Among our projects at Kimball Elementary School, in Southeast DC, was the creation of a forest understory garden designed to introduce students to the herbs (nonwoody plants) and shrubs typical of local forests. (June 2005)

Volunteer Perley Cooper and a young assistant practice thinking like a fern. Nearly all of the plants in the garden come from our Wild Plant Nursery. (June 2005)

Jeanette Stewart and her apprentice planters install a hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana) in the garden. Jeanette is President of Lands and Waters, a nonprofit that specializes in developing elementary-level environmental curricula—and landscaping projects to match. Jeanette is our principal school-greening partner and a major player at Kimball, where she has worked for several years. (June 2005)

We want as many children as possible to participate in our schoolyard planting—even if they have to take turns, as here. In the background, Jeanette helps organize the planting queue. In the foreground, Earth Sangha board member Margaret Garigan gets some help installing a hazelnut (Corylus americana). (June 2005)

The planting queue can be a lively place. Here students are putting in a variety of native herbs. (November 2005)

A garden is never really finished! There have been some casualties among the first-year plants but most have done well. Here, volunteers install another planting. (September 2006)

Yet more planting and weeding, beneath the boughs of a schoolyard flowering cherry. (April 2007)

We ventured indoors to remodel Kimball’s library. This is the “before” picture. Note the inefficient use of the floor space and the high shelving, which is inaccessible to small children. (November 2005)

The first step was to clear the room. (February 2006)

We painted, using nontoxic, environmentally benign paint. (March 2006)

We laid new carpet, made from recycled—and recyclable—materials, and we installed kid-friendly bookshelves donated by the Toyota Foundation. (June 2006)

We bought new furniture, all of which was as environmentally benign as our budget would permit. (June 2006)

The most expensive item was a new librarian’s desk. (September 2006)

Earth Sangha board member Gail Weigl has donated many hours of reading time to the new library. (April 2007)

In collaboration with Jeanette, we created a vegetable garden behind the Kimball building. We trucked in fresh soil and installed it over weed mat, to avoid any contamination problems. Earth Sangha President Chris Bright built the garden wall, thereby dispelling the widespread suspicion that he is incapable of spending more than an hour away from his desk. (April 2006)

Vegetable gardeners at work! (April 2006)

During the planting season, the garden is a very busy place. (April 2006)

Sometimes there seem to be more supervisors on hand than workers. (And, no, this is not intended as workplace training.) (April 2006)

We are also developing a large native pollinator garden at Kimball. The garden will include native plants that attract butterflies, moths, native bees, and other nonpest insects, to give students an opportunity to learn about pollination. Here, volunteers break ground on the garden. (September 2006)

Deep enough? Jeanette is being called into a meeting. (October 2006)

The pollinator garden is a huge space—too big to be planted all at once. (The stakes mark installed plants.) A great deal remains to be done in this garden, and at Kimball in general. (April 2007)

The Daniels Run Elementary and Middle School, in Fairfax City, is home to Jeanette’s most extensive program. Here, she arranges plants from our nursery, for a planting at the far end of the schoolyard, along Daniels Run, a stream that has been badly degraded by stormwater runoff. (October 2005)

Earth Sangha Executive Director Lisa Bright helps students install a swamp chestnut oak (Quercus michauxii) sapling. (November 2005)

These little stone circles set off the seedlings from their surroundings, reducing the risk of inadvertent damage. (November 2005)

The stream buffer planting takes shape. (November 2005)

A little black gum (Nyssa sylvatica) seedling in the stream buffer planting. (November 2005)

A view of the back of the school, taken from near the stream. At the request of Lands and Waters, the Sangha organized this large planting along the school playing fields. Here, plants are being set out. (October 2006)

Chris Bright, the Sangha’s President, and a student volunteer install a sycamore (Platanus occidentalis). (October 2006)

In plantings with large numbers of volunteers, as here, it’s important to accommodate different levels of involvement—otherwise confusion sets in. Seasoned gardeners should be invited to supervise less experienced planters. People who would rather not get their hands dirty can count plants and tools, circulate sign-up sheets, and organize lunch. People just looking for a little constructive exercise can move mulch and rake it out. (October 2006)

