Ronan, Montana is nestled at the base of the Rocky Mountains and at the heart of the Flathead Reservation. Home to roughly 2,000 people, which include the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). The Ronan High School (RHS) Native Plant…
The urban campus of American University in Washington, DC is known for its green spaces. Its grounds serve as an arboretum, caring for nearly 400 different species and varieties of woody plants. During this Spring’s Campus Beautification Day, a new…
Stories from the Students of Campbell Elementary SchoolAt Campbell Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, our students are fortunate to have wonderful outdoor spaces which serve as places to to extend their lessons and provide a natural…
Ithaca Children's Garden (ICG) is driven by a mission to inspire the next generation of environmental stewards, with a commitment to equity and inclusive access to quality green spaces.
Found in beautiful Ithaca, NY, ICG offers an award-winning…
Note: This story contains reference to school and gun violence. As the principal and I watched the heavy machinery level the last of the dilapidated portable classrooms, an idea flitted across my mind. On a whim, I asked if a portion of the land…
The peacock is the iconic symbol of this 127-acre garden. They serve as unofficial greeters whenever one enters. Lucky Baldwin, the owner before it became a county property, imported three pairs from China around 1910. Today the population is around…
Opened in 2007, this “People’s Garden” invites visitors of all ages and abilities to create and to explore meaningful connections to plants and nature at their own pace. The journey began in 1991 when a small group of midcoast Maine residents dreamed…
The A+ Garden Centre is a community-supported and student-operated garden center located at Parkside High School in Salisbury, Maryland. The A+ Garden Centre is the largest high school garden center enterprise in United States. The Parkside…
A wet Saturday morning dawned for the May “Saturdays in the Garden” lecture recently. “The Garden” in the lecture title is Loudoun’s Extension Master Gardener Demonstration Garden at Ida Lee Park and Recreation Center. In this space, our volunteer…
El Jardin del Paraiso, Inc. is a public park, operated by community members and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. El Jardin del Paraiso is available for community events and activities. The goals of El Jardin del Paraiso, Inc. are to promote…
My children were attending the local elementary school, Toomer Elementary in Atlanta, GA. This is a Title I school that has gone through a lot in the last decade or so, but was improving drastically due the community of Kirkwood and a new dynamic…
The Garden Path ~ Green, Growing, and Blooming Project emerged as a tangible remembered connection and, consequently, a pathway to engagement following my mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, thereby, enlarging her narrowing view of her world. She had…
In 2014, students and teachers worked together to create a monarch butterfly garden on the campus of Forsyth School in the city of St. Louis. Fifth grade big friends and junior kindergarten little friends installed 120 milkweed plants, Asclepias…
The Garden Path: Green, Growing, and Blooming Project Journal
Assisted Living Facility #1, Sevierville, TN
The Garden Path ~ Green, Growing, and Blooming Project emerged as a tangible remembered connection and, consequently, a pathway to…
Woodend Sanctuary is a 40 acre property in Chevy Chase, Maryland, bequeathed to and now headquarters of the Audubon Naturalist Society of the Mid-Atlantic States. The mission of the Audubon Naturalist Society is to inspire residents of the greater…
The Taneyhills Library Garden was a bare landscape. With a grant from the Master Gardeners of the Ozarks and donations from supporters of the library, new gardens were established. One of the Master Gardeners and a Library board member helped…
The Poquoson Learning Garden is located at the Poquoson Museum, the former sixteen acre William Freeman Dryden farm in the City of Poquoson, Virginia. The museum campus contains a circa 1900 farm house, agricultural out buildings, frontage along the…
Flowers in my grandmother's garden are some of my first memories as a toddler—and taking walks with my grandfather as he told me the names of trees and bushes—so a home garden community of plants and birds has always been essential to our family. We…
It started as a desire to get kids outside and let them know about two endangered skipper butterfly species and has now blossomed into the current ever-changing butterfly garden and Little Wings on the Prairie festival.
