Nunally Benzing, garden curator for the University of Georgia’s Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden, aims to educate the public about its sustainability contributions and cultural significance to the UGA community.

Q: What is your favorite part about holding the garden curator position?

A: It sounds really cheesy, but I really like talking to the students, actually. Because a lot of people, as you may know, that cut through here are not plant people, and they’re not from the school of ecology. That’s probably my favorite thing about this, is having those interactions and the spontaneous ones. 

Q: What is your view on UGA’s sustainability efforts, and what does this garden do, or mean, in terms of that?

A: I’ve been on a lot of these campuses in the southeast, and I’ve seen a lot of the ways that they’re managed. And UGA does a really good job at native plants. So they’re providing habitat for our native pollinators, it seems to be kind of a priority. And UGA, I think, with some of their native plantings, they do a good job. There’s no mowing, I don’t actually have to use gas powered things here. Thinking about how can I plant to bring in beneficial insects that might eat the ones that are eating my squash, you know, these kinds of things is what I think a lot about here. 

Q: How do you feel that this garden promotes diversity pertaining to plants and different cultures?

A: So in the very beginning, this garden was focused on a specific area of Mexico. And it was because the anthropologist, Brent Berlin, was doing research with the Mayan people and their medicinal usage of plants. From that early scope the garden began to broaden. So then we bring in, you know, plants from Paraguay or, like, species that are actually native to Asia but have big roles in Latin America. There's, like, a call for making this garden not just a garden celebrating Latin American plants, but all the Americans—like, north and south—so that we can have more native plants here and plants that have cultural, or value, to, like, our indigenous people. 

Q: What do you hope to accomplish through working with this garden?

A: I would like to use this garden more as a tool for people to understand some of the work that goes on at UGA that they're not aware of. There's a lot of really interesting agricultural work that's, a lot of times, based on Latin American plants. Like tomatoes, peppers, corn, beans, like, all of these things that UGA does research on. So I would like to use the garden to bring more attention to that. I'm interested in trying to create, like, just some like education to the broader public about the importance of native plants. Like, every little acre, like any little bit we can do is valuable because it all links together, and it all links together around campus. 

Comments have been trimmed for length and clarity.