The Dry Garden: If critics would stop picking on the school garden, they might learn a thing or two

A rant in the current Atlantic magazine argues that a plague of school gardens – thousands! – is returning the children of California’s Latino immigrants to the kind of stoop labor that their families struggled to escape.

“Cultivating Failure” tilts at the groupies of celebrity chef Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard program in such an entertaining way that it’s a pity that so little of the article is true. Although some privately funded school gardens in California -- maybe five -- involve the kind of “eco-gastronomy” programs during school hours that were so richly ridiculed by the Atlantic, the remaining multitude are more likely to have a small wooden planter outside the classroom kept by a science teacher to raise milkweed for a butterfly experiment. Urban wildlife, after all, is on the third-grade curriculum.

In Los Angeles, the need for school gardens goes beyond the ways that these spaces can serve as outdoor classrooms for enterprising teachers. Here, where parks are few and far between, even planted boxes amount to small Edens.

Occasionally kids, parents and the faculty have worked together to capture a meaningful swath of land and have created a true garden, the kind you can stand in and walk through. These landscapes don’t pull kids from class but create campuses where they are more likely to stay after school, where their parents happily become involved and where there is a prospect of shade and air that is fit to breathe (no small matter in Los Angeles).

Just such a garden was installed before Christmas at an elementary school near downtown Los Angeles named for the late painter, urban naturalist and children’s author Leo Politi. Nearly 300 volunteers worked on weekends to remove Bermuda grass from a largely neglected knoll behind the library. The chief loss of this largely ornamental space? The sound of mowers and blowers during school hours next to the library. To read more about the garden, click to the jump ...

Working on the slope, kids and adults planted native oaks at the top, a band of chaparral sages in the middle ground and a vernal pond with riparian grasses at the foot.

Some funding and horticultural advice came from the Audubon Society and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The installation is chronicled in the Western Tanager, the bimonthly publication of Los Angeles Audubon.

Contrary to the Atlantic’s argument, the Leo Politi work was not done at the expense of the curriculum, but in addition to it. Visit on a Thursday afternoon and you will find second grade teacher Linda Dowell using the garden as a teaching tool for an after-school program for gifted students.

The day that I visited, 30 or so children were given pictures and common names of plants from their garden, then were asked to look up the botanical names, history and applications using library computers.

Show me a campus where creating beauty and teaching reading, writing, Latin and systematics after school is an example of “cultivating failure,” and I might back down. But not until then. Bravo, Leo Politi.

-- Emily Green

Green's column on sustainable gardening appears here weekly. She also writes on water issues at www.chanceofrain.com.

Photos, from top: At Leo Politi Elementary School, plant identification tags had been made with stakes and cross sections of Christmas tree trunks. Credit: Emily Green. Principal Bradley Rumble helps children in an after-school program research garden questions on the computer. Credit: Emily Green.

Comments

[Jessica Hall]

This is a great project, let's make more of this happen.

[Paul Espinoza]

No question that the editors at The Atlantic were born after WWII or they would not be disparaging these smaller versions of "Victory Gardens".

[Green Teacher]

I was formerly a teacher at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale, CA, and the native garden there DID NOT keep our students down. On the contrary, it created opportunities for students to become confident, competent teachers themselves, leading after school composting and rainwater catchment workshops for community members, raising awareness of and tackling green space inequity in their neighborhoods, providing the subjects of environmental science and biology experiments, and urban planning classes and creating a safe place for students to stay in the after school gardening program. As for test scores? Our students perform solidly every year, with a marked increase this past year when the gardening program expanded... Oh yes, and ECHS is ranked as one of the nations top 100 schools. The Atlantic Monthly should have done its homework.

[Marina Stern]

Regarding the article in "The Atlantic": What else would you expect, from an East-Coast rag, but an article trashing California? Surely you wouldn't expect something called "The Atlantic" to publish news of something good coming from the Pacific region.

[K.E.]

I was completely shocked by the utter ignorance and stupidity of the Atlantic Monthly article. All I can think is it must have been a slow style month.

I also noticed the online version of the article didn't allow reader comments - what's the Atlantic afraid of? Bad sentence structure?

[Elizabeth Gray]

I thought the Atlantic article was all wet. Kids need nature.

[Raffi]

There was no need to even reply to this Atlantic article. The benefits of getting kids outdoors and physically active, teaching them something new, and giving them new reason to love their vegetables are obvious to everyone (well almost everyone!).

[Jeannie]

My goodness, a garden is the best thing any school can have these days. If I knew how to garden, I would be growing vegies right now. I think it is wonderful that we are teaching these children such valuable skills because we may all need to grow our own food one day again.

[Grace Phillips]

Absolutely! Anyone who ignores the science component of these gardens has clearly never set foot in one, or spoken to a teacher about what they plan to do in one. Or examined the numerous, well-rounded, multi-disciplinary curricula that have been developed around these spaces. The writer of the Atlantic piece clearly is holding on to some stereotypes about Latinos; perhaps that writer should question why they leap so quickly to the vision of migrant laborers instead of thinking of the next generation of biochemists and soil scientists.

[Friend]

I would think the ability to grow your own healthy food would be a major priority for our future generations.

If ADM and Monsanto succeed they will have a huge control over our seeds thus food.

I will retire soon to the midwest with a small farm, 30 fruit and nut trees, a bee hive and a huge garden. That is how many of us boomers will have to survive on SS and a pension.

[karin bugge]

Thank god for the Atlantic. Now we can blame bad test scores and racism on fingerling potatoes and French breakfast radishes.

[Charles Dews]

Thank you, Emily Green!

Who do you think is behind the systematic denigration of any sort of growing food organically effort? I am willing to bet the chemical companies, the out-sized so-called farmers, and a bunch of oily types, plus their bought-and-paid-for media--the in-crowd--are in it up to their lily white necks.
School gardens are not the locus of much stoop farming. They are mostly sit around and giggle or gossip while you dig sorts of places; sometimes kids kneel right on the (holy) ground. Stoop farming is the method enforced on people by agribusiness play food moguls such as Archer-Daniels-Midland and, well, you know who you are.
Alice Waters is a planetary hero, not just an American one (can´t we get beyond the "We´re Number One!" baloney and think in Earth terms?) And she is doing the Great Work and sharing it with schools, places in which if a bit of gardening gets done every now and then, it is a lot healthier and more engaging than what usually passes for learning in the modern nation state, which is basically propaganda from whomever happens to be in power at the time.
And in this age of massive need, a garden could not be more useful. I suggest calling them, this time around, Victory Over Capitalism gardens. I guess Michelle Obama might cringe at that one, seeing´s how her husband is about blowing up people and animals, advocating even more poisoning of the planet with nuclear waste, and continuing to plunder the land and the sea for the profit of oil companies, bankers, and their puppet politicians--a hopeless case.

[hydroponics]

Well, plants were really good no matter what.They really give a good purpose.Home plants were really a nice topic to discuss.