Letter from the Director

The UConn Garden

As we travel on life’s path, we encounter and stroll through a variety of gardens. Sometimes we pause for a moment and observe a flower’s shape and form or even extend ourselves to inhale its fragrance. Environment influences every flower, some flowers flourish with radiant sunshine while other flowers thrive in the cool shade of a deep dark forest. Some flowers thirst for gallons of water while others wilt with even a cup of water. Some flowers can be transplanted while others develop much better from seed and some flowers put down very deep roots.

Whatever environment they enjoy, flowers interest us because they are all different and distinct in their symmetry, color fragrance and aesthetic beauty. The ingredients for a good garden are variety and diversity. Imagine a spring flower garden full of brilliant yellow daffodils, fragrant purple and pink hyacinths, stately red and orange tulips, tiny blue bells and white forget me not, courtly peony bushes and trees and majestic roses. What a beautiful breathtaking site! Needless to say, this garden requires constant vigilance in pruning, clearing, cultivating, feeding, watering and providing unlimited patience and understanding of climatic changes. How can a garden not be beautiful with all this devotion and attention to detail?

The University of Connecticut also has beautiful and bountiful gardens of cultures! Our garden, like nature’s flowers, is rich in its diversity. Our flowers are the cultures of Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, North America and Oceania. Our flowers, like natural flowers, require careful and deliberate attention and cultivation to detail, to ensure that our “human flowers” grow and develop in a healthy caring environment. As nature’s flowers require attention during the ever changing weather patterns of frost, drought, and flooding, we must monitor the intellectual, social and cultural growth of our international students and scholars. Our flowers do not compete with each other but rather harmonize and support each other’s efforts, a true concert of harmony.  Our flower garden is full of vim, vigorous, and vibrant individuals who are eager, like spring flowers emerging from the ground to display their inner beauty and creativity of their indigenous cultures. Our garden was not transplanted over night, like a sod playing field, but was carefully thought out and planned. Our UConn garden was nurtured and cultivated over time by all of us and not just a few. There is mutual respect; the food that sustains us as we grow together as a community and family.

Visitors to our garden, have the unique opportunity of viewing a flourishing global garden, where each and every culture interacts in concert with each other. Our garden is not of one variety or species, but like a flower bouquet, consists of a multitude of many, a true rainbow of harmony and beauty. We hope as you stroll through our UConn garden, you can feel, appreciate and experience the energy, enthusiasm and excitement that we possess.

Finally, we trust that our UConn “garden experience” will open up doors of understanding and provide you with a first hand glimpse of this beautiful world we live in.

Bob Chudy
Director