Alumni Going Green

Blooming Ideas

Alumna Gardens for Edibility and Sustainability

As Marion McLatchy ’87, ’92 (B.A., M.A. Spanish) roams through her Hartford Avenue
backyard garden, her shadow falls upon any number of fruit trees, aromatic grasses and
flowering shrubbery. Everything here is either edible or smells wonderful. Not to mention
that the garden is organic and sustainable.

There are flowering cacti, sweet figs, fragrant lemon grass and even tall sugar cane growing in a tangle of leaves, blooms and branches. The patch of lawn grows ever smaller as she adds more native plants, trees and shrubs.

The Fullerton resident and Arboretum volunteer, a retired teacher, left the gardening to her husband, Al, up until his passing six years ago. Al used to garden the traditional suburban
way: He planted a lawn and borders just so. “I’m sure he would hate the way that I garden, with everything every which way,” Marion notes.

But two years after Al died, Marion read “The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans” by Patricia Klindienst, a professor of creative writing at Yale. The book – which describes 15 different gardens throughout the U.S. – changed Marion’s life in more ways than one, and led to her awakening as a sustainable gardener.

“A garden can tell you about a person’s roots,” says the Colombian native, who teaches Spanish classes for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). “I have all the plants that I grew up with here.”

She takes a visitor around the gardens, front and back, that are shady and green in the sunny morning. Here, she pollinates a cactus’s blooms; there, she explains where cardamom spice comes from. The front yard has ripe Meyer lemons practically falling off the tree and bunches of green bananas beckoning the sunlight.

“I’m sure the neighbors hate the look of my front yard,” she says, describing it as a “jungle.”

“But I don’t care. Here, there is a lot of shade and privacy. And I don’t garden for anyone else. Just for myself.”

 


Walking the Sustainability Talk

Alumna Caecilia Gotama ’82, ’86 (B.S., M.S. engineering-mechanical), who runs her own engineering consulting firm, is one who is walking the talk on sustainability. Gotama recently relocated her business from Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach. “Employees can take the Blue Line to the office, real estate is a lot more reasonable, and it’s a lot less congested than the West side,” she says. “It’s a better quality of life.” Gotama has incorporated LED lighting, bamboo and recycled carpet into her office décor. “We’re not missing anything – it’s possible to have your cake and eat it, too.”

 


Environmentalist Advises Composting

Alumnus Patrick McNelly ’73, ’82 (B.A. English, M.S. environmental studies), senior management analyst for the Orange County Sanitation District, has always been interested in caring for the environment. He was part of the team that helped build the old geodesic dome on campus. Today he teaches composting at the Fullerton Arboretum and scavenges his neighborhood for leaves and grass he can use in his own backyard composter. Because he and his wife have renovated their yards with succulents and other native California vegetation, he says, “I can’t produce enough organics on my property to compost properly.”

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