Garden Crew- The Crew of Resilience
Solie Lawson | October 28, 2025
Visiting assistant professor Sarah Sgro poses for a picture outside of Jensen Hall at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C.. (Echo/Neko Heinrich)
Many students who walk in the garden of Warren Wilson College (WWC) wonder who has put in the effort to make the WWC landscape as charming as it is. The answer is the Garden Crew.
The Garden Crew has been working hard not only to make the garden lovely but also to ensure WWC has sustainable and versatile biodiversity that students can learn from.
Perennial Moss, who has been the manager of the Garden Crew for a month and a half, described their deep fondness for the role they have been placed in. Their job entails ensuring everything is functioning properly, shaping the future of the garden, along with more tedious tasks such as payroll, repairs and budgeting. Moss particularly enjoys the hands-on learning aspect that WWC provides.
“I was able to come out to the campus, learn more about the work program, meet some of the students and see the environment for hands-on learning,” Moss said. “That's something that I'm jealous of. I wish that I had that when I was a student, and that's so valuable for solidifying skills that you guys are learning. I wanted to be a part of that system, and help this garden get back up on its feet, thrive, and be a really cool space for teaching, for education, and for community building.”
When talking about the biodiversity WWC offers, Moss noted the shift in focus from selling produce to plant production. With the increase in extreme climates, Moss talked about teaching her students staple crops for the future betterment of the garden landscape. Their main mission is to give students the ability to pursue their goals.
“Everyone has their own drive and things that they're passionate about,” Moss said. “I'm just trying to make sure they have the tools that they need to fulfill those interests and passions to be able to make this a successful space.”
Moss has enjoyed their experience as manager of the Garden Crew so far, and cannot wait for what the future holds for expanding the community within the crew.
“I think [the garden] can be a really beautiful area that can highlight and have a lot of interaction with all the other student crews and with the community in general,” Moss said.
Natalie Helser, a sophomore on a Garden sub-crew, the Herb Crew, described her time on the crew as one of community and digging in the dirt to learn more about the Earth. She described some of the preparations for winter that the crew had begun.
“We're doing winter crops; arugula, collards, bok choy, getting our hot houses going,” Helser said.
Herb Crew is in charge of the free herb program, through which students and faculty can get tinctures, tea blends and dried herbs. Helser emphasized her excitement at getting to do full hands-on work and how free she feels in her element.
Drying herbs at the herb cabin at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C.. (Echo/Vivian Bryan).
“You're fully committing yourself to the job,” Helser said. “It forces you to be in the present. You are not tiptoeing around saying, ‘Oh, my pants are gonna get dirty,' or ‘My shoes are gonna get dirty’. You fully throw yourself into the job, and it's really fun.”
Helser feels that her work has made her more involved in the gardening community on campus, and is inspired by the collective strength she and her coworkers produce to achieve the crew's goals.
“You're closer to everyone around you just because you're doing this gross, hard thing,” Helser said.
Grace Payton, a junior on the Garden Crew, has been on the crew since their sophomore year. Their role on the crew is the events planner, which includes planning potlucks, parties and reaching out to alumni. Payton noted how the crew has changed over time, especially in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
“We're shifting to food justice, and we're hoping to also create a community space that is able to bond people,” Payton said. “Food justice is definitely the biggest shift that we've made in the crew. Not selling our produce to make money for the school, but donation based [instead].”
During Helene, Payton found community in the crew even as the broader campus struggled to regain a sense of normalcy.
“I feel really connected to those people that I was there [in the Garden Crew] with,” Payton said. “It was really central for me to be able to come down to the garden during [Hurricane Helene] and be like, ‘I am outside. I'm with the people I love.’”
During the summer, Payton was employed on the Garden Crew as a summer worker. She described her enjoyment of connecting with nature as well as the people around her.
“It's so fun to have 40 hours a week to immerse myself in the work that I do, and really get to know the people that I was working with, and be silly, and get to be involved in every single aspect of the work,” Payton said.
She describes the enjoyment of being around people with the same interests as her and diving into hard work to learn more about how she can fulfill her goals within the crew.
“I feel like all of us on the crew are pretty light-hearted, even though the work that we're doing is pretty hard,” Payton said.
The Garden Crew has faced drastic change since Hurricane Helene, but has come out of the experience with a passion to grow sustainable crops and form a community of resilience. Many of those on the crew enjoy the dirty work and the community the crew creates.
A new focus for the crew is outreach to the greater WWC campus community. All interviewees emphasized that the garden space is welcome to everyone, whether a student wants to enjoy a free tea, make a bouquet from the garden or simply sit in the space. The Garden Crew’s hard work and dedication are a source of pride on campus, helping to make the garden space beautiful and bountiful.