Today — December 17, 2025 — we assembled and installed our first two garden planters for students living in Family Housing. With a skeleton crew of Stephen, Jack, and Kate, along with Stephen’s trusty little red truck, we took our 7.5’x2′ beds through rain, wind, and even a bit of sun to get the ball rolling with concrete work to help students improve their access to nutritious and rewarding food.
Here’s one of the beds, sitting in its new home. Soil and plants will be added when the winter rains subside and the students in the unit have settled on the final location of the bed.
Here Jack and Kate show off another of the beds inside a patio enclosure. The beds are made with 1×8 cedar boards to provide natural pest deterrence and to last a long time in the west coast weather.
Kate and Jack show off the size of the planters (and gang signs, maybe?).
Huge appreciation for the Emerging Learning Fund, the Community-Engaged Learning office, and the Campus Community Gardens for helping make this a reality!
If you live in Family Housing and would like us to build you a planter so you can grow some of your own food, just email saross@uvic. ca and we’ll make it happen. #food4thought
To quote Florence Williams The Nature Fix, “short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic-minded and healthier overall”(Williams 5) Neuroscience backs this up: time in nature lowers cortisol and activity in the brain’s subgenual prefrontal cortex, also known as the sgPFC, which is crucial in mood regulation and emotional processing. It connects directly to the amygdala, which is responsible for fear and stress reactions, as well as the hypothalamus, which is responsible for hormonal stress responses. When the sgPFC is overactive, we see strong ties to depression, anxiety, and negative thought patterns (Bratman et al., PNAS, 2015; Ongur et al., PNAS, 1998). Even short walks in nature improve memory and focus (Berman et al., Psychological Science, 2008). The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) explains this as “soft fascination,” where natural settings will do a ‘reset’ of sorts on the brain’s limited attention spans better than urban settings.
The positive effects of nature are proven even further by what Florence Williams calls the “Three-Day Effect,” .a neurological reset that takes place after an extended period of time in a natural environment. Cognitive psychologist David Strayer found that participants who spent three days in nature, away from screens and urban noise, scored a whopping 50% higher on creativity and problem solving tests (University of Utah, 2012). Williams says that after about 72 consecutive hours spent in nature, the brain’s prefrontal cortex relaxes, stress hormones decrease, and alpha brain waves associated with calm focus increase. This aligns with what neuroscience tells us: even in shorter stints, exposure to nature will reduce cortisol, improve emotional regulation, and improve cognitive flexibility. This makes it apparent that nature improves one’s mental state, helping students think more clearly, manage stress, and focus.
Main Research Question: How does time spent in nature influence university students’ stress regulation, GPA, and academic focus?
Rationale: Students spend most of their academic lives indoors, surrounded by screens and artificial lighting. This contributes to a lack of important sensory stimulation from things such as natural airflow and light variation, which are crucial for maintaining balance in the brain. Long exposures to artificial environments disrupt circadian rhythms, which may lead to fatigue and trouble focusing. Constant screens and artificial lighting can cause cognitive overstimulation but emotional undernourishment, the brain is flooded with signals to process but is deprived of any sort of sensory grounding. While existing research tells us that nature exposure reduces stress, there is limited data on how nature and academic outcomes correlate.
Direction: Surveys measuring hours in nature per week, GPA and focus, then use that data for a final piece called “The Cognitive Neuroscience Behind the Relationship Between Nature and University Students Academic Performance” , where the findings will (hopefully) be in support of the project’s final goal of creating these student gardens/ outdoor learning spaces.
