Newsmakers 2017: Sven Svenson

If living 500 or 1,000 years from now, Sven Svenson might be helping colonize another planet.

In that situation, the Southeast Missouri State University horticulture professor says he would be probing for answers to the question, "How do we bring life to this rock?"

It was a mindset he used to breathe life into a dumped-on area of the campus, reclaiming an eyesore and nurturing it into the Charles Nemanick Alternative Agricultural Garden.

On what he called "scarred" land, Svenson's healing dream has sprouted into a natural setting and extension of his classroom that he hopes reaches beyond his students.

Shortly after being hired in 2008, Svenson approached former university president Kenneth Dobbins about using the surrounding grounds of the Hutson Greenhouse facility for outdoor horticulture purposes. The ongoing project started a year later. A native butterfly garden and natural wooded area with expanded walking trails have materialized through donated money and volunteer work.

LAURA SIMON ~ lsimon@semissourian.com Sven Svenson

The facility also houses food and berry gardens -- Svenson hopes they will one day provide fresh, cheap nutrition for students on campus -- as well as testing areas for grasses, nursery plants and compost composition. It allows students to transfer knowledge from lectures and books into the real world.

"I want the facility here so the students have the greatest diversity of things they can work with to expand their experience," Svenson says. "That way they can quickly learn what it is they really like about horticulture, what their passion is and what they want to do."

He plans to crowd fund a seasonal butterfly house, which he hopes to open in 2018, that can provide field-trip opportunities for elementary students and growth opportunities for his own students. It's a marrying of plants and purpose in a world he sees connected from all angles.

Already a resource for homeowners, he envisions the Nemanick garden as a nursery for native Missouri plants, part of a self-sustaining entity.

"In many ways we've been building our own classroom," Svenson says. "That process, hopefully, will never stop, long after I'm gone."

LAURA SIMON ~ lsimon@semissourian.com Sven Svenson