“We’re Here For Them”: The Team That Keeps BC’s Campus Picture-Perfect
Students are not just at the center of Facilities Management’s efforts—each year, around student workers join the team.
Eric Hiebert, BC ’27, one of the student workers, recalled that the landscaping team did not hesitate to welcome him into their community.
“The older guys are very inclusive,” Hiebert said. “They will talk to you, get to know you, are interested about your lives,” Hiebert said. “They’re just great people in general, and they’re really funny. So once you become integrated in your crew, it’s really fun, because it feels like a crew, and you’re all in together.”
Training student workers and fulfilling their own duties are hardly burdensome to the crew, according to Hiebert.
“They all had a positive attitude and were excited to have students working with them,” Hiebert said. “They make working feel like it’s not all a chore and all a job.”
For the student workers, some daily tasks required more effort than they initially expected.
“It’s often in the early morning hours where you don’t see it,” Hiebert said. “The grass—I think in the spring, in the summer, in the fall—it grows insanely fast. It needs to be cut every week, and the whole campus needs to be cut every week, which is a big task.”
Hiebert saw firsthand the passion landscapers bring to their work.
“You could tell that they took pride in BC’s campus,” Hiebert said. “And they weren’t just like employees. They actually cared about making it nice.”
For the crew, the devil is in the small details.
“They would tell you about how to make it look better, how to improve on certain things, and not just because they had to,” Hiebert said. “It’s because they would go around and check and make sure everything looked nice.”
Hunter Harris, a junior at Boston University who works for BC landscaping, noticed how the landscapers seem to stick around.
“It seems like they enjoyed [their jobs],” Harris said. “One has been there for five [years], another one had been there for like 20.”
Ultimately, the student workers take away something other students may never fully understand.
“I just learned how much care and effort goes into making [BC] look like that,” Hiebert said. “And you think, ‘Wow, this is beautiful,’ but you don’t realize how much work goes into it.’”
The high bar Landscaping Services sets for maintaining the grounds extends to their approach to sustainability.
Sustainable landscaping at BC takes a few main forms—water conservation through irrigation, integrated pest management, and composting.
Across campus, moisture sensors determine what a normal irrigation cycle should look like and adjust irrigation levels based on rainfall levels.
Though they don’t have the data, McCoy believes that Landscape Services’ water usage rates have gone down significantly over the past five years.
Integrated pest management, which entails testing the soil and regularly inspecting plants, dictates the division’s approach to plant care. BC Landscaping doesn’t use pesticides, herbicides, or other similar substances, unless there is a warranted need.
The soil itself is often . Brush—separated into brush piles, grass, and leaf clippings—is sent off to a composting facility, transformed into soil, and then repurchased by BC.
Although these measures require additional efforts, McCoy says the group is confident they are the best approaches, according to McCoy.
“I mean, maybe it would be easier to do it a different way,” McCoy said. “But that’s not the foundational theory that we operate on in our working group.”
For McCoy, the team owes it to the land they are caring for to go the extra mile.
“I see us as stewards of the environment and responsible for a very valuable capital asset, and I don’t see any reason that we would cut corners,” McCoy said.
They are caring for something living, and this requires care and effort, according to McCoy.
“It’s not a piece of HVAC equipment or a light which is generally in the place that you left it the day before,” McCoy said. “You take care of a living thing, and the environment is always changing, and you have to see it on a regular basis in order to manage it properly.”
Maintenance is oriented toward long-term sustainability, and the team is constantly looking for new ways to work toward this goal, according to McCoy.
“We continue to look at ways to offset our carbon footprint by changing some of the equipment that we’re buying, getting away from gas powered, and then this continued effort to reuse our horticultural waste that will continue to evolve as time goes on,” McCoy said.
McCoy detailed how the team is constantly re-evaluating areas on campus for potential improvements.
“We’re always looking at spaces and looking at what plant material is working in a particular location and making decisions about what might be best—not only for the environment, but from a sustainable perspective as well,” McCoy said.
This framework is guiding long-term planning.
“That’ll create the new working plan for the next five to 10 years as a result of doing the inventory that re-evaluates each tree from a rich standpoint, or general health standpoint,” McCoy said. “And then we can make decisions about what the priority should be in terms of maintenance.”
The landscaping team isn’t sure how much students actually pay attention to their work, both in general maintenance and sustainability.
“I wonder how much they appreciate seeing our different ideas— the work that goes into it, our work after football games, the long hour jobs that we have,” said Michael Collins, Grounds Supervisor of Landscape Services.
Anthony Erwin, lead gardener, has had similar thoughts while on the job.
“Oftentimes I wonder how many of them actually pay attention to the landscape as they walk to class,” Erwin said. “I think to myself when I’m working, ‘I wonder if any students got to notice this tree that I just planted.’”
Though the students may not notice the work being done, they are always at the core of landscapers’ considerations.
“We don’t want to disrupt students,” McCoy said. “We look for our opportunity space around what they are doing.”
Class transition periods pose a unique challenge, according to McCoy.
“We kind of have to stop for that little transitional period,” McCoy said. “Manny might go over there with the cutting unit getting ready to do his work, and he has to go out there and talk to the students about moving spikeball over a few feet, and moving the volleyball.
This even extends into working hours.
“We don’t try to make noise in the morning,”said Landscape Services worker Osiris Mejia. “We wait till after nine o’clock to go if we need to walk around the dorms.”
McCoy is looking for even more ways to make as little disruption as possible.
“We continue to evaluate things, specifically design and equipment,” McCoy said. “I’m not crazy about the noise associated with leaf blowers. That’s one of the things that is really difficult for us. We’re trying to do our work. But then this is a college environment, I would find it irritating if I was sitting in Gasson and we’re outside cranking the leaf blower.”
While they may not notice everything, students appear grateful for the work Landscaping does, according to McCoy.
“They always seem thankful,” McCoy said. “And they are all really, really nice about it. So we just try to do our thing every day.”
Collins reiterated this sentiment.
“I do think in general, students are appreciative,” Collins said. “When we go into the Mods at 3 a.m. on commencement morning, that’s when we get a lot of compliments. That goes a long way at that hour of the day.”
The Mods, specifically, have seen a lot of landscaping improvements in recent years, including the addition of plant foundational material outside the buildings and irrigation in the back lawn areas that have improved the grass. This care seems to have inspired students to take better care of the area, according to McCoy.
“It seems like students have a little more respect for their own space,” McCoy said. “They’re tidying up their furniture and keeping their backyard organized and neat. I think that’s a reaction to seeing us care about the space or try to make the space better for them.”
Erwin has seen this care displayed in other ways as well.
“I think they’ve been doing a good job,” Erwin said. “Last night, when I worked a function, all the students were picking up the trash and throwing it in the cans.”
These little things don’t go unnoticed, and when students express appreciation, it only strengthens the team’s efforts.
“The tulips are a big hit,” McCoy said. “We actually put quite a bit of thought into the color schemes. And we try to do different things in different places annually.”
In everything the team does, students are the priority.
“We’re here for them,” Collins said.
This sentiment is from the heart, according to Mejia.
“We love to do what we do,” Mejia said. “And now we do it for students. So everything, we do it for them.”
