As leaves begin to bud on trees on the University of Iowa campus, new flowers seem to magically appear in front of the Old Capitol Building on the Pentacrest. While students might think those flowers popped up overnight, the UI landscaping team is responsible for the new plants — a task they are beginning for this spring, among other jobs.

UI Landscape Services Manager Michael Weikamp said his team, which includes a landscape meeting supervisor, a landscape construction supervisor, an urban forestry supervisor, and a total crew of about 36 full-time employees, is gearing up to transform the 2,000 acres of campus they cover into spring mode.

“We’re just coming out of winter, so making that winter transition from plowing and shoveling snow to getting our mowers ready, our string trimmers ready,” Weikamp said. “Tree work is in full swing … It’s kind of a year-round affair — getting our mulch in planting beds ready, growing our annuals out in the greenhouse, just getting ready for spring.”

Weikamp and the team are starting to focus on putting out and planting the annual flowers and shrubs ahead of the commencement ceremonies in May. The team typically brings those plants in at the end of April or early May, around the last frost date of the year.

The flowers are planted and maintained at a greenhouse at the UI’s Oakdale Campus. An automatic irrigation system is used to grow the plants, and staff check on them regularly before they are transported to the main university campus.

It is then that the landscaping service’s installation team goes to work, replenishing parts of campus with the new plants and new mulch.

“It’s a pretty big undertaking. It’s not just putting annual flowers out,” Weikamp said. “That’s whole new landscaping beds, retaining walls, big limestone blocks that we’re out doing.”

While the weather can impact how plants are handled each season, Weikamp said the landscaping team follows a landscape management plan that illustrates what tasks they will complete around campus each year. That document helps the team stay on task while also navigating the seasons themselves.

“There’s a monthly calendar in there that has tasks that generally we’ll be doing,” Weikamp said. “Obviously, that’s subject to change, but how we plant trees, how we take care of trees, it’s all in there. And so that’s how we guide our work because that’s also the expectation of our customers, which are our students, staff, the various colleges across campus.”

The spring season is also when a lot of tree maintenance is done on campus, alongside planting and maintaining flowers. These tasks often fall to UI Urban Forestry Supervisor and Campus Arborist Andy Dahl, the top tree maintainer at the university.

Many tree removals and relocations take place in the springtime because it is more likely the trees will be able to recover in their new location, such as the spading of a Chinese Catalpa tree on the medical campus that Dahl moved on April 7. Spading allows a tree to be picked up and moved to a new location without the cutting of all of the tree’s roots, only some.

“It’ll take them two to three years to get back to their previous growth rate and how it was growing before [moving],” Dahl said. “It just sets them back because roots go way past the [tree’s] drip line … So, it’s going to take a while for those roots to regrow.”

The Chinese Catalpa is just one of many trees the UI landscaping team will plant this month. The team is also partnering with the university’s Undergraduate Student Government, the UI Office of Sustainability and the Environment, and the Iowa City-based organization the LENA Project to plant 4,000 trees near Hillcrest Residence Hall.

The event, which will start April 25 and could last until April 29 if the planting takes multiple days, uses the Miyawaki Method to plant thousands of trees in a densely populated area where the trees are then able to sustain themselves, Dahl said.

“It’s really high density, so they grow really fast,” Dahl said. “Akira Miyawaki was a Japanese botanist, and he figured this out. So, it’s a way to make a forest mature faster. It’s all native species. You plant them and basically forget them, so that’s pretty neat.”

RELATED: Digging into the weeds of gardening: the rise of native planting

Spring is also an active time for the Office of Sustainability and the Environment. In an email to The Daily Iowan, Sustainability Program Manager Beth MacKenzie wrote that the office is also collaborating with the Johnson County Conservation Department and the Iowa City Public Library for the City Nature Challenge, a global event encouraging people to get outside and explore nature by using the iNaturalist app on their phones.

“The iNaturalist app will help you identify what you’ve taken a picture of, and then it documents your findings as part of our Johnson County project,” MacKenzie wrote. “It’s easy, fun, and people can participate at their own pace from anywhere in Johnson County.”

The office’s main goal this spring is to get the word out about the events that UI students and Johnson County community members can engage in within nature, like the planting of the Miyawaki forest, MacKenzie wrote.

“Spring is one of our busiest seasons of the year and one of our favorite seasons of the year,” MacKenzie wrote. “The days are getting longer and warmer, trees and plants are coming back to life, and there are lots of events and activities celebrating nature.”

For Weikamp, maintaining the 2,000 acres, 8,000 trees, and more than 6,000 shrubs the landscaping team is responsible for at the UI is essential to curating the impression the campus gives off to visitors.

“If you show up to a place, and it doesn’t have a tidy, kept landscape, you’re a little bit more off-put,” Weikamp said. “[Landscaping] creates a welcoming environment, a place where you want to be, and that’s our first impression for students and staff and their parents when they come to campus, is how well is campus maintained?”

He added that a poorly kept campus might shift visitors’ perspective of the university and what it can offer students.

“If it’s not maintained well, then they probably don’t want to be sending their kid here because it might be an indication of how well everything else is or how stringent the curriculum is,” Weikamp said.

Weikamp said the most challenging part of the spring season is the coordination between the large team and the multitude of campus spaces the landscaping team is responsible for. However, he added that the team often runs like a well-oiled machine.

“Luckily, we have some good people here that have been around a long time,that know what needs to be done and make sure we have the right pieces in the right places,” Weikamp said. “We’re being accountable for ourselves, not only for our operation, but for the students. We’re here for the students to make sure they have a good place to come to school and learn.”