Elon Community Garden Strawberry Festival brings campus, community together

Rows of student-grown plants, strawberry treats and a steady flow of parents, professors, students and local residents turned Elon Community Garden into one of Elon’s clearest shared spaces on May 1. The annual Strawberry Festival brought together the campus and the surrounding community with lemonade, ice cream, live music, balloon flowers, a strawberry hunt and tote-bag painting, all centered around the garden’s long-running plant adoption tradition.

For Sam Hinton, a teaching assistant for the Garden Studio class, the festival was about more than seasonal food and entertainment. It also served as a window into the work that keeps the garden running through the semester, from outreach and activity planning to plant propagation and event logistics. Hinton said the event celebrated spring and strawberries while showing how teamwork sustains the garden. Junior Elisabeth Holmes, another organizer, said the best part was watching the community enjoy the space and share in what students had built over the past year.

The Strawberry Festival has become one of the garden’s most visible traditions because it gives visitors something to take home. Elon University says the spring festival includes strawberry-themed baked goods, student musical entertainment, face painting, a photo booth, dancing and an heirloom plant sale, where student-grown plants are sold for summer gardens. The event is one of two major gatherings planned each year by the Garden Studio Class, alongside the Fall Pumpkin Festival, and it gives the class a public stage for the work that usually happens out of sight.

The garden itself has roots that reach back nearly two decades. It began in fall 2006 as a senior honors project by Bree Detwiler ’07 in an Environmental Ethics class, then grew into a larger teaching space after Michael Strickland introduced the Garden Studio class in 2010. The National Wildlife Federation recognized the site as a certified wildlife habitat in 2012. Elon University describes the garden as a place for learning, research, demonstration and engagement, and students also work with the Elon Community Gardening Club to tend plants, develop seed collections and plan the semester-ending festivals.

That mix of instruction and outreach has helped the festival grow into a true community event. Elon News Network reported that more than 100 plants were adopted at the 16th annual Strawberry Festival in 2025, when 63 plants were available and many sold out before the event began after online reservations were introduced for the first time. Students start planting in January for the spring festival, and the teaching assistant helps train the next student leader each year, keeping the tradition rooted in both classwork and community life.