The Learning Garden

Kids grow, body and mind, with time spent in a garden, in nature, in the great outdoors.
words + photos Cedric Rose

I don’t mean to brag, but my toddler eats kale like a dinosaur. Without breaking his tiny, monster stride, he’ll break a big leaf of kale right off the plant and munch it on the go. You’re probably thinking: Are you nuts? You can’t just let a toddler eat plants right out of the garden. They can’t know what’s safe. You’re setting a dangerous precedent.

Which is a thought I’ve frequently had while prying unknown plant matter from his mouth or wiping dirt from his lips. But kids learn incredibly fast. And there’s a flip side to Sidney popping berries and kale in his mouth: This is when it all happens, when his tiny brain is taking shape, deciding what to love, establishing habits, learning the languages of people and the natural world. And there’s another precedent his mother and I are hoping to set: that his zeal for vegetables fresh from the soil will grow into life-long habit. Also, all that dirt has got to be good for his immune system, right?

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This is when it all happens, when his tiny brain is taking shape, deciding what to love, establishing habits, learning the languages of people and the natural world.

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It’s no surprise that thousands of studies show the benefits to kids of time spent in natural spaces and gardens. Kids with access to gardens show improved mental, physical, and immune-system health, better language and social skills, better academic performance, more of an inclination to eat fruits and vegetables, lower body mass index—the list goes on and on.

And while such experiences are great for kids, the love of living things that we learn in gardens and natural spaces—biophilia— is essential in an increasingly urbanized world facing multiple man-made environmental crises. In short, we’re not going to win the fights for environmental health and food security, and slow down climate change and mass extinction, without caring about living things. Without empathy. You can’t love what you don’t know.

Reconnecting Kids & Nature
Empathy is at the heart of Dr. Maria Montessori’s essay “Nature in Education” from her 1948 book, The Discovery of the Child. In it, the pioneering educator frames our modern predicament as “estranged from nature,” where the dominant culture teaches us not to love but rather to fear the natural world, that “children are isolated in the artificial life of the city.” Nature is central to Montessori’s aim to educate the whole child. We should allow children to “live naturally,” she writes, “and not simply have a knowledge of nature.”

Montessori’s words were on my mind one cold morning in December when I called up a couple of local educators whose students’ school lives and curriculum benefit from a very special, urban garden.

I first met Bryna Bass in 2015 for a tour of the Rothenberg School Rooftop Garden, an oasis of green perched on the roof of the Over-the-Rhine school for an earlier Edible Ohio Valley article. Formerly the director the garden, Bass is now an intervention specialist leading a self-contained classroom at the school that utilizes the rooftop garden both for lessons and a place to chill out.

I spoke with Bass and Rothenberg School Garden Education Coordinator Ann Troyer about where the garden fits into the life of this public school. Even though Rothenberg isn’t a Montessori school, the garden’s roles reflect Montessori’s theories, including both structured and unstructured experiences.

While many of the lessons they design around the garden are structured and hands-on, Troyer says, “some of the lessons that are the most meaningful for our students are the ones where they can actually explore through scavenger hunts and discover things on their own. That’s where I think a lot of these teachable moments occur. Where the most interest and excitement happens.”

You can see how a garden is a great place for students to learn STEM subjects—for example, the class in which they grow a tower garden from which, at the end of six weeks, they get to make and eat a salad. But Troyer, a former dietician, says it’s also a laboratory for research. A medical science intern from the University of Cincinnati is investigating the impact of growing their own food on students’ developing nutritional choices, a widely observed benefit to school gardens.

But the garden’s informal uses might be just as impactful. “The space itself becomes a great place to take students from the classroom when they need a break,” Bass says. That’s important given the positive impact gardens have on mental health. They’re places where kids can go to relax, or to be loud and cut loose, a perfect foil to the more structured classroom environment and to the technology and screens with which kids’ lives are increasingly saturated.

A study conducted in Scotland found that “experiences in natural environments may directly restore a child’s attention by giving fatigued cognitive processes the opportunity to rest.” A Barcelona-based study suggested that children who spent time in natural spaces had better memories and attention spans. Gardens and nature are also shown to reduce stress—both in children and their caregivers.

Fundamentally, the natural world often rewards sustained and careful observation, and gardens in particular, as opposed to raw natural landscapes, which are an intermediary between natural and human order. They offer kids a sense of safety that wilder spaces might lack. And studies further underscore both socioeconomic disparities and a big opportunity. While access to gardens and greenspace is a “luxury” most often afforded kids from wealthier families with leisure time to spend outdoors, the American Journal of Pediatrics reports that the benefits of time in gardens are greatest for children for whom access to natural spaces and gardens is rare.

Opportunities for All Kids

That it’s good for kids to romp outdoors might seem like common sense. But it’s worth paying attention to—worth allocating and protecting urban green spaces so all kids have the opportunity to play and explore outside.

It was heartening to learn from Bass and Troyer what they’re able to do with one small, urban garden. But I confessed to them that I was still feeling a little cynical. Can gardens really compete with the addictive digital worlds that kids today have at their beck and call? Isn’t it idealistic to believe that simply putting kids in gardens will promote the levels of environmental awareness and related cultural change needed to claw our way back from the brink of environmental collapse? For how many kids does the lesson of the value of living things stick?

Bass and Troyer acknowledge that no, that seed doesn’t fully take root in every kid. But, Bass says, at Rothenberg alone, “350 kiddos get to experience the garden at that school. A handful kind of take it in and run with it. And that’s a handful that didn’t have it before.”

And that’s where it starts: with a few individuals, with interest and excitement sparked in one person from another, passed from a parent or teacher to a young person. That can happen, Troyer says, “whether you’re starting sweet potato slips, making seed balls, or finding strawberries,” she says. “And if the teacher’s excited, it’s hard not to encourage the children to experience that same joy. I think the best experience to get kids started is pulling a carrot or a radish, or picking a pea,” she says. “To go back to Dr. Maria Montessori, that reaping instills a desire to sow and plant, a curiosity to see what happens.”

“There is a saying in education,” Bass says. “You’re always modeling. So when Ann shows that excitement, that’s really important. And if you can reach just one child, right?”

Nurturing Bodies & Minds

So gardens are places for us to reconnect, to tap into the universal commons of nature. They’re places to fertilize our interior lives, our imaginations.

Recently at our house, a macrame plant hanger has become, in Sidney’s malleable mind, the Kraken, swooping around corners to eat us. In our garden, he mounds and smooths soil with scale-model construction equipment, and builds these Andy Goldsworthy-esque sculptures — most notably a massive “beaver lodge” (we don’t actually have beavers, but this impressive ziggurat of sticks doubles as a great pollinator habitat).

A child in a garden is an essential atavism. Ignore the plastic shovels and slides, the Tonka toys and fairy houses, and it’s a window back to a collective past where hominids figured out the living world quite literally from the ground up. That experience is encoded in our genome, the way human embryos briefly sport gills and tails. For most of human history, people grew up close to nature, grew up alongside agricultural work. Only in relatively recent times have we cut ourselves off from the natural world—to our detriment and the environment’s. In every garden, that connection awaits, keeping alive the knowledge and the empathy needed to survive, both as individuals and as a species.n