What's growing in Punahou's campus gardens?
The simple answer is "plants" or maybe "vegetables." Experienced first-grade gardeners would be able to specify "oregano" or "tomatoes." But the truth is something more is growing in campus gardens.

For a number of years, various classes have raised gardens. Even without gardens, students have studied about seeds and growing cycles, roots and photosynthesis. Gardening on campus is nothing new.

What is new is the focus on integrating gardening into the core K - 12 curriculum. The garden is an ideal classroom, with applications for learning that reach beyond botany and home economics, into geometry, English, politics, history, mathematics and even global studies. Some classes have a long history of incorporating gardening into their curriculum. For eight years, the Garden to Market program has allowed first-graders to plan, grow and harvest their gardens, then sell the produce in a one-day, student-run market, where students practice math, economics and marketing skills. But the idea of taking gardening to the next level of campus integration is now meeting with new energy.

Last summer, six teachers from Punahou used funds from the C.N. Wodehouse Faculty Benefit Trust to attend The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley. There, they explored the question: What would a curriculum incorporating lessons from the garden look like? It turns out it looks different to different grades, and that's part of its beauty.

To Malia Chong '87 and her sixth-graders, the garden is a chance to explore different foods with all their senses: smelling, seeing, feeling, as well as tasting their newly planted arugula. Becca Kesler's kindergarteners play in the soil, sifting handfuls of earth through sieves with progressively smaller holes, learning intuitively that there's more to dirt than just, well, dirt. They learn how to observe and ask good questions, the basis of scientific inquiry - skills that will serve them well as they grow as learners.

Lessons in any garden should start at the roots, learning about the medium in which plants grow: the soil. Eliza Leineweber '92 Lathrop, Academy English teacher, stresses the importance of understanding this first step to her 11th- and 12th-grade Nature in American Literature students. With her students, Lathrop has created a garden plot behind Griffiths Hall, hoping it will become a community garden for the entire campus. It also serves as a lab for her students and others. Those who work there first learn how to make compost, the pungent pile of teeming green and brown matter that is a remarkable science experiment waiting to be explored. Academy students take the temperature of the compost pile, charting their results and learning the chemistry of decomposition.

The lesson is that good soil yields a good crop. But good soil can also yield good things for the greater community, beyond the plants that are harvested.

Nationally renowned educator Cathy Berger-Kaye defines service learning in part as a teaching method where guided learning is deepened through service to others. Such deepened learning happens daily in the garden, where, among other things, relationships are grown. Lathrop's Academy students work alongside Chong and Laurie Ching's sixth-graders in the rows of corn, basil and sunflowers. The Academy students become mentors and feel an increased sense of responsibility with their young partners. Amazed at the energy of the sixth-graders, an 11th-grader remarked, "They're willing to do and say anything!" That unbridled enthusiasm rubs off on the older students who so often get caught up in the intensity of academic life. They find themselves willing to try things without worrying about "getting it right."

The Garden to Market program has not only been a model of integrating gardening into the classroom, but has also been a successful model of service learning. First-graders learn about and serve various charities during the year, then donate the proceeds of their market to those charities. Other classes have begun to incorporate this pattern into their learning.

Over the course of a year, Rita Cassella's fourth-graders talked and read books about homelessness. Then they made a nutritious soup with herbs and vegetables harvested from their three garden plots. Along with some crusty bread purchased with money that the children had earned doing household chores, the pots of soup were delivered to River of Life Mission in Chinatown, helping to feed the homeless in a community not far from Punahou's campus.

The students in Robin Kelleher's fourth-grade class deepened their understanding of homelessness when they visited a Habitat for Humanity home site during construction. Too young to actually wield hammers, the students still wanted to help. They took their gardening knowledge to the job site, met the residents and helped plant vegetables and herbs.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons of the garden is that nature is, by nature, unpredictable. Weather varies, and harvests can be either wildly bountiful (what will we do with all this zucchini?!) or disappointingly small. The garden project on campus is ever changing, but discovering how to effectively deal with the unexpected is a valuable life lesson in itself. Lathrop puts it aptly when she says, "Change doesn't represent failure. It represents learning." And so our gardens grow.