Student-Led Rooftop Therapy Garden Fosters Biodiversity, Supports Improved 'Green Rating'
When you visit the rooftop at the Campus Center, students are now invited to relax and enjoy a holistic healing experience from the Newark Rooftop Therapy Garden.
Students at NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College are working toward creating a greener, more sustainable urban environment in keeping with the university’s broader push toward sustainability, as it’s a core value in the university’s strategic plan, “Building on a Strong Foundation — NJIT 2025,” and has shaped operations for years.
The sustainability push has yielded results with national accolades from The Princeton Review. Named a "Green College,” NJIT earned a score of 90/99 for its Green Rating, which provides a comprehensive measure of a school's performance as an environmentally aware and prepared institution — more than a 45% increase over the past five years.
The Newark Rooftop Therapy Garden, which called for adding more than a dozen flowers, fruit and herbs, including black-eyed Susan, lowbush blueberries, lavender, wild bergamot, basil and mint, was created to provide aromatherapy and also provide the rooftop with something visually appealing.
Last week members of NJIT’s Urban Ecology Lab (UEL) went to monitor its progress. The garden is part of the Honors First-Year Seminar — all first-year honors scholars researched the types of plants on the roof and proposed new plantings to heighten biodiversity and make the garden more appealing to birds, bees and the campus community.
This year’s freshman class put forth the project in action, while preparing future biodiversity projects on campus that the next freshman class will put into effect.
“Part of the experiment is to see where do people sit? What do they like better? Do they want to be near something pretty? Do they want to be somewhere where there’s a good smell? Because one of the things that was observed before was that because it had been a while since this place had been upgraded, it wasn't very effective and it wasn’t getting used a lot,” said university lecturer of biological sciences and co-director of UEL, Caroline Devan.
As the UEL members walked around observing the new additions to the garden, students sat at the tables right beside the garden.
Currently the freshman class is preparing projects to add plants by the Summit Street Parking Deck.
“We’re getting asked to come up with biodiversity projects, and the goal is to try to plant by the Summit Parking Deck, which is currently alone there,” said freshman Hannah Shahinian, an Honors College scholar and member of the UEL. “They want us to plant things that will attract pollinators and provide biodiversity and walkability there because it’s an area that people don’t walk by. Projects like these make the campus better to be around.”
In class, on campus grounds and in Newark, students at NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College are working toward creating a greener, more sustainable urban environment in keeping with the university’s broader push toward sustainability.
