Sacred Places
Listening Garden at the University of Maryland
A half-acre built for conversation, next to a garden built for grief.
WHERE
College Park, MD
SETTING
Education
PARTNER INSTITUTION
University of Maryland
Visit
Where it is
4282 Chapel Ln, College Park, MD 20742
What happens here
Student organizations, faculty, chaplains, and staff use the garden for programming, events, meetings, faith-based sessions, and classes, and it is open for drop-by gatherings too. Groups of two to six sit together on the clustered benches. Both formal and informal occasions give students practice in listening and in talking to each other.
HOW IT CAME TO BE
The next garden had to be for talking.
Drag to see the transformation.
01
The Need
Students were trying to re-find equanimity and happiness after COVID-19, in a period when conversation itself had grown more polarized. The campus already had the Chapel Garden of Reflection and Remembrance, born from students processing the losses of September 11 and the Virginia Tech massacre, but that garden is about the journey within.
02
The Vision
The university community felt that time in natural places, always important, mattered especially now. Undergraduates in a landscape design class produced the first concepts and presented them to Stamp and Chapel staff and design faculty. Students, landscape and student affairs staff, chaplains, and an outside consultant refined them through the planning committee. The garden's name, and the words on some of the benches — "listen" and "story" among them — came partly from campus surveys shared on social media. The whole continues the Chapel's long commitment to dialogue across faiths and ways of being.
03
The Transformation
The half-acre directly beyond the Garden Chapel is being reworked rather than replaced. Long-established trees, the magnolia and crepe myrtle, stay where they are, along with smaller components like the viburnum bushes. New brick paving has created two large nodes flanking the Chapel's exterior doors, with enlarged plant beds and more open ground for seating and programming. Visitors enter through a graceful metal arch threshold adorned with plant life. The new metal and granite "word" benches each carry a word chosen to prompt conversation, and classic wooden benches placed in groupings seat two to six people comfortably while providing a design link back to the Garden of Reflection and Remembrance.
WHO TENDS IT
Denise McHugh
Firesoul, Listening Garden at the University of Maryland
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Marsha Guenzler-Stevens
Firesoul, Listening Garden at the University of Maryland
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