A School Garden Grows with Teamwork
An inspiring garden story in Cincinnati.
Full disclosure: This article is about a garden the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden made as part of a community project in conjunction with the Cincinnati Reds and its partners. I’ll try to be objective. Even if I’m not, I think you’ll understand what horticulture did for a community, and what such efforts can do for horticulture.
Since 2009, the Reds Community Fund, a nonprofit affiliate of the baseball organization, has worked with other prominent local businesses and nonprofits on a service project called Community Makeover. In this annual event, one community in Greater Cincinnati is provided help improving its ballfields, recreational centers, parks, schools and such. Led by the Fund’s Executive Director, Charley Frank, the planning takes place over the winter, and on a late-July day several hundred volunteers from the partner organizations swoop in and get it all done! Sometimes, they’re almost finished by lunchtime.
The Zoo signed on as a Community Makeover partner early, contributing facilities expertise, muscle and, increasingly, a horticultural component. In 2021, Avondale, the Zoo’s home neighborhood, was selected as the focus. The makeover addressed a number of sites across Avondale, but one location offered a unique opportunity to go big in terms of horticulture.
Just two blocks from the Zoo, Rockdale Academy, a public school serving pre-kindergarten through grade six, faced a two-acre field of nothing but struggling turf. The school’s STEM Coordinator, Chelsea Clark, had been enthusiastically asking the Zoo for a pollinator garden. What they got through the Community Makeover was so much more than that.
In late 2020, Steve Foltz, the Zoo’s Director of Horticulture, visualized a mini botanical garden—basically drawing it out on a bar napkin. Steve’s boss, Mark Fisher, VP of Facilities and Sustainability, a man always dialed to 11 and with a knack for sucking others into his jet trail of enthusiasm, convinced Zoo Administration, Cincinnati Public Schools and the Reds to give Steve free rein.
By spring of 2021, the Zoo’s Architect, Dean Violetta, had converted the napkin to CADD and the plan for the Urban Learning Garden at Rockdale Academy was in motion. The Zoo’s horticulture team began doing some of the prep work, including moving a dozen large-caliper trees that had been destined for the axe because of another construction project at the school.
As July approached, momentum and enthusiasm began to peak. A few groups took a preliminary crack at planting, including Zoo staff, the Zoo’s Board and some local dignitaries. But on July 29, about 300 volunteers showed up and planted the vast majority of more than 12,000 plants (a number that doesn’t include the garden’s thousands of annuals and vegetables). It was quite a sight to see.
At every one of these volunteer days, I have made it a point to find a few minutes to step back and take it all in. I always get emotional watching all the good getting done and the joy it brings to everyone. On the day of the Rockdale installation, I was an emotional wreck. (I am right now, just writing about it!)
The Results
Did the school get its pollinator garden? It did. It got the largest in the region by far. But it also got a secluded sensory garden for children with autism, trialing beds for hundreds of perennials and annuals, raised vegetable beds, an orchard, an amphitheater and three greenhouses, including twin 100-foot Quonsets (also known as high tunnels). The site changed from a barren field to a lush, vibrant garden in just a few months.
Importantly, once the day was done and everyone went home, the Zoo stayed, having committed a full-time horticulturist to it in perpetuity. Carlos VanLeeuwen is the man with that job, tending the garden, working with the school and the community and directing a stream of volunteer groups who help maintain it.
Successful community gardens are not easy. The failures far outnumber the successes. But the Urban Learning Garden combines all the essential components that make up a winning formula: sufficient funding, deep horticultural expertise, a desire for and a commitment to the project by the school and community and the committed support of a long term, solid horticultural partner—in this example, the Zoo, which can also assist with education on conservation and many of the sciences.
Steve Foltz’s vision, scrawled onto a napkin, was a garden that would showcase everything that horticulture has to offer, from ecological services to pure, simple beauty. As a result, almost by default, the garden is colorful and vibrant, and, because of that, it’s accessible to everyone in the community. People love it!
Sure, it provides unique opportunities to teach kids science; yes, it produces loads of fruits and vegetables; indeed, it has drawn flocks of pollinators since day one. But more than anything, here’s what captures hearts: the shade of the taller trees, the winding paths, the pleasing combinations of color and texture provided by a world of beautiful plants—in other words, the experience of a garden.
We all need nature. In the suburban and urban environment, it is horticulture that most often provides a connection to it. The Urban Learning Garden at Rockdale Academy is a tremendous example of horticulture’s unique power to make spaces that provide beauty and abundance, places where we can work, create, think and aspire.
