Inside Dal's yearly makeover

Those who stay at Dal through the summer term are well accustomed to seeing a small army of Facilities Management staff sprucing up campus grounds this time of year – planting new flowers, replacing worn-out sod, fixing gravel pathways.

But students who finished exams in April and return next week for convocation will find a campus renewed and revitalized – just in time for family photos.

See also: Tips for capturing your conovcation moment

You could call it Dalhousie’s yearly makeover.

Mike Wilkinson, who oversees the Grounds Services division of Facilities Management, leads a team of 10 who spend most of their month of May getting Dalhousie sprung for spring.

Landscaping by the truckload

“We start as soon as we can in the spring, which, depending on the weather, can be a real moving target,” he explains. “Some years, the bulbs aren’t even out by the time we get into May.”

To give you a sense of the scale of the operation: by the time convocation kicks off on Tuesday, the Grounds Services team will have have laid down more than four big truckloads of top soil, two truckloads of crusher dust, five truckloads of mulch and placed more than 30 pallets of sod.

Mr. Wilkinson says that the number of new flowers each year is more challenging to track — depending on the weather and the condition of the existing flora, they may decide to plant more annuals, but they are working towards building up the number of perrennials.

Their biggest struggle? The weather. Their deadline is set — the start of convocation — but when they start their work and how many good days they’ll have to complete it can vary a great deal. This year things are moving along well, though Mr. Wilkinson says that a couple more days of rain to help the new sod would have been preferred; they’re having to do more manual watering than usual.

But it’s all in the name of repairing the damage done from another Halifax winter, and making campus glisten in the background of those convocation snapshots.

“Obviously, we’d have to do this sort of work each spring no matter what, even just to keep up with grounds repair as a result of construction work,” says Mr. Wilkinson. “But we want to make sure campus looks extra great for the graduates at convocation.”