What does it take to beautify a university?

Just this: hundreds of faculty, staff and student volunteers planting 9,000 flowers in a single day. A grounds crew in a cherry picker hanging 100-pound baskets of arrangements on 13th Avenue. And for the person overseeing all that flora, a beautification day that starts earlier than any rooster but is as satisfying as it is demanding.

“University Day feels like a lot of work, but we always get so many comments on the flowers,” said grounds worker Lauren Meyer. “It really brings a lot of joy to people.”

Meyer, of Campus Planning and Facilities Management, this year assumed the management of plantings for University Day, the annual University of Oregon beautification event run by the Division of Student Life. Working closely with landscape architect Jane Brubaker and a spirited grounds team, she oversaw a two-day effort that left the Eugene campus bejeweled with blossoms and ready for commencement.

University Day was May 15 but the work began a day earlier, when Meyer and her team hung the massive, water-soaked flower baskets from lamp posts on 13th Avenue.

As throngs of students passed in various states of curiosity, UO arborist Becket DeChant and custodian Andrew Sechrist attached the arrangements while fastened into a cherry picker atop a forklift driven by Aaron Maxwell.

DeChant has done this job for eight years. During the pandemic, he said, there was talk of suspending the corridor décor but nothing came of it, much to the relief of those who look for the botanical beauty brought to the UO’s front door each spring.

“People were saying, ‘What? No flowers?!’” DeChant said. “The work is totally worth it. This strip really looks great. People notice. It’s important.”

With the prelude complete, it was on to the main event: University Day 2025, which for Meyer began at 4 a.m. She and her crew needed hours to deliver a huge assortment of buttery yellow bidens and strawberry marigolds to planters at 13th and Agate Street before volunteers arrived at 9 a.m. to put them in the dirt.

To guide her team, Meyer had drawn up an elaborate map of the flower layout — perhaps a tad too elaborate, as the crew questioned its readability and appeared instead to use it mostly to needle her.

“This is too complicated, sorry everybody!” Meyer said, laughing. “It is a very sassy crew.”

All kidding aside, therapist Jill Siegfried of University Health Services noted it is therapeutic to put flowers in the ground or pull weeds from it. Focusing on the latter at the health center on 13th, Siegfried said there are physiological benefits to what might seem like just a tiresome weekend chore.

“When we complete a task — when we pull a weed or plant a flower — we feel accomplishment and we can have a surge of dopamine,” she said. “Every time we see that flower we’re getting paid in feel-good hormones. It’s actually feeding us on a chemical level.”

A trio of employees planting leafy China aster in front of Gerlinger Hall also got a surge of satisfaction from the work: Anika De, Katie Murray and Daisy Wu, all with human resources for Finance and Administration Shared Services, said they were enjoying a few hours away from desk work and connecting with others across the university, some of whom they helped to recruit and hire.

“It’s nice to see them again after the hiring process,” Wu said. “It’s full circle.”

At 11 a.m., dozens of volunteers at the Millrace Natural Area at Franklin and Onyx streets stopped work to watch the annual tree planting with President Karl Scholz, Angela Lauer Chong, vice president for student life, and Mike Harwood, associate vice president of Campus Planning and Facilities Management.

Before joining Scholz and Harwood in dumping a ceremonial shovelful of dirt on a young Oregon white oak, Chong told the crowd that University Day is “a powerful reminder of our shared responsibility to care for and sustain the natural spaces that shape our campus community.”

A lunch of pizza and pop followed, but Brianna Liberty barely noticed: the design associate and project manager with campus planning was locked in battle with stubborn blackberry bushes along the millrace, armed with a shovel and enshrouded in a verdant tangle of trees and foliage.

The grueling work appealed to her on a personal and professional level. “I kind of enjoy manual labor,” she said, “and I work in the design field — aesthetics are very important. Your surroundings — the natural environment, the built environment — have a huge impact on the way you feel.”

Liberty was part of a volunteer corps at the millrace that numbered nearly 100 by day’s end. They removed invasives, restored habitat and spread mulch for trails.

As University Day came to a close, Natural Areas Steward Emily Hamblen stopped her cleanup for a moment to admire the group’s work. She described the difference for the millrace as “night and day” — but that wasn’t what impressed her the most.

“It’s the enthusiasm and the amount of people that were interested in making a difference,” she said. “It just blew me away.”

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