Students Sow Seeds, Reap Confidence

Gwen Quinn recently planted a salad.

She marked off a plot with stakes and twine. She carved grooves in dirt. She sprinkled seeds into the grooves. With the flat of her palm, she spread a smooth blanket of dirt over the seeds.

When she was done, the lanky 18-year-old stood over her handiwork and beamed. The job was hard for her. In Gwen’s life, achievements often don’t come easily.

Gwen planted her seeds in the Harvest Garden, tucked away in a private corner of Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. Most people don’t know about the Harvest Garden because it isn’t for most people. Gwen goes there each week with her class from North Hollywood High School, one of 20 public schools that tend their own plots there.

The student gardeners range in age from 14 to 22. Some have Down syndrome. Some are autistic. Some have disabilities that make movement so difficult they have to be lifted into the garden plots and have other hands guide their own in order to pull a weed or pick a tomato. A couple of the plots are raised to a comfortable height for those in wheelchairs.

In their garden plots, the students plant marigolds, dahlias and zinnias. They plant squash, strawberries and artichokes. They use compost and pull weeds. They harvest their vegetables and flowers -- and their confidence grows too.

Gwen is a loquacious teenager who likes to be busy and smiles a lot. Officially, she is classified as mentally retarded. But that’s a label, said her special education teacher, Erica Marlowe. The Harvest Garden is a label-free sort of place. “Nobody tells them there, ‘You’re stupid’ or ‘You can’t,’ ” she said.

In the garden, the San Gabriel Mountains seem close enough to touch. The plots pop with color. City noises don’t intrude.

But the real beauty of the place, said garden coordinator Shelley Sanneman, is in the way the students move around in it with a feeling of belonging. They rush to dig through the milk crates full of garden gloves and trowels, and to find their name tags, which are always waiting near the gate when they arrive. They wear the tags proudly.

Gwen likes the garden, she said, “because it’s fun.”

“You talk with the other person and you know the other person and it’s fun to help the other person,” she said.

In the shade of a California live oak, students gather to eat snacks. They sit on benches under the wooden roof of a stone-columned pergola to talk gardening. Each visit, each class goes over the basics -- how plants need love, air, water, nutrients and sunlight, and how people need a lot of the same things too.

“I love using the garden as a metaphor for life. A lot of the kids have lives of such hardship,” Sanneman said. “But no garden is perfect. There are always different seasons, something that isn’t growing, something that’s blooming. In the garden, it’s always a new day and a new opportunity to just honor the people who come for who they are.”

Everyone at the garden -- teachers, volunteers, paid staff -- has a Harvest Garden moment. There was the day the boy who barely speaks crowned himself king of the compost and had everyone following his lead. There was the walk through the fruit trees in the orchard one crisp autumn day, when another boy made the connection between the leaves falling off the trees and the season called fall.

There was Gwen, planting a salad, and what came after.

When Gwen planted her seeds -- for spicy salad greens -- Bill Lee, a Harvest Garden volunteer, was by her side. Even though it wasn’t so easy for him, he knelt next to her, gently guiding, smiling, encouraging. Lee, 66, is a retired city park supervisor. He’s gardened all his life. He planted the cherry trees at Lake Balboa, he said.

He told Gwen to start by pushing stakes into the dirt to form a square. When she hesitated, he used a finger to sketch the shape in the air.

When her hands had trouble twisting twine around the stakes, Lee told her to take her time, that there was no hurry. When she dumped seeds out of the packet into a clump, his thick, friendly voice cautioned, “Go slow, go slow.” If she sifted seeds through her fingers, he said, they’d scatter more evenly and the salad would grow better.

Planting within a marked-off plot was important, he explained to her: “We’ll know the seeds are in this area.”

Gwen ran off moments after her seeds were planted. She hurried to her classmates, who were also learning to plant seeds. She needed to tell them about the stakes, about scattering seeds, about covering them. She needed to teach them.

“C’mon, George. You got it, George,” she called out to Jorge Arguello, 16, as he tried his hand at twisting twine around stakes.

Lee watched and grinned.

He said he knew what it was like to be labeled, to have people staring and making assumptions.

“I was born with cerebral palsy. So I understand their fight,” he said. “A lot of them will have a hard time making a living, and this is something that they can do. You don’t know what that means to them. They’re always put down. And maybe they can’t write as good as you, but they can do things ... and I think that while they’re in here, they forget their problems.”