The Pacific Crest Trail, a West Coast
counterpart to the Appalachian Trail, stretches 2,600 miles from the
Mexican to the Canadian border, spanning terrain that ranges from
deserts to snow-topped mountains, bare lava fields to thick evergreen
forests.
Hikers might spend half a year covering its length, but a group of
University of Delaware students is hard at work on a different kind of
challenge distilling the essence of the trail into a 23-by-33-foot
exhibit that visitors to the Philadelphia Flower Show can experience in
just a few minutes.
Our goal is to give everyone the sense of actually walking along the
Pacific Crest Trail, so with all the variety on the trail, there are a
lot of things for us to think about and try to include, said Greg
Heiner, a junior majoring in criminal justice
whos the project manager for the exhibits construction. Were
partnering this year with the Delaware Nature Society, and theyre
giving us help with the best way to spread the message of appreciating
nature.
The end result will be on display for the duration of the Flower
Show, March 5-13, in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. For more about
visiting the show, including hours and ticket information, see the website.
On a recent evening in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
Worrilow Hall, Heiner and some two dozen other students were busy
sawing and painting plywood for the exhibits walls, mounting
poster-size photographs depicting scenic views of the trail and making
papier-m??ch?? boulders. Some walls were being covered with green
chalkboard paint to encourage exhibit visitors to leave a personal
message sharing their thoughts about the experience.
Student involved in the project represent a diverse assortment of
majors from nearly every one of UDs seven colleges. Some are working on
the exhibit as part of the Design Process Practicum class, taught by
Jules Bruck, associate professor of landscape design in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, while others are members of the Design and Agriculture student organization.
Everyone is so engaged in creating this project and wanting it to be
a great experience for the people who will come to the Flower Show,
Bruck said. I see students who arent even taking the class for credit
theyre members of the club but they come to class just because
theyre so enthusiastic about it.
This will be the sixth consecutive year that an interdisciplinary
team of faculty and students is contributing an exhibit to the show,
which is the oldest and largest indoor flower show in the world. The
shows theme this year, inspired by the centennial of the National Park
Service, is Explore America.
At UD, students in Brucks class last year came up with the design
concept for the 2016 exhibit once the Flower Show announced its theme
encouraging exhibitors to draw inspiration from the nations parks.
Students chose the Pacific Crest Trail, a designated National Scenic
Trail, and made drawings and models of their proposed exhibit, which
will be UDs first walk-through entry in the Flower Show. Brucks
current class dived into the construction work as soon as spring
semester began.
Because the exhibit must be partially disassembled, trucked to Center
City Philadelphia, and then reassembled inside the convention center,
the class got some expert help from a faculty member accustomed to that
kind of process. Stefanie Hansen, associate professor of theatre,
has been working with the students to help them construct the kinds of
modular, lightweight pieces that are used in set design.
This is a more interactive exhibit than the ones theyve done in the
past, Hansen said. Everything we do in theatre work is built like
this, in manageable pieces so it can be moved around and reassembled, so
I was able to help them with that process.
In fact, she said, she hopes more theatre minors get involved in
future Flower Show projects at UD because the skills involved are so
similar to those used in stage-set design.