For the second year in a row, gardeners from ASU showed they have the greenest thumbs in the land.
Eleven ASU students from the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture won the Gold Medal and the People's Choice Award at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show on Sunday.
They also won the gold medal from Pacific Horticulture magazine for best regional landscape design.
The five-day show is the sixth largest of its type in the world and was expected to draw 50,000 attendees.
"It was a really interesting opportunity," said Jefferey Prince, a landscape architecture sophmore.
Prince functioned as lead designer and construction manager. "It isn't often that you get sponsered to compete against 23 other organizations in an international garden show."
The students, under the supervision of George Hull, their instructor, have worked for three months on their entry and then traveled to San Francisco, where they rebuilt the entire display in just 64 hours.
"The premise of the garden was to use low-water-consuming plants," explained team member Luis Patino, a junior ASU student. And added that they wanted to "use a variety of plants that people could use."
The show's producer, Kay Hamilton Estey, seemed to agree, saying that the garden was full of good and practical ideas.
The plants were grown and donated to the team by the Mountain States Wholesale Nursery, who also sponsered the team. The plants, though native to Arizona, were expected to do well in the Bay Area.
"It was a great experience because the majority of the people on the team were Sophmores," Patino said. "I didn't know them before and getting the chance to meet them and learn about what they wanted to do in their careers was great."
The judges of the show, Nigel Colborn, Iain Robertson and Alexandra Stoddard, were all picked for their knowledge of horticulture and design. They presented gold, silver, bronze and crystal awards to each of the 23 gardens. The People's Choice award, however, was determined by ballots filled out by the general attendees.
The students who built the winning garden are sophmores Camilla Rogers, Brian Weiler, Jeffrey Prince, Isaac Deneen and Whitney Warman; juniors Rey David Solorio, Luis Patino, Widyawan Pratadaja and Ryan Wassenaar; and senior Jeremy Stapleton.
Chase Johnson is a journalism senior and a reporter for the Web Devil. Reach him at cbjohn1@asu.edu.