In 2013, a grant from the…
Nestled within the thirty acres of one of the most beautiful zoos sits a small parcel of land dedicated to education, conservation and promotion of gardening at the Santa Barbara Zoo. The idea of an onsite garden had been bounced back and forth among…
This organic garden at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Arlington, Virginia was created as a Girl Scout Silver Award project by Cadette Troop 557. The garden was built over the course of a few years, with the bulk of it constructed in 2012-2013. A…
“We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.” ―Vandana Shiva
If building soil health, growing organically, and sharing fresh food with our neighbors is…
Greenhouse 17 (GH17) is a forty-acre domestic violence emergency shelter and farm that has become a healing oasis to thousands of women and families since 2004. Greenhouse 17 is a Grow Appalachia success story for its innovative therapeutic farm…
Love for good food, love for the Earth we grow it in, and love for the communities we share it with, can only lead to one thing—more love. At Grow Appalachia, that love is initiated in the grants we give out to partner sites, is passed on in the…
In the fall of 2012, a group of environmentally-conscious high school students in Memphis, Tennessee, gathered around an idea. We wanted a vegetable garden to grow in our public high school, White Station, one of the largest schools in the state.…
The Arboretum is located in Sandpoint, Idaho on Lake Pend Oreille. In addition to the beautiful lake, there is a mountain resort for winter skiing. Locals often observe, “we’re almost in Canada,” in an area referred to as the Panhandle. It has…
As a student at New College of Florida in Sarasota, I fell in love with Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. Fellow students and I visited to luxuriate in orchid-filled nooks and get away from campus. When campus was steamy and oppressive, Marie Selby…
The Berwyn Heights Community Garden Planning Committee (Planning Committee) is an outgrowth of the Berwyn Heights Green Team (Green Team) in Berwyn Heights, a town of approximately 3,123 residents in Prince George's County, Maryland. In 2012, the…
We have three Community Gardens in St. Cloud, Florida. Our Girl Scout troop has rented a plot for almost a year now. We have grown organic food for our local food pantry. Our last crop was twenty-five pounds of organic carrots. We have sweet potatoes…
As the eldest grandson of the inventor of the Ross Root Feeder, I set out to take my grandfather's vision to the next level. From 1976 to 1990 I worked at the family company until it was sold. I have stayed closely-tied to green industry.
My…
The garden at Hickory Hill, a historic site in Georgia, grew out of a desire to share the site's agricultural history with kids who visited the site on field trips and came for summer camps. We soon realized that children did not know where their…
Initially, a group of Lafayette Community members came together to form the Local Foods Group under the inspired leadership of local “green” activists. From 2008 through 2011 the group searched Lafayette for an appropriate site to establish a…
In 1912, Dr. Henry Forrest Libby created the Libby Museum in order to house his collection of specimens found in nature. He and his wife stuffed and mounted many of the animals and plants still present in the museum today, making them over 100 years…
North Austin Community Garden is a partnership between the City of Austin and YMCA of Austin. Local artists Lucy Begg and Robert Gay of Thoughtbarn were commissioned by Austin’s Art in Public Places program to design and build the garden. Although…
The Green Thumbs Garden is a contribution to the community effort to enhance downtown Newark, Ohio and its offerings. It is located on property owned by The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art, and Technology. The Green Thumbs Garden is both a…
Following 2013 flood, Clemson architecture students rebuild the South Carolina Botanical Garden. Just more than one year ago, the summer of 2013 saw a flood wipe away most of the South Carolina Botanical Garden's nature trails and bridges. But thanks…
Since she was young, Maria's dream has been to have a place with lots of flowers. Asking herself to make the dream come true she figured out that the solution was to make a garden for herself and others. I had the chance to interview with Maria and…
Sixteen teenagers. Four iPads. Two days. One summer on an urban farm in Washington, D.C. Lots of questions. Every summer Common Good City Farm welcomes a group of local teens as part of their Summer Youth Program. The teens in this employment program…
Chewonki is a non-profit environmental education center in Wiscasset, Maine, with a semester school for high school juniors, an Outdoor Classroom program for visiting school groups, and a summer camp for boys on its 400-acre saltwater peninsula,…
For the past three years, Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum has been leading a collaborative Smithsonian project on Urban Waterways. The project comes out of a desire to explore the various issues facing urban communities and document the…
The Neighborhood Farm Initiative is a non-profit in Washington, D.C. that brings people together to gain skills to grow their own food in our city. Founded in 2008, our founders wanted to make sure that adults had access to garden education in D.C.…
In 2007, the founders of Jones Valley Teaching Farm transformed three acres of vacant downtown property into a budding urban oasis, driven by the singular mission of making our community a healthier place. In no time, the Farm was teeming with…
Las Parcelas, a community garden in the Norris Square neighborhood of Philadelphia, began with brushes and paint, rather than shovels and seeds. Plans for the space began in the 1980s. It was not until a summer day in 1992, however, that a “massive…
In the summer of 1902, the land that would become New York City’s DeWitt Clinton Park, just a few blocks from Central Park, was described as a place so run-down that even “The most vivid imagination could not have conceived a more desolate spot than…
