The Nurture Your Roots program includes QR codes around the Beal Botanical Garden that students, faculty, staff or other garden visitors can scan to practice wellness and reflection. Each station has content contributed by community members.
Michigan State University
By the time 2023 Student Voice Survey from Within Higher Ed and College Pulse asked students about health goals, 43 percent of respondents wanted to work out to spend more time outside and 36 percent wanted to practice mindfulness more often.
Michigan State University has established a program in the five-acre garden space to promote healthy living among students and other community members.
The Nurture Your Roots program includes guided nature walks, mindfulness practices and yoga, helping individuals connect with their mind and body, as well as nature, through holistic practices.
The garden: The Beal Botanical Garden and Campus Arboretum is a well-known fixture on the MSU campus and the longest continuously operating university botanical garden in the United States, celebrating 150 years in the fall of 2023.
After the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning, campus leaders wanted to do something different with the garden space and, based on feedback from community members, elected to focus on the welfare
The garden “aims to promote wellness in the MSU community by building on research showing that being outside supports physical and mental health through increased activity and facilitating connection, relaxation and healing.” according to MSU’s website.
In 2022, garden staff created an interdisciplinary internship program, Beal Scholars, and student participants led some of the development of the wellness program, explains Alan Prather, interim director of the Beal Botanical Garden.
“One of our first students, Elliot Pancioli, created a nature journal for visitors, with suggestions that intentionally connect wellness and nature,” says Prather. “Seeing the power of the newspaper in practice really inspired us to think about how other types of activities, presented in the garden as a story and created by people in our community, could be a powerful way to encourage visitors to explain the connection between nature, the garden and their own well-being.
Finding wellness: Nurture Your Roots invites visitors to a series of self-guided experiences at various “rooting stations” in the garden focused on health and interconnectedness. Each experience was developed by a member of the MSU community who bases their research or expertise in wellness.
At the entrance to the garden, visitors can take a Pocket Journalcreated by Pancioli, which encourages reflection in the interior and the earth in the present moment.
Inside the garden, visitors can participate in any activity by scanning the QR code in the respective location. Grounding exercises include an adaptive stretching exercise, guided meditation, reading poetry or just sitting on a bench and listening to music for meditation, all led by students, faculty or staff in a video format. Each web page also features a short biography of the contributor and their thoughts on wellness, art and nature.
The garden is free and open to the public, so visitors can engage with the garden as they wish.
The impact: Since the creation of Nurture Your Roots, community members have expressed that they appreciate the offerings because they are “diverse, unique and meaningful to the campus,” says Angelica Bajos, community and sustainability coordinator at the garden.
In the future, the garden staff plans to reimagine rooting stations each year to continue to innovate and experiment with different campus creators, Prather says. “It’s part of what we feel makes this program so dynamic, that the content is created by artists and wellness experts on our campus.”
Staff also hopes to increase the program’s reach. Curricular partnerships with faculty to integrate nature and well-being into courses have grown over the past year to 38, including the new African and African Studies program at the university. Each course visits the garden in some capacity, increasing students’ awareness of how the garden can benefit their health and well-being.
Another future consideration is to make offers available in all seasons. “As you can imagine in Michigan, there are months where getting periods off is more of a challenge!” Prather says.
Last year, Beal piloted a virtual green spaces project in a campus residence, which helped students immerse themselves in a natural environment with wellness activities and therapy dogs. The campus also includes an arboretum with more than 20,000 trees, so implementing forest therapy training among the team is another ambition among the staff, Prather adds.
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