Spring updates from our community garden
🌿 Spanning neuroscience to co-creation — a community unfolds
Something is growing in our garden and it’s not just plants. Earlier this month at the Community Garden at Nova School of Business and Economics, we welcomed Marion Oberhuber of The Plant Wisdom Project for a workshop exploring the connection between neuroscience and plants. What unfolded in the garden that day was more than a workshop — it was a moment of community.
Students, visitors, and curious minds gathered to learn and co-create. Some joined the session, others naturally flowed into tending the garden — planting, caring, contributing. Different rhythms, one shared space.
It was a reminder that growth doesn’t happen overnight. We plant seeds and expect immediate results. But what we’re building at our Community Garden at NOVA SBE is rooted in trust, patience, and time. And now, we’re beginning to see it slowly and genuinely flourish. It was heartening to see people from across Lisbon join our students — blurring the lines between campus and city. Our community garden guardians loved having the space they have been tending become so full of life.
Open Day – from grounding to growing
Last month we hosted our annual Open Day — a moment of connection, learning and co-creation with our NOVA SBE students and garden guardians community. We started the morning with a grounding yoga session led by Natasha from the Nova Growth Club, setting the tone for a day rooted in well-being and connection with ourselves, each other, and nature. Throughout the morning, guardians introduced the planting areas they care for — sharing their knowledge, stories, and dedication to nurturing these spaces with students — who in turn helped with some much needed weeding.
We then explored our grove together with local community members and guided by our garden consultant João Martins. He helped us identify local plant species, deepening our understanding of the surrounding ecosystem and taught us how to cut them so we could propagate them in the garden. To close the day, participants got their hands in the soil, planting in a flower bed thoughtfully prepared by our amazing student volunteers from Open Thursdays. A true moment of collective action and care.
At the heart of what we do is the belief that meaningful change happens when we learn, grow and experiment together. I do believe that we plant seeds in everything we do: in conversations, in projects, in care. And with time, some of them begin to sprout. Right now it truly feels like spring and some of those seeds are starting to emerge.