Hawken School’s seventh-grade students continue taking steps to restore and improve the environmental landscape at one of the 23 Cleveland Cultural Gardens in Rockefeller Park near University Circle.
Unanimous approval by the Cleveland Cultural Federation was given to the students’ Master Conceptual Plan for the American Cultural Garden, which the school has overseen as a delegate since 2008.
The garden was then known as the American Colonial Garden. The idea to adopt it as part of a commitment to active community service and involvement came from former seventh-grade teacher Karen Doyle, now a staff member in the admissions department.
“Karen learned the cultural federation was looking for a delegate to take over the garden and she brought the idea to the seventh-grade team, who decided to go with it,” said Anna Tuttle, a seventh-grade science teacher at the middle school at the Lyndhurst campus.
Since that time, Tuttle said the biggest accomplishment has been the recent creation of the master plan, which was begun by last year’s seventh-graders. It includes benches, walkways, trees, and landscaping that will include native plants and an American flag made of seasonal flowers at the garden that sits between Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and East Boulevard.
She said it’s a challenge because anytime a visual change is proposed, a plan has to be presented for approval by the executive board of the CCF, who then must give a recommendation to the city of Cleveland about the change.
Also at the garden will be a grand ellipse that will feature the busts of Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Anna Ochs, a Clevelander who originally founded the American Garden in 1935 with donations of pennies from schoolchildren.
Tuttle said she learned that many busts formerly in that and other gardens were vandalized decades ago and removed, but she said some students did some research to uncover one of theirs.
“Our students did some great detective work to find the bust of Mark Twain in a box in the basement of Public Hall. After that, they had to gain possession of it from the city of Cleveland and restore it before bringing it back to the garden,” said Tuttle, who notes there still are missing busts of Abraham Lincoln, John Hay and Artemas Ward.
Each year, the seventh-graders at Hawken, 67 of them this year, work on the project specifically by joining one of four committees headed by the seventh-grade teachers. The committees are dedicated to community outreach, history, landscape, and event planning and fundraising.
“The committees offer a diverse opportunity as they tap into the different interests of the students,” said Tuttle, who oversees the community committee with Middle School Director Matt Young.
Strides have also been made in providing water access for the garden. In March, students Andrew Gerace, David Kim and Anna Shaulis, along with their faculty advisor, researched the issue and set up a meeting with the Cleveland Water Commission to discuss that need. It resulted in a commitment of partnership with the Federation from Interim Water Commissioner Alex Margevicius and his staff.
It is now their hope that a fully functional water flush box, giving them access to tap into the water supply, will be opened before summer.
“We’ve been working on gaining water access for years,” said Sheila Murphy Crawford, president of the CCF, “and are so thankful for the assistance of Hawken’s persuasive students.”
Besides using the garden for curriculum, the students engage in various events there each year, including a scavenger hunt in the fall and community picnic, currently scheduled for May 24, in the spring. The latter is open to all, especially students from Michael R. White Elementary School, the nearest school to the garden and whose students collaborate with Hawken’s.
Grant proposals and fundraising are slated for the next school year. Tuttle estimates at least $10,000 is needed to make the master plan a reality.
The master plan for the garden was drawn by Dorer Associates landscape architects and can be seen, along with the history of the garden, at http://bit.ly/Z6gmav.
See more Lyndhurst news at cleveland.com/south-euclid-lyndhurst.
