Arlene Marturano
For over 20 years, Arlene Marturano, has entertained and educated The Columbia Star readers by sharing her lifelong love of gardening in her column, “Stopping to Smell the Flowers.” Marturano has now published a book, Growing Up Gardening: Gateways to Gardening with Children, a treasure trove of ideas, examples, and guidance on how to create educational opportunities for children in the outdoors.
Marturano has spent her career in education. She earned her undergraduate degree, MA, and PhD from the University of Illinois and spent her career contributing to the lives of children, educators, and schools in South Carolina. Her passion is to open the minds of educators to the benefits of incorporating outdoor educational opportunities in school teaching and curriculum.
She begins Growing Up Gardening: Gateways to Gardening with Children by sharing her early childhood experiences in suburban Chicago, Illinois, while spending time with her grandmother.
She says, “I gardened beside a quiet, patient earth mother…Welcoming wildlife came naturally to her. Spiders, birds, toads, and frogs consumed garden peas. Tools like the hoe, weeder, and hand controlled weeds. Flowering trees and shrubs—crabapple, peach, mulberry, mock orange, snowberry, viburnum, althea, vitex and currant—framed the explosions of color, scent and taste she created.”
Marturano never left her childhood love. One of her early contributions in South Carolina occurred when she was assigned to teach a group of students in Gadsden who needed help with their reading skills. Instead of using the traditional textbook approaches, Marturano decided to teach the children by “Reading the Environment,” which became the title for her first book. They spent most of their time outdoors, creating a garden and learning about the outdoors. Their final assignment was to write small books about what they learned. Her students wrote about butterflies, and flowers and vegetables they grew outdoors. These books—the product of their education—were inspired by their time outdoors and demonstrated their development in reading and writing in Marturano’s special class.
Growing Up Gardening: Gateways to Gardening with Children is a thoroughly researched anthology of creative ideas, successful programs in schools nationwide, and tips and tricks for raising children as outdoor learners. This book is for parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, principals, state departments of education, grant writers, nutritionists, and public health practitioners. It is self-published by Marturano and supported by the editing skills of Margaret O’Shea with Rob Barge as graphic designer; Shelly Quattrochi, president of the American Society for Indexing; and Tom Alewine, interior designer of books. With this teamwork in place, Maturano published a resource, almost encyclopedic, of methods and real-life examples to bring outdoor education to the lives of children in school and at home.
Marturano encourages her readers by saying, “As you reminisce about your gardening roots when reading this book, extend a green thumb to a new crop of seedling gardeners by volunteering at a nearby school garden, botanical garden, or community garden.”
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