Gardener’s Notion Blossoms at Pierce

It all started about four years ago, when Duc Tran bought a few roses to speckle a bit of color around the entrance to Pierce College.

Tran, a gardener at Pierce, paid for the flowers himself, inadvertently sparking a long-running but friendly competition among the gardeners to fill the campus with lush blossoms and neatly pruned shrubs.

“When he did that and I saw how much he was doing, I kicked in some money because I didn’t want the men paying out of their own pockets,” said Bill Grant, the head gardener at Pierce.

But Grant’s gesture just spurred the gardeners on, and soon they were all pitching in tens and twenties to buy flowers.

In time, the horticultural fever bloomed all over campus. This week, to help pay for a glowing bed of orange marigolds and deep blue lobelias in front of the administration building, the gardeners went directly to the top.

“Yesterday we did the shakedown,” Grant said. “Dr. B”--that would be Pierce College President E. Bing Inocencio--”chipped in. Dr. Carmelita Thomas, the vice president [of academic affairs], she just handed one of us $20 to get some flowers.”

Well aware that extra roses are not a priority for the financially squeezed Los Angeles Community College District, the gardeners have become inventive in their campaign to beautify Pierce.

One worker said he asks neighbors for decorative plant clippings to help start new shrubs at the college. Others collect soda cans to exchange for cash to buy a few more flowers. The college baseball and football teams, meanwhile, have pitched in to help weed and mow their fields.

Each gardener is responsible for 10 to 30 acres in an assigned section of campus. Often the men team up to work on a project, as they did Thursday to plant their new annuals in the bright morning sunshine.

“After a while, you get tired of looking at all the green,” said Fernando Sosa, a gardener who tends the area around the men’s gym and baseball field. He decided to perk up the monochromatic landscaping with a bit of creative clipping.

Soon Sosa had transformed a scraggly mass of overgrown juniper near the gym into a virtual topiary tree, its foliage meticulously sculpted into shapes reminiscent of those in a Dr. Seuss book. It’s a high-maintenance look, Sosa acknowledged, but he doesn’t mind.

“The majority of us really care about the way our areas look,” he said. “We do the work from our heart.”