UGA Landscape Design First Year Odyssey students tour the LAEG in Fall 2015 The UGA Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden is first and foremost an educational outreach resource for UGA students/faculty, the Athens community, and beyond—helping visitors understand the historical and contemporary relationships between plants and the peoples of Latin America. The LAEG provides tours for UGA courses each academic year for students in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Mary Frances Early College of Education, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the College of Environment & Design, and the Odum School of Ecology. The LAEG regularly collaborates with Athens-area organizations to provide educational tours. Most recently these have included local garden clubs and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. 57 Hall County Middle School students from World Language Academy in Flowery Branch, GA, their teachers and curator Karen Moss Bryan (front right) at the Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden to tour the garden and carry out a plant propagation activity on November 3, 2015. · Collaboration with Athens-area K-12 schools has always been an outreach priority for the LAEG, teaching children about Latin America and its peoples through the plants they have used for thousands of years. Over the last 20 years the Garden has collaborated with numerous elementary schools in Athens and surrounding counties to establish gardens to teach the life and social sciences. The LAEG also works each year with the UGA Office of Service-Learning’s Experience UGA program, touring hundreds of ACC K-12 students through the garden. · With the objection of expending our reach throughout the state and region. In 2018 the LAEG helped Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American Studies establish an on-campus Latin American Garden. In 2019, the LAEG collaborated with the Sarah J. Gonzalez Park (SJG Park) in Atlanta to establish the Officer Edgar Flores Memorial Garden. We are currently working with our SJG Park friends to broaden our reach throughout the Atlanta metro area.
