NYBG Certificate Alum: Planting Her Knowledge

Posted in Adult Education on April 22 2014, by Plant Talk

Some people are born to garden. Some people are born to teach. And some people have a knack for both.

Marlene Lyons, a 2012 Gardening Certificate graduate, is a gardening educator for kindergarten through fifth grades at Western Connecticut Academy of International Studies, a magnet school in Danbury. Her students actively tend their school garden and are involved in planting, pruning, harvesting and composting. Lyons encounters teachable moments regularly.

“The kids enjoy having their hands in the soil,” she said. “Initially, many of the kids will treat the garden soil like sand on a beach, smoothing it and patting it down.”

She explains to her class that soil actually does its best work, and plants like it better, when it’s not packed down tightly.

Then, there’s addressing the reactions to the creepy-crawlies in the garden’s soil.

“It’s the school’s philosophy that the kids should at least try everything once,” she said. “The bigger issue is to keep the kids’ attention when they find a pill bug, beetle, spider, or worm, or any other living thing in the soil.”

The school’s garden not only gives students hands-on lessons about nature and where food comes from, but it also supports the Danbury community. Parents who volunteer to tend the garden in the summer are invited to take home some produce for themselves; any remaining food goes to a local homeless shelter.

And the garden is mostly sustainable. After harvesting and freezing herbs grown by the fourth-graders, students sold them to the school staff as a fundraiser for the entire garden program.

Lyons imparts her vast gardening knowledge to her students because she is passionate about gardening. She raised her family with a garden, and now her adult children have home gardens of their own. She taught at the university level after earning a Ph.D. in socio-medical sciences from Columbia University. After she retired, she enrolled in the Master Gardening Program at the University of Connecticut Cooperative Extension System, graduating in 2010. From there, she thought she should take advantage of the education available at The New York Botanical Garden, so she signed up for the Gardening Certificate program. Now, she’s working on a Horticulture Certificate with a specialization in plant propagation.

Lyons wants her students to get more out of her gardening classes than just a grade on a report card. She expects it to be a foray into the scientific and technical worlds of botany, horticulture, and ecology.

“The most important take-away is our responsibility to the environment and our dependence on the entire ecosystem,” she said. “The point is made that plants can survive without us; we cannot survive without plants.”