(IMAGES: top MOBOT Orangery.JJEWELL; MOBOT in spring with sculpture.JJEWELL; Sean, Daria McKelvey, Supervisor - Home Gardening Information & Outreach (Kemper Center) Jeanne Carbone, Supervisor - Therapeutic Horticulture JJEWELL; ShawNatureReserve, by Sundos Schneider)
It’s back to school time – you can tell by the ads on television and radio (yes, I’ve been watching and listening to the Olympics!), and you can tell by the displays at the stores with notebooks and pencils, backpacks and lunch boxes being on prominent display. As you and I know, one of the best classrooms
available to us all is the outdoors – from the wildlands of fields, woods,
and waysides around us, to more formal state and national parks and
monuments, our own gardens, and very specifically our many public
gardens.
Being outdoors is a great classroom and plants are among our
best teachers.
Joining me this week to explore all of this and more is Sean Doherty, a gardener, a plant lover, and a 25-year-career public educator: in the classroom, as a principal, and for six years as a St. Louis School’s district superintendent.
Sean is now the Vice President of Education at the Missouri Botanical Garden in downtown St. Louis. Now in this role for almost two years, Sean works with an astounding team of nearly 40 educators at MOBOT and many more volunteers all focused on engaging and exposing as many people as possible to the science, educational capacity, beauty, and joy of plants and their conservation.
Sean sees his role at the Missouri Botanical as the perfect next growth ring for him and a way to pay forward the many ways plants and this garden specifically have taught him to be an effective educator.
From school groups to mindfulness walks, botanical art, and identification classes to therapeutic horticulture, from seed banking to historic herbarium collections, this botanic garden in St. Louis continues to expand how they and we think about the phenomenal educational capacity and imperative of plants and their conservation.
In this back-to-school season, and always, Sean sees a moral
responsibility in how we integrate nature and plants into all of our learning environments.
"The focus is around building connections between people and plants, and making sure that people feel like the Missouri Botanical Garden is a place where they belong. ...We have a moral responsibility for people to understand and to start developing those connections [between people and plants] so that way they can make some choices or some decisions about their work and their lives that is actually going to have more of a systemic impact.... It’s about how do we get [people] exposed to nature, because ultimately we need to grow stewards of nature and stewards of plants.”
- Sean Doherty, VP of Education, Missouri Botanical Garden, speaking on the importance of educational programming at botanical gardens regionally and globally.
After having been hosted by Sean and his education colleagues there at
the garden for a day this past spring, I am so pleased to welcome him to CP this week.
Enjoy!
You can follow Sean Doherty and all the educators at the MOBOT on line at
and Instagram:
FOR EDUCATORS LOOKING TO FIND ONLINE CURRICULUM:
All images courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden; photographer credits in image titles. All rights reserved.
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JOIN US again next week, when we begin two weeks of Best OF conversations – we kick it off with my own personal need for more flowers in this long hot fiery summer by revisiting our conversation with the UK's very own Shane Connelly and his Thoughtful Alchemy through Sustainable Floral Design. That's right here, next week.
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Thinking out loud this week...
As I mentioned in my conversation with Sean, I had the great pleasure
of visiting the Missouri Botanical Garden earlier this year to address a
sold out audience of guests attending the Garden’s inaugural annual
spring lecture in honor of gardener, longtime garden volunteer, and staff
member in charge of the remarkable Home Demonstration Garden
Center at the Missouri Botanical: June Hutson. The Missouri Botanical
Garden’s home demonstration area is one of the best and most useful in
the country, if you ask me. And it returns us to this theme of lifelong
learning and the incredible lifelong classroom that our gardens are - and
nature as the context for our gardens - no matter how curated they might
be.
I love how Sean says he grew up at the Garden – having started his
relationship with it as a young person whose family returned to the
Garden perennially and then getting one of his earliest jobs there…and
then after a career in the more mainstream public education system
returning to MOBOT for his role as VP of Education.
He saw his lessons from plants as having been integral to what led him to being an effective educator in the classroom, as a principal and then superintendent.
Raise your hand if you grew up in a garden or more specifically were
helped to grow up along your path by plants and gardens? (or grew up
more – who’s kidding who – are we all grown up yet? Not so much – I
have plenty of growing up still to do at 58).
I want to nominate the Gardens of Our World as the Classrooms of the
Year.
Have a public garden that grew you up? Shout them out to me by
email: cultivatingplace@gmail.com, or on this week’s Instagram post
where you can find me at: @cultivating_place – and now on Substack as
well – where I’m experimenting with riffing a little longer in writing off
these Thinking Out Loud sections of the podcast – unpacking and
germinating on some of the lessons or resonating points from each
week’s podcast. Find me over there on Substack at: https://substack.com/@cultivatingplace
Another thing that really struck me in the conversation with
Sean, and in my visit at the Missouri Botanical Garden which I had
not visited since the late 1990s, is the sheer range of ways gardens and
plants grow us.
I want to shout out to the whole education team at the
Missouri Botanical (inlcuding: Jennifer Smith-Simms, Manager - Public Education Programs Jeanne Carbone, Supervisor - Therapeutic Horticulture , Daria McKelvey, Supervisor - Home Gardening Information & Outreach (Kemper Center) and so many others) who hosted me and so proudly took me through conservatories, through the Zimmerman Therapeutic Hort Garden, through adults at risk support programs, through the herbarium and the library, and finally through the thoughtfully curated Journey to Well Being walks and materials. I want to applaud their overall dedication.
All gardeners are educators at some level – I really believe this. We
forget this at our own loss – the greater world’s loss, as well. We embrace it and live into it for the better of us all. Starting with ourselves. I like how Sean put it: to be the most effective educator, he has to remember that he is the leader of learning...
In our gardens, we are the teachers as well as being the leaders of learning.
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