Seventh Grade Revives Cultural Garden

On Friday, May 15, current seventh grade students ventured one final time to the Rockefeller Park area of University Circle to celebrate their year-long project – the beginnings of the renovation of the American Cultural Garden. With the aid of Radiah Douglas, community organizer for Famicos Foundation, students distributed flyers about the project to invite UC neighbors, family members and community members to witness their progress, discuss their plans, and join them for a garden barbecue lunch. Students spent Friday morning getting their hands dirty, planting colorful annuals and adding finishes touches to make the garden clean and beautiful for the year-end event.

The seed for this project was planted over a year ago when humanities teacher Karen Doyle came across an article in The Plain Dealer about the grossly neglected garden in Rockefeller Park, which had been started in the 1930s by a group of school children. Karen immediately saw possibility – possibility for experiential learning, service learning, and interdisciplinary curricular study – and acted on it. Why not put the garden back into the hands of school children? Karen shared her idea with receptive colleagues, and before long the Hawken seventh graders became the official sponsors of the American Colonial Garden, under the guidance of Karen and science teacher Matthew Young.

The renovation project itself will take 3-5 years and involves landscape design (they have hired a firm to help them carry out the plans) and the writing of grants, with a goal of raising $250,000. Because students are doing all of the work, the project is very time consuming, but the rewards and learning opportunities make the hours and effort worthwhile. This year the seventh graders mapped the garden, identified all plants and trees, did primary source research on the history of the garden, learned about the original statuary (including a bust of Mark Twain which had been missing but was recently discovered in a storage closet at the Convention Center - and which in time will return to its garden home), worked with landscape architects, cleaned up the garden, and planted. To ensure that the students’ vision for the garden parallels the master plan for Rockefeller Park, students are working closely with Parkworks, the group overseeing the park vicinity. Students also worked on researching and writing grants to request funding for landscape elements like walkways and other architectural design features, statuary, trees, shrubs, and flowers.

Once the formal grant proposals are completed, they will be sent to the Cultural Garden Federation for approval. Work in progress will be passed on to the upcoming seventh grade class, who will continue the good work and progress initiated by this year’s seventh graders, who were honored and proud to have the president of the Cultural Gardens Federation Paul Burek join them for their celebration. We look forward to more garden news as the baton gets passed on to the Class of 2015!