University of Florida undergraduate students unveiled Poetry in the Gardens, a public art installation, during Friday’s UF/IFAS Field & Fork Farm Spring Festival.

In collaboration with Imagining Climate Change and IFAS/CALS Field & Fork Farm and Gardens, the public art installation was created by students in UF English associate professor Terry Harpold’s Ecopoetry & Ecopoetics course.

The farm is located on the UF campus, 1062 Museum Dr. in Gainesville, near Lake Alice and the UF Bat Houses.

The project was inspired by Poetry in Parks, a 2024 project of Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, which placed historic American poetry on picnic tables in seven US national parks. UF’s Poetry in the Gardens was designed to enrich the experiences of visitors to Field & Fork Farm and Gardens with poetry installed in multiple locations throughout the farm.

The 11 poems written by celebrated American authors were selected by Ecopoetry & Ecopoetics students for their expressions of the farm’s biodiversity and its seasonal cycles, along with the poets’ meditations on the vitality and resilience of human and more-than-human worlds, Harpold said.

Kelli Martin Brew, program coordinator for the farm, said visitors are encouraged to walk through the farm in search of the poems and to pause after they’ve read each and consider: Why this poem? How does it speak to this place? How does it speak to you, here and now?

Field & Fork Farm & Gardens is part of the UF/IFAS College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and the campus food system that provides more than 10,000 pounds of organically produced fresh produce to the campus food pantry each year.

Brew said the farm offers an opportunity for students to learn about sustainable agriculture and food systems while enjoying and appreciating the surrounding ecosystem. Poetry in the Gardens invites viewers to reimagine a working farm as a space of reflection and reverie.