Diefendorf Meadow bringing blooms to South Campus

Watch for a colorful meadow to blossom on the South Campus at the site of the old Diefendorf Annex.

Campus Planning recently planted a temporary “meadowscape” on the now-vacant island encircled by a traffic loop.

“We should start to see blooming about five or six weeks from now,” says Daniel Seiders, a landscape architectural planner in Campus Planning. “Certainly, by the time the students return there should be an explosion of color.”

The university demolished the single-story, 26,000-square-foot annex in front of Abbott Library last November with expectations of shortening the loop and redesigning the site into a more formal quad to serve as the new Bailey Avenue entrance to the South Campus.

A consultant will be solicited for the capital project, which will take at least a couple years to complete, Seiders says.

In the meantime, UB has a large space with open soil to play with. Seiders, who was hired in January as the university’s first landscape architect, has experience with meadowscaping and offered up the idea.

“It’s sort of a pilot project, if you will,” he says. “And we have nothing to lose because it’s temporary.”

Meadowscaping can be challenging, Seiders acknowledges, because it’s contrary to the manicured landscape people have grown accustomed. Meadowscaping also has to be done in a way that is very intentional, he says, so it’s not perceived as just an unmowed area that’s being neglected.

But meadowscaping provides food and habitat for declining or endangered species, like bees and monarch butterflies, Seiders says. It improves absorption of stormwater into the ground as opposed to runoff that can collect pollutants and eventually end up in waterways, he says. And the myth that meadowscaping attracts rodents is simply not true, Seiders says.

Seiders is engaged in conversations with UB faculty, including Nick Henshue, associate teaching professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability, and Sandy Geffner, director of internships and experiential learning in the department, about opportunities for research and experiential learning with these sorts of landscapes.

“This is a great step and part of a much larger conversation at UB about how we can advance a more holistic ecosystem approach to our landscaping and integrate nature as part of our climate-action strategy — taking into account, of course, that different landscapes on campus will receive different treatment” says Ryan McPherson, UB’s chief sustainability officer.

“Daniel brings a great new perspective to UB and we are happy to have him advancing this great work,” McPherson says.

At the end of May, staff from Campus Planning and Design & Construction broadcast 25 pounds of seed across the site, which measures nearly two-thirds of an acre. They disseminated 23 different species of annual wildflowers.

Seiders believes this venture into meadowscaping will be a positive first experience for UB because the site will bloom in the first year.

“It will be multicolored,” Seiders says. “There’s actually a lot of blue, appropriate to our branding, but also lots of pink and red.

“They’ll bloom in waves at different times and the colors will change as the summer progresses into fall,” he says. “It should continue to bloom right up until the first frost comes.”