Brackett students listen to Green Team Co-Chair Gillian Wright-Cassone explain how to put seedlings into the ground on planting day for Brackett’s new native plant learning garden.
Under blue skies and bright sunshine, students from Brackett Elementary School took turns last week crouching down in a stretch of dirt beside the playground. With some wearing garden gloves and others using bare hands, they picked up dozens of small plants, tenderly breaking up the root systems to place them in the ground. Parent volunteers from Brackett’s Green Team wove between the clusters of kids, offering guidance and advice, dousing their careful work with gentle showers from a watering can.
It was planting day for Brackett’s new native plant learning garden, a momentous step in a project more than a year in the making and made possible by a $4,000 AEF Innovations Grant awarded last spring. Framed by two wooden arbors and a series of stepping stones and logs, the new garden is filled with a wide variety of native straight species — no cultivars — including ferns, blue stem goldenrods, blue wood asters, foxglove, trumpet honeysuckle, wild strawberries, columbine and bluets, many of them sown from seed by the second graders in milk jugs over this past winter.
Organizers, including parent volunteers from the school’s Green Team and members of the Mystic River Water Association, Mystic Pollinator Pathways Group, Arlington MA Invasives and the Arlington Sustainability Coordinator, hope the garden will serve as an outdoor classroom space for Brackett students, providing them with hands-on learning experiences in the workings of a healthy native plant ecosystem.
“It ties in beautifully with all the new ELA curriculum,” said Gillian Wright-Cassone, co-chair of the Brackett Green Team, which has spearheaded the project, and mom to two Brackett kindergartners and a fourth grader. “Kindergartners study trees, first graders study birds, and a lot of these species attract birds, for example bull finches love eating the heads of coreopsis! Second grade studies pollinators, so we are planting a ton of milkweed for monarchs. Third graders study water conservation, and we hope to also build a water catch basin system.”
Brackett Green Team Co-Chair Gillian Wright-Cassone and volunteer Michelle Lewis prepare to welcome dozens of students on planting day for Brackett’s new native plant learning garden.
The garden is planted densely, Wright-Cassone said, to make the plants more visible for the kids and less attractive to bunnies and weeds. Organizers focused on species with spring, early summer and fall blooms, so that the garden would be most vibrant and colorful during the times of the year when students are present. Using native species should also help the garden to be self-sustaining, requiring less upkeep and maintenance going forward.
Wright-Cassone hopes the garden will provide enjoyment and educational opportunities for students for years to come. She and other organizers say they are grateful for AEF’s support of the project. And for the kids helping out on planting day, the excitement is clearly well on its way to taking root.
