Planting Petaluma, One Schoolyard at a Time

This week, we're shining a light on Porches Scout @Denise Ward, the gardener, educator, and artist behind some of the most beloved school gardens in Petaluma. Her story starts the way a lot of the best Petaluma stories do, with a parent walking into their kid’s school and never quite walking back out. When her family landed at @La Tercera Elementary School in the late 1990s, Denise found a school garden that had already won grants and built a greenhouse, and she signed up for everything. Four summers at Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s teacher training program turned that volunteering into a calling. What she discovered there became the engine for everything that followed. A school garden is a place where a child who struggles inside a classroom can suddenly be the expert. Math becomes measuring rainfall. Reading becomes following planting instructions on a seed packet. Lunch becomes something the kids grew, harvested, washed, and set on the table themselves. As Denise puts it: “When kids plant seeds, you’d better run!” The energy, the dirt, the questions, the pure delight of it all moves fast and it doesn’t stop. She went on to become Garden Coordinator for Petaluma City Schools, building gardens at @Grant Elementary School, @McKinley School, @McDowell Elementary School, @Valley Vista Elementary School, @Penngrove Elementary School, and @McNear Elementary School. Along the way she grew eight hundred tomatoes in a single season, partnered with NASA on a fifth-grade tomato experiment, and learned heirloom seeds from her friend and mentor Mimi Luebbermann from @Windrush Farm Fiber Arts. BaySci was another program close to her heart in those years. A collaboration between five Bay Area school districts, Petaluma City Schools among them, it paired classroom teachers with three science education partners: the Exploratorium, the Lawrence Hall of Science, and the California Science Project. The whole idea was to train the teachers themselves to lead hands-on science, and Denise loved that the work started with the adults so it could reach every kid. Later, she stepped into art education at @Cinnabar Elementary and Charter School and @The Spring Hill School teaching kids to find self-respect and dignity in what they made. Through every chapter, the same idea holds: approach the whole human. Ask questions. Listen for what comes back. “I want to push forward the possibilities that inspire people to provide for themselves.” That is the line that sits underneath all of it. The gardens were never really about vegetables, and the art rooms were never really about paint. They were about giving children, and the adults around them, a real sense that they could grow something, make something, and feed themselves and each other. All this week, Denise will be sharing memories, musings and helpful tips from her time in the garden. Follow along. 📷 by @Rachel Colla