as foundation plantings around all academic buildings, but today can be found surrounding Winther Hall, the Andersen library building and the Ambrose Health Center.
“We don’t want to just maintain the campus,” said Bertagnolli. “We want to enhance the campus.”
Extremely resourceful, the grounds crew continues to enhance the campus by borrowing the chipper and getting free mulch from the city of Whitewater, working with the Department of Natural Resources to get free plantings, and even cutting down trees from a professor’s land. “We dug up about 115 white pines,” Bertagnolli said. “They are all over campus.”
You will see the grounds crew at work all over campus, especially near green spaces that are visible to the roads, where people get their first impression of the university. “Your high priorities are what ever is highly visible,” Bertagnolli added. “Hyer Hall, the corner of Prairie and Starin Road, the Visitor Center. Anywhere where there is a lot of traffic.”
Bertagnolli is very proud of the job he and his team are doing especially the wild flower beds, foundation plantings and newly transplanted white pine trees. Yet mindful of the dire economic situation, he would still like to start a “needs list” of trees that are indigenous to this area for people to donate. He also has a list of equipment that needs repairing or replacing including a new dump truck, a lawn mower, and a parking lot sander.
“Our goal is to make UW-Whitewater the prettiest campus in the world,” said Bertagnolli. “And obviously we don’t have the resources for that, but we’re doing the best we can.”
- Cindy Vergenz,vergenzc@uww.edu
