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Rooted in LSA
How LSA senior systems administrator Ben Firestine’s love of native plants grew from a backyard project into a staff community.
By Hayden Frye
Five years ago, when Ben Firestine and his wife bought a house, he was excited to have something he had missed for years: a yard.
Growing up, Firestine, now a senior systems administrator in LSA Technology Services, gardened with his mom. They grew tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and other summer staples. But through college and the apartment years that followed, gardening was mostly out of reach.
When he finally had an outdoor space, Firestine started where his childhood memories had left off: tilling the soil and planting seeds. That first garden came together quickly, but there was something missing.
“The first summer at the house, I noticed that there weren’t as many fireflies as I remembered as a kid, and I really like seeing them light up at night.” says Firestine. “That sent me down the rabbit hole of figuring out why that was the case and learning about native plants.”
Soon, Firestine wasn’t only thinking about vegetables, but about the larger ecosystem taking shape around his home: flowering plants for insects, milkweed and butterfly weed for monarch caterpillars, shrubs that support other species, and small changes that could make his two-thirds of an acre in Livonia more hospitable to the living things around him.
Today, much of his yard is still grass, but Firestine is slowly working that back. Around the house and in the front yard, he has added native flowers, shrubs, and trees, replacing sections of lawn. In the edible garden, he still returns to an old favorite: tomatoes.
“The main thing for me is tomato plants,” Firestine says. “I plant probably 15-plus tomato plants every year, and I’m the only one that eats the tomatoes in my house.”
Every year, he tells himself he will save some for sauce or tomato soup. Most years, the tomatoes do not make it that far.
“It’s rare that I can resist eating them,” he says.
Sowing the Seeds of Community
What began in his backyard has since grown into something larger: Firestine founded and leads an LSA Staff Affinity Group devoted to gardening and native plants.
“I was hesitant at first,” says Firestine of creating an affinity group. “I’m usually not an outgoing person, but I talked to my wife about it, and she convinced me that I should give it a go and see what happens. The reaction that I’ve gotten has been way bigger than I ever expected.”
An affinity group fair in the fall of 2023 garnered some 20 sign-ups, and since then the group has grown to more than 40 staff. The group functions as a flexible community where members can share advice, ask questions, trade plants, and participate as much or as little as they like.
“I don’t want it to feel like it’s a chore,” he says. “I want it to be something that people can enjoy—just sharing knowledge or sharing plants with each other.”
In the spring or early fall, the group typically gathers for a plant swap, complete with tea, biscuits, and cookies. Members bring plants from their own yards, divide what has spread, and offer cuttings, starts, or extras to colleagues who can give them a new home.
“I’ve never met a gardener or a plant person that hasn’t been more than willing to share plants or knowledge if you ask them,” he says.
That generosity, Firestine says, is one of the things he has come to appreciate most about gardeners—and it is a trait he finds among his colleagues in LSA.
Serving with Servers
Firestine’s work life is rooted in a different kind of ecosystem.
As a senior systems administrator in LSA Technology Services, he helps maintain the digital infrastructure that supports work across the college.
Firestine’s current focus is LSA’s VMware virtual server environment, which supports a wide range of tools and projects, from password management systems and software distribution to publicly available academic resources. One of them is, fittingly, the Michigan Flora Plant Database website.
Firestine did not arrive at LSA already knowing that environment. When the previous staff member managing VMware left, Firestine volunteered to take it on.
“Taking on VMware was a significant learning curve,” he says. “It's a critical service that the entire college relies on, so there was a lot of responsibility involved. It pushed me to develop new skills quickly, and it's been a great opportunity to grow professionally.”
That willingness to learn by doing has been a theme throughout Firestine’s career. In college, Firestine became interested in systems administration and server management, so he bought an old enterprise server on eBay, put it behind his couch, and tinkered with it in his free time.
The server—a Dell PowerEdge R720XD—is still running today.
In LSA, Firestine’s work connects him to people and projects across the college. Sometimes he is troubleshooting. Sometimes he is helping make an academic resource more accessible. Sometimes he is meeting with faculty or researchers in person to better understand what they need.
That variety is one of his favorite parts of the job.
“Having that variety is really great. It helps me continue to learn new skills and see what technologies are out there and how we might implement them,” says Firestine.
A Slice of the World, Improved
For someone whose professional work is largely digital, gardening offers Firestine something more grounded.
“One of the things that has really surprised me with gardening native plants is how fulfilling it has been to put effort into something and then see actual, tangible results from it,” Firestine says.
He sees those results in the fireflies that now return in the summer. He sees them in the insects drawn to the plants he has added. He sees them in the staff members who show up to a plant swap to share saplings, resources, and advice.
“I try my best to make a positive impact in my little slice of the world, even if it’s a small thing,” Firestine says. “Gardening and native plants have really allowed me to see the fruits of that labor.”
Firestine is encouraged by the number of people who are beginning to rethink what they plant, how much grass they maintain, and how their yards can support the local ecosystem.
“More people are starting to realize that they can do the same things in their yard, whether that’s getting rid of some of their grass or changing out the flowers they normally plant with something that’s local to the area,” he says. “That line of thinking has really started to take hold, and I think that’s such a great thing.”
For Firestine, whether he is maintaining virtual servers, helping a faculty member support a research database, sharing chive plants with a colleague, or planting for fireflies, the work comes back to the same quiet principle: tend the systems around you with care, and they will have a better chance to grow.
