Logo by ©Hughstin Grimshaw-Surette

For just over 18 years I worked as a university professor at a small, mainly undergraduate university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the summers, there were often more than 10 people associated with my research lab: fourth year honours research students, graduate students (lots at the master’s level students and near the end, some PhD students), summer field assistants, sometimes a post-doc or two and occasionally a visiting professor. The physical space was really more like office space than a lab, but we did have sinks and some lab benches where we could work with plants and soil. We had west-facing windows across an entire wall of our space and the students enjoyed filling every horizontal surface with houseplants. These plants were not just decorative. I used these plants in my classes as well and was often sighted pushing a cart laden with greenery from my lab to the classroom. The plants soon spread, with small trees taking over desks and vines spreading inward from the windows, attached to the ceiling with with hooks. At one point, my students visited the greenhouses of a neighbouring university and then snuck back with pockets filled with leaves and stems that they propagated in house, adding to the diversity of our own jungle wall. Where the wild things were, in any case. 

During one of the times when the lab was filled to capacity (with both plants and people), for some reason now lost to me we decided we needed a name and a logo. We started looking into acronyms that would memorably capture what we did. My best attempt was “E.P.I.C.: Ecology of Plants in Communities”. It’s sort of a double entendre: my field is plant community ecology, meaning suites of plant species that live in the same place, and we were mainly working on plants in cities, so the idea of human communities is in the name as well. With this cheesy epithet in hand, I threatened my students that we were going with “E.P.I.C.” unless they came up with something better. They didn’t. 

In addition to their science brains, my students brought all their other talents to bear on our work over the years. Shout out to the gifted Hughstin Grimshaw-Surette who designed our fantastic logo. I love how he captured the built environment with a green roof (our research focus at the time) as well as natural barrens and cliffs (where our green roof plants came from). And check out the wild bee in the upper left (Hughstin was studying pollinators and plants on green roofs for his MSc at the time).   

Mug art: ©Lianne Yoshida

In fall 2021, I left my academic position and closed down the E.P.I.C. lab. The ideas that went into that research group live on in this blog and in my current work, but sadly the lab itself is finished. I still have some of the t-shirts with logo. I also still mentor a handful of graduate students, but I don’t have a physical space where my students can work in the same room, and that’s key to having a “lab”, a kind of community in itself. My current students are part of a larger entity: TransCoastal Adaptations: Centre for Nature-Based Solutions at Saint Mary’s University https://www.transcoastaladaptations.com/, run by Dr. Danika van Proosdij, co-founded by my other boss Tony Bowron at CB Wetlands and Environmental Specialists https://www.cbwes.com/. 

I’ll end this with a heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped out, all the students (paid and volunteered), post-docs and professional colleagues visiting over the years. And I’m happy to report that all those houseplants got divvied up and dispersed out into other offices, labs, apartments and houses. 

Thank you, Merci, Danke, Kiitos, Gracias, Obrigado, Wela’lioq, 谢谢,ありがとう, شكرًا !!