Plant for Pedagogy I

Does your schoolyard look more or less like this?

If so, the school community has not yet tapped into the potential of its outdoor space as a place of learning and wonder. In the fall, your seventh grade class can do much of the legwork to research and design part of the school grounds to be a naturalized ecosystem.  There, students of all grades can observe the interactions between living things and non-living things right in their own schoolyard for years to come. Because why would we learn about soil, trees, pollinators, and the water cycle indoors?)

More about the particulars of this seventh grade project at the Seventh Grade Science Field Trips at School entry on this website.

The following two recommendations towards a naturalized area in the schoolyard are simple and cheap.  

1. In the spring, put down a thick layer of wood chip mulch on a selected area (maybe an area that is underutilized or often wet), enough mulch to smother the grass underneath; that is, 6-8 inches of mulch.  
2. Then in the following fall, plant tough shrubs and trees in that mulched spot.  

But the seventh graders can get a head start 

and do this second step first.  

They can plant the initial shrubs in the selected area's grass and mulch around them next spring.

My choice for the initial planting is some native shrub roses.  They are a tough plant. They have thorns to keep curious hands from handling them. Shrub roses are a pioneer species, meaning that they are one of the plant species that naturally show up first to populate a previously barren or disrupted field. 

In the Great Lakes region where I am, two appropriate choices are Rosa carolina (pasture rose) and Rosa blanda (meadow rose, or prairie rose, or Hudson's Bay rose, or arctic rose).  Both of them have single pink flowers. The former is smaller (3 by 3 feet), thornier and disease-susceptible, while the latter is similar in width but taller (5-7 feet). The downside to Rosa blanda is that, once established, it spreads by growing a lot of suckers. Good thing that Rosa blanda also has fewer thorns because pruning will be needed at least annually.

A third nice choice is Rosa segitera (climbing prairie rose).  It will make good use of space along a chain link fence.

For a wet area, consider Rosa palustris (swamp rose) because it can handle wet feet as the common name suggests.

If you hike in open forests regularly, you may have seen the prettiest wild rose of them all: Rosa multiflora.  Don't plant that one! In eastern North America, Rosa multiflora is an invasive species. It was originally introduced from Asia as a soil conservation measure, as a natural hedge to border grazing land, and to attract wildlife. It is readily distinguished from American native roses by its large clusters of white flowers, while the North American species have only one or a few pink ones on a branch.

Once established, your roses will look great with native bunch grasses like Shenandoah switch grass (Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’) and native purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) planted in front of them to hide the less-attractive lower stems.*

All these roses provide food and shelter for birds, bees** and butterflies, and will go a long way to providing a purposeful place of exploration, observation and study for all classes in the school.

 

* Good idea from Fafard.com 

**A school should be concerned about bee sting allergies of course.  According to www.anaphylaxis.org.uk, by far most reactions are to stings from yellowjacket wasps, hornets, and honey bees. All those have black and yellow coloring. 

• Wasps are most aggressive. A nest of them at a school needs to be dealt with. 
• Hornets buzz more loudly as wasps and their stings are more painful, but they are not as aggressive.  
• Honey bees sting mainly when they feel threatened. 

There are about 4000 additional species of native bees in North America. They are all ground nesting, solitary (no hives) and, most reassuringly of all, stingless!  So don't neglect to plant pollinator-friendly plants;  most of the bees you will attract that way are not the stinging kind.