 "Photo: Madeline Zappala")
Also view a photoessay of the Skinner Greenhouse by Madeline Zappala ‘12 on the Miscellany's photojournalism blog, Exposure.
Head Gardener Marty Pinnavaia, like many of the individuals hard at work on this campus, fulfills a pivotally important yet quiet place here at Vassar. As the head gardener, Pinnavaia selects and grows the various plants that decorate campus buildings—the New England Building, the ALANA Center, the president’s house and The Powerhouse Theater, to name a few—and selects the flower arrangements for Main Circle and the Shakespeare garden. He even selects the herbs used in various dishes served on campus—ever wonder where the fresh basil on your Retreat pizza came from?
He grows “his props”—what he calls the plants that he uses—in the Skinner greenhouses located above the Skinner Hall of Music, which is the closest thing on the Vassar campus to a tropical paradise. They house everything from amarillos to oversized lemons. And there are parrots there, too.
Many students have not heard of the Skinner greenhouses—not to be confused with the Biology greenhouse next to Olmstead Hall, which serves the purposes of the Biology Department, although the two greenhouses often communicate with one another and “do a lot of swapping,” according to Pinnavaia.
“Up until six or seven years ago, both greenhouses were surrounded by woods at the tail end of campus,” Pinnavaia explained during a recent interview. “In fact, I was having a conversation with an alumnus, and she was saying that it was like the forbidden part of campus because it was all wooded. A lot of other people never even knew about it here and had no reason to come here.”
Before Pinnavaia was Head Gardener, the Skinner greenhouses served a very limited purpose, and it was only under his watch that they become so important to the aesthetics and functioning of the Vassar campus. “In the ’20s the greenhouses used to grow cut flowers for the tables [in] the dining hall,” Pinnavaia remarked. “When I came here, things had already started changing with the economy, but cut flowers...was like a total extravagance—we’re heating these big greenhouses just to make the desks look pretty?” So Pinnavaia successfully set out to “revamp the real purposes of the greenhouses to better serve the community.”
Having worked at Vassar for 25 years, Pinnavaia is a Vassar establishment in and of himself. He joked that when he started working here he was “younger than the freshmen’s parents,” and now he’s “as old as their grandparents.” He has observed and participated in the evolution of the College from the days of former President of the College Virginia Smith—and he has a lot to say about his time here.
“When [former President of the College Francis] Ferguson came—who was an art historian—it was, ‘Let’s get the ivies off the building because it’s ruining the mortar. Let’s start clearing out the underbrush and make it safer for students.’ Also, the Shakespeare garden was in tremendous disarray, and I decided to ask [alumnae/i] and contributors to spend their money for brick work to create brick walls around the beds instead of buying memorial trees, so that everything is bricked in now, which is an English-garden type look. And that’s why every bed’s got a plaque on it. ”
Pinnavaia has also observed changes in Vassar’s student body. “One specific change I can think of is that the students seem much more appreciative. They’re much more appreciative of the school, the grounds, the gardens and the workers. People spend a lot of time doing a lot of things, and the students now recognize that.” He also recalled, “I was here when it was all punk and leather.”
In the future, Pinnavaia explained, the College plans to build a big greenhouse—combining “the usefulness of the plants of the Skinner greenhouse with the purposes of the [Biology] greenhouse.” Whatever the College does, one can only hope this creative soul will be behind the project. Oh, and the myth about the flowers in Main Circle costing a million dollars is false. Marty explained: “It’s nowhere near that much money. It just comes right out of my budget.”
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