After her close friend Mycah Shaw passed away last year, Howard student Alexia Godinez-Thompson found solace in the campus garden, where she and other students had placed a small memorial in her honor. On March 2, friends stopped by the garden to commemorate the anniversary of Shaw’s death, laying flowers around the memorial artwork.
Less than two weeks later, the university administration ripped up the garden without informing any of the students who visited or tended it. At least part of Shaw’s memorial was removed along with the fruit trees, crops and flowers torn from the soil.
“Of course, I see her everywhere I go, and her memory is always present—however, there isn’t anything [else] on campus that has been established in her honor,” Godinez-Thompson said. “The garden was a beautiful place for one to be able to see the flowers and stones that were put in place for her and sense her beautiful soul.”
The garden’s removal on March 11 in response to a rat infestation came as a surprise to the student-run Society of Holistic Living and Meditation, which founded the Halo G.R.E.E.N Garden 13 years ago and has tended it ever since. In a press release, the organization said it had recently been working with Howard’s Office of Sustainability on efforts to address the rat problem, but hadn’t been informed of the decision to tear down the garden over spring break.
“The idea of the garden’s complete removal was never mentioned,” Camryn Curtis, the club’s community affairs chair, wrote in an email to The Informer. “It came completely out of nowhere.”
Curtis said that the Halo G.R.E.E.N Garden’s executive board met once with Ariel Triplett, who heads Howard’s Office of Emergency Management, to discuss the rat issue. At that meeting, Curtis recalled being “told that our compost would be removed and that we could use our spring break to come up with solutions and ideas… to avoid rodents.”
Howard’s Office of Sustainability did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Triplett.
The student newspaper The Hilltop received a statement from university officials saying that multiple students had reported rodents in the adjacent building, Howard Plaza Towers West, and an investigation connected the rodents to the garden’s composting site.
“Our first plan of action was to remove the compost, [and] following spring break we were planning to have urban farmers take a look at our garden to give second opinions,” Curtis wrote. “But we, of course, were not given that opportunity because on day one back from break, the garden was demolished.”
‘So Many Memories, Just Gone’: Over a Decade of Work Dismantled
Howard’s only on-campus garden began in the 2010-2011 school year, when four students asked to take charge of an overgrown plot of land near Sankofa Video and Books Cafe.
Priest Amen, one of the four, said that after they had cleaned up the Sankofa plot, the university’s Office of Sustainability asked them about doing the same for a larger spot near the Howard Plaza Towers West residence hall.
Amen and the others co-founded the Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden in that plot; the acronym they chose stands for “Gardening Revitalized for Eating Energetically and Naturally.” Ever since, current and former Bisons from the student-run Society of Holistic Living and Meditation have been tending the garden’s soil and the flowers, herbs and food crops it supports. The club met there every single Saturday, and anyone who wanted to lend a hand could join them.
“A former member sent me a video showing what happened to the garden, and it was just devastating,” Amen said. “So much history, so many memories, just gone. It was a very traumatic moment, actually. But then I resigned myself to be like ‘well, it was a blessing that Howard allowed us to have the space for so long.’”
The garden’s abrupt removal last month destroyed five fruit trees—two cherry trees, and one each of fig, peach and apple trees—that had been growing on the land for around 13 years, according to the garden club’s vice president Ixele Akinmowo-Simon.
“We have reason to believe that the garden could have been leveled and rezoned without completely destroying our fruit-bearing trees,” Akinmowo-Simon said in an email, writing as representative for the Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden club’s e-board. “With more advance notice, we would have made time to harvest growing crops, preserve artwork, and discuss non-harmful/natural methods of extermination in our space.”
Howard’s Physical Facilities Management office, which performed the actual removal, did not respond to a request for comment.
Club members did manage to harvest some vegetables and herbs that remained intact. They also replanted some of the tulips and African daisies in the plot outside of Sankofa Café—the exact piece of land that the garden’s founders had planted those same flowers in more than a decade earlier.
‘They Would Always Make These Threats’
In an interview, former Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden club president Jaylin Ward did not seem surprised to see the Howard administration demolish the green space without warning club members. Ward, who graduated in 2021, said the club experienced a lack of support for the garden from some university offices.
“Some of the people in [Howard’s office of Real Estate Development & Capital Asset Management] would make sad remarks like ‘oh, the ghetto garden,’” Ward said. “I’ve always heard that they have a plan to bulldoze the garden and stuff like that—they would always make these threats. But I never saw anything in the Howard Forward plan that actually made an intentional effort to turn the garden into something else.”
During their time with the club, Ward said that the university seemed reluctant to provide any financial support for the garden. Even while interning at the Office of Sustainability, Ward said they couldn’t get the administration to direct money to the garden, even when it was already dedicated for campus green initiatives.
“The university does promote the garden on its pages, but was withholding funds from us students,” Ward said. “We won several gift cards from the Home Depot Retool Your School program, and I never got access to the money.”
Howard’s Residence Halls: No Strangers to Rats
The rodent sightings reported at Howard Plaza Towers East and West residence halls would not shock some in the Bison community. Howard made national headlines in 2021, when students occupied the Armour J. Blackburn Center for more than 30 days to protest mold and pest issues in dorms.
