Gardening at Heathwood Hall

Heathwood Hall Episcopal School has a long tradition of environmental stewardship and sustainable use of resources. The campus was built to harmonize with the natural world. Through environmental education, its students learn to live as responsible stewards of the land.

Within the past three years several new gardens serve as laboratories for Todd Beasley’s fifth grade environmental science students. The Native Plant Garden outside Nord Middle School is filled with plants attracting pollinators, beneficial and opportunistic insects, and birds.

Milkweed, Aesclepias turberosa, host plant for the monarch, attracts sapsucking aphids; the latter are preyed upon by assassin bugs. Students are able to observe plant and animal populations and interconnections among the them. Biodiversity is learned as students plant and maintain a wide variety of ground covers, perennials, shrubs and trees in the native garden. The native plant garden is low-maintenance and many of the plants reseed or naturalize to the site.

Raised bed organic garden at the Early Childhood Learning Center A one–year–old butterfly garden stocked with Mexican sage, lantana, gaura, salvia, marigolds, the cigar plant, Cuphea ignea, and the firecracker plant, Dicliptera, has the look of a long established garden due to the rich alluvial soil on site. Beasley’s background in horticulture contributes to the extensive palette of plants chosen for the gardens.

The middle school’s newest garden contains 20 raised beds featuring seasonal herbs and vegetables. Students seeded rows of kohlrabi, radishes, and lettuces, which are now ready for fall harvest.

An attractive greenhouse is used to teach vegetative propagation not just in middle school but in high school as well. The Upper School biology program sponsors a large herb and vegetable plant sale each spring.

Two rabbits supply compost for the Early Childhood Learning Center garden. Beasley is an advocate of gardening with children and has written numerous grants to fund gardens. He dreams of overseeing a K–12 garden program at Heathwood someday. He wants his students to learn how to reduce their carbon footprint.

Through the gardens, students are practicing sustainable living by planting native species that require less water and maintenance, reducing turf on campus and the use of gas–powered tools, growing food on campus for consumption locally, recycling garden waste, and maintaining trees on campus and planting more.

For the past ten years Virginia Moore, head of after school care, has directed a garden for young sprouts. The Early Childhood Learning Center has clusters of raised beds where children ages three–six are growing organic herbs and vegetables: basil, tomatoes, turnips, romaine, leaf lettuce, collards, kale, carrots, and beets. Two class(y) rabbits supply compost for the garden.

Native Plant Garden Plaque Gardening at Heathwood Hall is building lifelong habits and perspectives toward the earth and its resources.
Mimicry and predation demonstrated by the assassin bug on the milkweed covered with aphids.
The turnips planted by three–six year olds are ready to harvest.
Todd Beasley and other teachers use the greenhouse to teach vegetative propagation.
The Butterfly Garden has grown gargantuan in one year.