Credit: Michelle S. Baffuto

With a leadership gift, retired professor Bruce Hamilton and his wife Ellen are planting the seed for an endowment to support Rutgers Gardens.

Bruce Hamilton has a soft spot for plants. When the retired landscape architecture professor was a Rutgers student in need of financial assistance, an especially kind professor named Norm Childers allowed him to live in a campus greenhouse, then Waller Hall, for free. In exchange, Hamilton helped to care for the greenhouse.

After he joined the faculty, Hamilton –  known affectionately as Doc –  led teams of students to enhance the Cook Campus landscape, providing them with experience-based learning and benefiting plant identification courses in the process. Hamilton says this hands-on aspect is critical for students in his field. “They have a chance to get experience while their minds are fresh and open, to feel the environment as well as see it,” he says.

In the 1970s, when there was talk of selling Rutgers Gardens, Doc wouldn’t let it happen. He and his wife, Ellen, donated several sizable gifts over the years to help sustain them. They also got community gardening groups and students involved in their cause. Due to a robust intern and volunteer program, active fundraising, and the Hamiltons’ continued generosity, the gardens have blossomed in the past few decades.

Since the professor’s retirement in June 2008, the Hamiltons have turned their attention to creating a lasting source of support for the gardens. If they can raise enough to match their leadership gift of $25,000, they will create an endowment to provide ongoing training opportunities and operational costs for the garden’s student interns.

“We are working hand-in-hand to raise money for this fund,” says Rachel Napier, senior development officer for the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “Doc and Ellen braved a snowstorm in January to join me in my office, writing personal notes to alumni, colleagues, and friends to announce their challenge and ask for support. The response was overwhelming.”

The fund is designed to continue Hamilton’s life’s work of bringing students under his wing and sharing his own vast knowledge of horticulture and landscaping. “Doc provided the backbone for the gardens, to get them to where they are now,” says Bruce Crawford, manager of Rutgers Gardens. “What we’re trying to do is elevate them to where they not only enrich the community but also provide formal educational opportunities for students.”

The income from the endowment will allow interns to visit other public gardens, learn from experts, and perhaps, leave Rutgers Gardens a bit better for each new generation.

To find out how to help your favorite part of Rutgers, visit support.rutgers.edu.