The Garden the Children Designed
There is a courtyard at the primary campus. A few years ago the older students were asked what should happen to it, and then — this is the unusual part — they were allowed to decide.
They planned the layout. They researched which seeds to plant and when. They organised a going-out to buy what they needed. They planted it. Then they waited, and watched, and looked after it.
Why not just plant a garden for them
It would have been faster. It is always faster.
Montessori’s argument, and it holds up, is that a child who is handed a finished garden learns that gardens appear. A child who plans one learns about sunlight and drainage and germination times, about the difference between what a seed packet promises and what a courtyard delivers, and about the fact that if nobody waters it in the holidays it dies.
The garden is not the output. The planning is the output. The garden is the feedback.
This is why our classrooms treat the outdoors as an extension of the prepared environment rather than as a break from it. A teacher’s note from the preschool campus puts it plainly: the garden is “a space where children can apply the knowledge and skills they acquire indoors to the real world.”
The holiday surprise
The same idea produces a different scene at the preschool.
One year a class spent the last weeks of term planting seeds, watering them, and watching not very much happen. Then they went away for the summer holidays.
They came back to find the garden had turned into an edible environment.
They planted all the seeds before the holidays, watered and watched. They were so excited to see the fruits of their labour when they returned.
Montessori education insists on real materials and real consequences — children should see the benefit of their own work. It is difficult to think of a cleaner demonstration than walking back into a classroom after six weeks away and discovering that the thing you did in November has produced food in February.
The class then harvested it, which is how a two-year-old ends up understanding paddock to plate without anyone using the phrase.
What the garden feeds
Nothing in these gardens is decorative.
A harvest of potatoes one year produced what may be the best line in the entire newsletter archive, from a child who had just eaten one: “I can always, always eat potatoes!” They had been picked fresh from the soil, boiled, and served with butter, salt and pepper.
Eggs come from the school chickens. Produce from the garden has gone into mini quiches served to grandparents on a visiting morning. Vegetable scraps are chopped up and fed to the worm farm — the children learn very quickly which foods the worms will take and why the pieces have to be small, because worms have no teeth.
The worm farm produces liquid fertiliser, which goes back onto the garden, which grows the vegetables, which produce the scraps.
Children who run that loop for a year do not need to be taught about composting. They have been doing it.
Where it starts
At the beginning of one school year, a preschool class began with a working bee: everyone out in the vegetable garden, tackling the weeds, getting it ready for planting.
That is a real job with a real outcome and a visible finish line, which is precisely the kind of work a young child wants. It is also, in Montessori terms, practical life — the care of the environment — and it is where a great deal of concentration, coordination and independence quietly gets built.
Read about our programs, or book a tour and go and look at the courtyard.