Gardens Grow Into Versatile Learning Tools

Sure, gardens are great tools for teaching children about growing plants and getting their fingers dirty.

But teachers in Ventura County are discovering that these patches of green also encourage students to learn about a wild array of other concepts: Design, math, science, and even respect.

“I remember the night before we opened our garden,” recalled Trish Doerr, a fourth-grade teacher at Meadows Elementary School in Thousand Oaks. “You could have heard a pin drop. The kids were like, ‘Did we really create this? It’s so professional.’

“We’ve had no vandalism either. It’s like the kids know, ‘This is ours.’ They take care of the garden and respect it.”

Meadows Elementary, which got a $5,000 grant from Thousand Oaks biotechnology company Amgen three years ago to make its garden bloom, is just one of several schools in the county and statewide to grasp the concept that gardens can be enormous additions to a child’s overall education.

Some schools say they were motivated when state Supt. of Schools Delaine Eastin declared two years ago: “There should be a garden in every school.”

Eastin’s philosophy comprises an ideal learning environment in which “natural vegetation and flowers offer beautiful settings in which to integrate every discipline, including science, math, reading, environmental studies, nutrition and health.”

In addition to hiring a nutritionist to pump up garden-based healthy-food programs across California, the state also grants awards to schools that want to start gardens.

State Department of Education spokeswoman Sally Livingston said the agency is considering giving an Ojai school $1,000 to start a garden, which would take effect by January.

About 13% of the state’s 8,000 public schools have gardens, according to Eastin’s office.

Fifth-grade teacher Lesley Tibbits led an effort at Montalvo Elementary School in Ventura in September to revive the school’s garden, abandoned two years ago.

Latching on to Eastin’s statewide dream of every school growing its own flowers and fruits, Tibbits and some other teachers got a $1,200 grant from Amgen and donations in time and materials from parents and the Green Thumb International nursery in Ventura.

Now, two days a week during class time, teams of five students work on eight separate plots, planting, weeding, watering, nurturing.

Aside from keeping garden journals and conducting water tolerance experiments, Montalvo students are busy plotting their winter and spring gardens, voicing a desire to plant an entire salsa garden, Tibbits said.

She also said she is hoping to start a “gardening angel program” where people with gardening knowledge, perhaps elderly people, would come to the school to help kids with their projects.

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At both Meadows and Montalvo, the gardens have far surpassed teachers’ expectations.

“There are hidden things that you’d never expect to happen,” Doerr said. “Problem-solving techniques I never would have imagined and other total learning experiences.”

The Meadows garden, which boasts four distinct climatic regions of California, was designed and tilled by the students. They placed each pebble. The frog pond was their idea.

The garden beds are now watched over by young eyes.

“You should have seen the kids shoveling all this dirt in the rain,” Doerr said.

Three years later, classes still go outside at least once a week to maintain the Australian paulownias, sea sage and yuccas.

Aside from watering the plants, the science classes use the soil samples for experiments. The geography classes use the garden to show the state’s coastal, mountain, desert and Central Valley regions.

The project has been so successful that Doerr is completing a second grant application to Amgen, asking the company for another $3,000 to create an experimental garden, where each class will be responsible for growing produce and flowers of its own.

“We felt the fourth-grade curriculum was understanding California,” Doerr said. Traditionally, she said classes had to “either go on field trips off-premise or learn from books.”

“We decided we’d like to do active learning right at our own school, and we incorporated math and design and geography and science into our own garden right here,” she said.

Plus, the garden reminds students about the biosphere, the environment and the effects of recycling.

“We cleaned up the leaves today,” said 9-year-old Colin Linebaugh, a fourth-grader. “That’s so animals can have room to run around and it’s good for mulch.”

These are the kinds of comments that make Amgen officials proud of how their grants are being spent.

Although a garden is not a typical use of Amgen school grants, “We’re committed to supporting science education in the county”--a goal clearly furthered by a garden, said spokeswoman Andrea Rothschild.