History

The original Neville Scarfe Children’s Garden was designed and built in 1987 as a collaborative project involving students, faculty, and staff of the Faculty of Education and the Landscape Architecture Program in the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences (Pennington, G., Qualye, M., & Naslund, J., 1993). The garden was a project initiated by Dr. Gary Pennington from the Faculty of Education. Dr. Pennington, with the support of Jo-Anne Naslund (Education Library), approached Dr. Moura Quayle in Landscape Architecture who involved a team of her landscape architecture students to facilitate a participatory design process as part of their third-year design studio course. Moura Quayle’s team of landscape architecture students worked with children, community members, and Faculty of Education staff, faculty, and students to create a design and implementation plan in time for Phase one of the construction to take place at the UBC Open House from March 6-8, 1987. The garden existed for three short years until a construction project for the Scarfe seismic upgrading and the construction of a new wing for the Education Library displaced the garden. Since the garden’s demise, various proposals have been brought forward to create similar outdoor learning spaces associated with the Education building. In 2006, Dr. Susan Gerofsky developed two proposals for Indigenous Sustainability Teaching; unfortunately, neither of these received funding. In 2009 Julia Ostertag, working on a directed study project with Susan Gerofsky, rediscovered the Neville Scarfe Children’s Garden and completed a comprehensive literature review.