Today, April 20, 2013, the campus was alive with the annual Garden festival. This event is always a highlight of the year for campus and community, with food, performances, booths with information and a wide range of plants and garden goods for sale.
Centennial Year Celebration
Ag department chair, Lindsey Ono
This year’s Garden festival was a special one marking the start of BC’s year of activities commemorating the college’s 100th year. [For more on the Centennial Year celebrations check out http://www.bakersfieldcollege.edu/centennial/%5D. Attendance was higher than it had ever been and the atmosphere was full of energy as students, staff and community members talked, walked and shopped.
Centennial Year Tree Planting. Executive Vice President Gomez-Heitzeberg, President Christian, Mayor Hall
CC BY-NC NIck Strobel
http://tinyurl.com/bskxyf4
It was great to see youngsters from the Newman center painting the faces of children who were queuing up. I attempted to get in line to get the BC logo painted on my face before the media blitz but the line was long and i felt self conscious of being the only adult in the line. so I finally snuck away.
Face painting at the gardenfest.
At 1:00 there was a ceremony to mark the planting of the one hundredth commemorative tree – over the course of the past year ninety-nine commemorative trees have been planted, a wide variety of different trees that will help make the campus an arboretum to enjoy and learn from. The one hundredth is a large oak tree symbolizing stability and selfless giving of shelter, strength and vitality.
100th tree planting Mayor Hall with Christian, Gomez-Heitzeberg April 20 2013
The California Live Oak. BC’s 100th tree planting for the Centennial Year.
Source: Nick Strobel. CC BY-NC 2.0
http://tinyurl.com/d5pwafb
Christian inaugurating the new water feature at the Centennial Year celebrations. April 20 2013
The college had a booth with the Centennial yearbook on sale for $20.13 (get it?…). This is a beautiful book full of pictures, stories and history of BC and I bought a couple of copies and was grateful to be able to have them signed by the author. Here you see Bonnie Suderman and Becky Whitson with the author.
Becky Whitson, Tracie Grimes (the author), Bonnie Suderman. Centennial Yearbook
Many thanks are due for all the hard work that made this year’s festival so wonderful: to all of our community members that pitch in and bring life to the event; to the Ag department that does everything from staffing the show, offering “plant sitting,” identifying plants, solving garden problems, and offering informational presentations; to Chef Coyle and Chef Davis who really outdid themselves in making wonderful food for the event (though unfortunately I was too late to try the ribs special).
Culinary Students at the Gardenfest April 20 2013
Special thanks are in order for Sally Sterns, who has been working for many months to coordinate the complex activities needed to make this event such a success. Sally, you rock!
Here is Sally the day before the big event. I wandered over to the horticulture lab to see if Sally was surviving and here she was hard at work with her students with energy and high anticipation for the big day.
Sally Sterns the day before Gardenfest April 19 2013
Seeing friends from my old days at BC:
It has been a delight running into colleagues from when I was here 10 years ago. Here are a few pictures with faculty colleagues who are now retired.
Bruce Meyer and Sonya Christian
Steve Smith and Sonya Christian
For more photos:
Nick Strobel has many more photos on his flickr site at http://tinyurl.com/bunofjl
