A Blooming Legacy : Empty Courtyard Yielded Santa Ana High’s Own Secret Garden

While other kids were putting together costumes for Halloween parties, about 50 students toiled on the grounds of Santa Ana High School this weekend.

They weren’t serving a Saturday detention detail. These students asked to come down on a hot Saturday morning to clear weeds, prune rose bushes and plant begonias, snapdragons and poppies.

The gardens at Santa Ana High School have long been a source of pride for students and teachers alike and the biannual planting event once drew new and die-hard gardeners.

It started about 10 years ago with Pat Kubba, a recently retired accounts manager in the student activities office at the school.

“The back of the activities office is all windows and it looks out to this courtyard and it just looked so drab,” said Gabby Gonzalez, a former student and assistant to Kubba.

“All the plants were rather tabby,” said Kubba, a native of Manchester, England. “One of the students at the time worked for a contractor and offered some cement for a small pathway. My friends and I had a few bulbs so we planted them and from there it kind of took off.”

It was a little difficult to get the student body involved at first, Gonzalez explained. “But once they saw it bloom . . . it was awesome,” she said. “The students stopped walking through the garden . . . They stopped throwing trash around and learned to appreciate it more. It brought a lot of smiles to people.”

Kubba volunteered endless hours maintaining the garden, drumming up donations of plants and fertilizer and organizing fall and spring plantings. Under the direction of Peggy Pierson, a social science teacher and Kubba’s fellow gardening enthusiast, the senior class became one of the garden’s main supporters, donating funds each year.

The garden is now a lunchtime privilege, open only to seniors with special passes, and it’s the prime location for campus art shows and other performing arts events.

Alumni often return to check up on the gardens and continue to donate their time, Kubba says. “We’re encouraging the next generation of gardeners here.”

In 1994 the senior class dedicated the garden, naming it the Pat Kubba Garden.

“Now I can never give it up,” Kubba joked at the time. “I have to put it in my will that my daughters must continue to oversee its maintenance.”

Chris Ceballos can be reached at (714) 966-7440.