MEDIA ADVISORY
TO: News Directors, Feature Reporters and Community Calendars
SUBJECT: Red, White and Blue Hue to Color UAF Campus this Summer
DATE & TIME: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 at 8:30 a.m.
LOCATION: Fairbanks Campus
The University of Alaska Fairbanks will join the local Chamber of Commerce and area downtown associations in planting patriotic flora this summer. Volunteers will plant red, white and blue flowers on the UAF campus to celebrate the centennial of the founding of Fairbanks. The color theme for UAF’s annual campus flower planting is one that sprouted from the folks at Festival Fairbanks, an organization created to promote the interior city, founded by the University of Alaska’s fourth president, the late William R. Wood.
Fairbanks’ humble beginnings are owed to E.T. Barnette, who founded the town as a trading post in 1901. The next year, Felix Pedro discovered gold and so began the gold rush history of the Golden Heart City.
UAF certainly has it’s own rich mining history, established as the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines in 1917. In more recent years gardeners have been establishing their own tradition of working the ground. This is the 7th year volunteers will beautify the campus by planting more than 14,000 flowers from Alumni Drive to West Ridge and nearly everywhere in between. Grounds crew students grow the plants from seed. This year’s display will feature the shape of a Nanook, UAF’s famous polar bear mascot, planted in white alyssum in Constitution Park.
The UAF College of Fellows, a support group for UAF, sponsors the event to add color to the campus through an activity reminiscent of the school’s agricultural history. This year’s campus flower planting will get underway at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 30, 2001. UAF students, faculty, staff and Fairbanks community volunteers should meet at Constitution Hall or at the UA Museum of the North for plot assignments, tools and refreshments. Everyone is welcome.