Eventually, this planting will return a little forest to the school grounds. Such plantings reduce carbon emissions from mowing, ease the pressure on streams from stormwater runoff, and create a little additional wildlife habitat—for both wild plants and animals. They can also function as living classrooms, where students can develop more meaningful connections with the natural world. (October 2006)

Thanks to a tremendous amount of hard work, on the part of Jeanette and all the Lands and Waters people, the plantings have prospered. This and the following three photos show views of the grounds in September 2009, three to four years after most of the plantings went in. Here you can see a little dryland planting near the school parking lot. (September 2009)

This meadow and tree planting is also doing very well. Compare photos 27-30, earlier in this slide show. The path that you can see here is part of a loop through the principal plantings. (September 2009)

Farther down the path, looking along the area immediately adjoining the stream. It’s very dense in here, as it should be! Compare photos 22-25. (September 2009)

This is part of a planting on the other side of the stream. It was installed in 2006, at the same time as the plantings in the previous three slides. The area in the background is a school playing field, which is why this space is still entirely in turf. Of course the turf won’t buffer the stream very much, but the canopy will still be an important asset to the property. (September 2009)

At Franklin Middle School in Chantilly, Virginia, as part of our stream buffer restoration program, we broke ground on a stretch of turf that borders a tributary to Flatlick Branch. This was a tough site. The soil was highly compacted and full of rocks. With a huge planting event in the works, we figured we’d make it easier for our volunteers and dig the holes for the trees ahead of time. After pounding in wood stakes for the tree tubes, Nikki and Valerie check the entire site. (October 2008)

How compacted was that soil? The answer: Volunteer Matt Craig (at left) and our Nursery Manager Philip Latasa needed this gas-powered two-man auger to break into it. (October 2008)

Over an entire weekend, about 130 volunteers put in about 440 native trees and shrubs! All of the plants were grown at our own Wild Plant Nursery. Most of these volunteers were students from Lake Braddock Secondary School’s Environmental Science program. (October 2008)

Chris Bright (at right, in the foreground) shows volunteers how to remove a tree from its pot. As the planting continues, some volunteers run back and forth from the creek to water the seedlings from buckets. On a site like this, where there is no shade (at least not yet), it is vital that these freshly planted seedlings get a good soaking. (October 2008).

The last step in planting is to affix a bird net to each tree tube. The nets prevent birds from attempting to nest in the tube, an adventure that is usually fatal for both bird and seedling. (October 2008)

A freshly planted, mulched, deer-protected, and bird-netted forest in the making! (October 2008)

Two years after that planting, success is evident! As you can see, the mowing has ceased in the planting area, and the taller grass is soaking up more stormwater. And the trees are beginning to emerge from their tree tubes. The survival rate at this point was better than we expected, given the poor soil and the fact that the seedlings were in full light. (September 2010)

Volunteers from the local branch of the accounting firm PBGH braved the sun and heat to enrich the Franklin planting with some additional native trees, shrubs, and herbs. They put in new stock to replace any dead seedlings that they found, and they added some additional diversity by planting herbaceous (nonwoody) species in between the trees. (September 2010)

This time, the creek was too low for us to draw water for the seedlings―a real problem, given the drought that we were going through at the time. The volunteers started watering with their own drinking water, but luckily we got permission from the school staff to use an outdoor faucet to fill up those water jugs. (September 2010)

The Howard Gardner School, in Alexandria, Virginia, presented a very different opportunity: a kind of wetland planting, in and around a recently excavated stormwater pond just behind the school. On our planting day, it was full of water from the early spring rains. (March 2011)

In the water itself, the students dug into the muck and put in some “emergents”―species that root underwater but that send their growth above the water. Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) was one of the emergents planted here. Along the shore, the students put in a variety of moisture-loving shrubs and herbs (nonwoody plants). As with our other plantings, the planting stock came from our own Wild Plant Nursery. (March 2011)

After planting, the students sowed native, local-ecotype grass seed on the slope above the pond, to help stabilize the soil and improve the habitat value of the planting. (March 2011)