For NC State University’s Julieta Trevino Sherk, a recent visit to the North Carolina Academy of Physician Assistants Veteran Memorial Garden in Durham was a chance to both look back and think ahead.
While there on a rainy February morning, Sherk recalled practicing with a local landscape architecture firm to develop the gardens and grounds in 2005. Then, last spring, as an associate professor of horticultural science, she and her undergraduate landscape construction studio students worked to incorporate a remembrance wall and patio to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the physician assistant profession, which originated in North Carolina in 1967 when three former Navy hospital corpsmen completed studies at Duke University.
To plan the garden additions, students led workshops designed to allow stakeholders to share their ideas and hopes for the memorial garden. They then applied what they learned in those sessions to develop design proposals and construction plans, which were used by the community to raise funds.
Today, the peaceful memorial garden is nearly complete, and Sherk is looking forward to using some of the same evidence-based design and community development principles that guided her work with the studio class when she heads to Mexico next fall as a J. William Fulbright Global Scholar in Science and Technology.