“A lot of students don’t realize this is a fight for thousands of students to breathe healthy air in their rooms and not have rats,” one Howard protester told The Informer during the height of what became known as the Blackburn Takeover.
Beyond Howard, the entire District has been experiencing a surge in its rat population since 2022, which the D.C. Department of Health attributed to “new construction, milder winters over the past decade, and trash not being stored properly.” In fiscal year 2023, the city received more than 16,000 rat-related complaints.
“The university’s agenda to pinpoint the garden as the source of Howard/D.C.’s rat problem feels very intentional,” Akinmowo-Simon wrote. “There have been rats at Howard for as long as I know, and it feels like a ploy to disregard the Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden as a space that’s used and loved by many.”
The Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden Club recognized the rodent issues connected with the compost bins and executive board members said the group had been trying since at least this summer to work with the university on addressing the problem.
People outside of the garden community would put non-compostable trash in the bins, Akinmowo-Simon said, and that “misuse” made the situation harder to manage.
According to an Instagram comment from the Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden account, the university told club leaders over the summer that it was “working on getting [them] a proper waste management system” but that “that never occurred.”
Neither the Office of Sustainability nor the Howard University press office responded to questions about the scope of the rat problem associated with the garden’s compost or the school’s efforts to handle it.
According to Akinmowo-Simon, the Office of Sustainability had met with garden leaders several times and expressed a need to “rectify the rodent issue by leveling the garden, filling the burrows, and performing general extermination.” They said club leaders asked the university to provide a written proposal explaining how and when that work would be done, but administrators did not provide any.
“We were assured that no changes would be made without our approval/a written proposal from us,” Akinmowo-Simon said. “We were assured that no changes would be made outside of removing the compost bins.”
By the end of March, a fenced-off square of grassy lawn had replaced the carefully tended garden, where the spring’s first tulips and veggies—including kale, pak choi, spinach and beets—had been blooming just a few weeks earlier.
What’s Next?
The day after the garden’s removal, members of the Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden Club met with Howard administrators to “gain more clarity” about what happened, according to a press release from the club. Akinmowo-Simon said that the e-board has begun weekly meetings with the assistant vice principal of student affairs and the Office of Sustainability.
“The tone is apologetic, yet not truly willing to take steps to truly reconcile,” Curtis wrote, of communication from the university since the demolition.
It’s still unclear whether the garden will be replanted in the same location or elsewhere on campus, and the timeline remains murky. An informal list of the club’s main demands, provided in Akinmowo-Simon’s March 25 email, includes:
- the return or replacement of the mature fruit trees
- assistance with future funding and projects
- a public apology from Howard University, the Office of Sustainability, and Physical Facilities Management to Howard students and the surrounding community,
- transparency about the individual who contacted Physical Facilities Management to start the demolition
- accountability systems in place for future communication.
Discussions are ongoing between club leaders and Howard administrators.
“We have some very specific demands, but when proposed, the response is usually ‘but how do we move on?’” Akinmowo-Simon wrote. “They’ve also proposed various ways to ‘beautify’ the space and contribute to our legacy, but that was our legacy. Our legacy was bulldozed over.”
Regardless of what happens next, the garden that students and alumni had carefully tended through three “generations” of graduates will have to be started from scratch.
“So many hands, so many people have come in and out of the space, have donated their time and labor,” Akinmowo-Simon said. “It took us a long time, miscommunication, a lack of running water, [and] changing leadership to get where we were. Luckily, a lot of our community members have joined us in calling out the university for its carelessness, and have been constantly checking in with us, asking how they can assist.”
An Outpouring of Support
Curtis told The Informer that many students and organizations reached out to the organization with offers of support. The group’s first Instagram post about the demolition received more than 1200 likes and 85 comments, mostly from outraged Howard students and alumni.
“The garden was the ONE safe space for me on campus when I felt unsafe in my shared dorm space and unsafe in my own head space,” one comment reads. “In the years since leaving campus, I’ve been so happy seeing glimpses of how the growing Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden Club has taken ownership of the garden that is their inheritance as students of the illustrious [Howard University], but also as BLACK PEOPLE… who most certainly should be able to take ownership of space within the historic CHOCOLATE CITY.”
The garden meant different things to those who spent time in it. On social media and in conversations with The Informer, students and alumni often described it as “sacred,” “safe,” and “healing.”
The fruit trees and beds of carefully tended crops provided fresh produce for the community. The plot could become an art exhibit, an outdoor classroom, a yoga studio and a house of worship.
For Godinez-Thompson and others who knew Shaw, it provided a peaceful space to memorialize a friend who “absolutely loved flowers” and often bought them for herself and others.
The garden offered a place by and for Howard community members, where anyone could come to connect with the land and with each other.
“The Halo G.R.E.E.N. Garden is one of the few spaces on campus where you don’t have to prove yourself to be included,” Akinmowo-Simon wrote. “There’s no application, no headshot, GPA or resume needed. All we ask is that people show up, and they have, and we’re eternally grateful to them for that.”
A Big Emotional Shoutout To Asha Taylor and Kayla Benjamin. Your Due Diligence “Preserves The Integrity” of Investigative Journalism.
Although rodent infestation can create many problems, I’m disappointed the Howard University administration did not communicate with the keepers of the garden and provide alternatives. Gardening is very important to our environment especially with the food shortages, contamination and high prices. Fresh foods provide very good nutrition.