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The beautiful new landscaping around the New Old Chem Building will be formally dedicated as the University of Cincinnati’s Garden of Refuge next spring.
This urban garden, incorporating micro-forest and pollinator garden elements, will be a peaceful place of belonging and wellness for the entire UC community. It includes outdoor classroom space as well as areas for quiet reflection, with accessible pathways.
This Garden of Refuge, fittingly, has its roots in our city’s past, in our present care for our community and in our hopes for its future.
Cincinnati has been a center of migration throughout our nation’s history, as generations of people have found home and hope and opportunity here. The Garden of Refuge honors that cultural history and our civic pride.
As a place of belonging and wellbeing for all our students, faculty and staff, the garden is a place of present refuge from the stresses we all face as we work toward the future. Designed with large and lush plantings as a peaceful haven, it will nurture our spirits and inspire ideas and community.
This garden also connects us with the larger, global academic community and an ecosystem of innovation for the future.
This project stems from UC’s strategic partnership in Germany with the University Alliance Ruhr, an alliance of the three leading universities in the Ruhr region: Technical University of Dortmund, the University of Duisburg-Essen and Ruhr University Bochum. The garden was designed as a twin to the Garden of Refuge being created on the campus of TU Dortmund.
Our city’s cultural history, mentioned a moment ago, is one of the strong ties we have with these German partners. We also share common ground with the Ruhr region specifically: Both our region of the United States and the Ruhr region of Germany were coal and steel centers that are being transformed into innovation hubs through the leadership of our respective public research universities.
The two mirrored Gardens of Refuge visibly reflect the importance of the sustainable international partnerships UC has developed with universities around the world to provide global opportunities for our students and scholars and to advance our research and education missions.
In addition to the beautiful physical environment and open classroom space that the University of Cincinnati Garden of Refuge offers, it will also be the core of an interdisciplinary research cluster with our partner universities, including disciplines such as horticulture and landscape architecture, environmental studies and sustainability, biology, urban planning, education, art, history, German studies, and more.
Multiple colleges and UC International will fund a graduate fellowship for research that engages any of the garden’s themes.

[Opportunity to name the first graduate research fellow, Fatemeh Rezaei, one of the AiE fellows who is here at UC pursuing dual degrees in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and in Fine Arts. She first came here as a participant in the exhibit and symposium in 2023. Her double degree pursuit has inspired Arts & Sciences and DAAP to create a dual degree program in development for the 2026 academic year.]

Our Garden of Refuge is an emblem of the sense of belonging and community that is here for all at the University of Cincinnati. We share so much, past, present and future, and from these strong roots we can flourish, tend to our community and nurture future growth.

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