Fostering Community Spirit with Bulbs

Author: Lisa Duchene

The magic of gardening with kids is that they will always surprise and delight you. A half-dozen 9-year-old Girl Scouts taught me this in November 2007, the first fall of our new Community Children’s Garden in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, as they made the connection between their joy of planting and giving back to their community.

We had received a donation of 75 bulbs and one chilly morning, I laid the bags of bulbs in the grass along a curvy flowerbed that didn’t have much in it besides some mock orange shrubs. I instructed the Scouts to plant the bulbs wherever they wanted in the bed — in a curvy row, in clumps, in combinations — reminding them that this was a children’s garden — their garden.

The girls decided on a curvy line along the bed’s edge and got to work. Their troop leader and I showed them which end was up, and helped them dig holes about six inches deep, and a few inches apart. When they reached the spot where the bed widens, they got creative, asking: “Can we plant a smiley face?” “Absolutely,” I replied, “this is your garden.”The girls used shovel blades to sketch a face in the dirt, then dug a big circle around some yarrow plant “eyes.” Below them we made a smile. The curvy garden with its new daffodil smiley-face was situated near a sidewalk, where passersby could watch as the garden took shape and would see the daffodils smiling back at them the next spring.

As she dug and planted that chilly morning, one of the girls stood straight up and paused. She’d noticed people walking by and peeking in to the garden, and said it was pretty neat to feel like you were doing something in your community. “It makes you feel good, you know?” she said. And then she was back at it, pushing a bulb deep into the earth and tucking it in for the winter ahead, as her troop leader and I exchanged a quick glance of triumph — because in that little moment, through that one little flower bulb, she’d experienced a community connection like never before.

The next April, when the weather had warmed, the Girl Scouts rushed out to see the green shoots breaking the soil in their smiley face garden. Throughout the spring they tracked the daffodils’ progress until the blooms were spent. That summer, for the first time, they grew their own vegetables, discovered they liked tomatoes after all, and used them to make spaghetti sauce they ate on a camping trip. At the end of the summer they donated much of their harvest to the community food bank.

Lisa Duchene is an environmental writer and volunteer coordinator of the Bellefonte Community Children’s Garden in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.