Native Plant Teaching Gardens: A Collaboration with the Guilford Garden Club

​In partnership since 2005, Friends School of Baltimore and the Guilford Garden Club (GGC) have created a series of Native Plant Teaching Gardens throughout the campus. Conservation and education are at the heart of the project.  The gardens employ Chesapeake Bay Watershed native plants that thrive with minimal care, attract pollinators and other wildlife, and absorb surface water on the school’s sloping campus.

Friends School, founded in 1784, is Baltimore’s oldest school.  The campus is tucked between two Olmsted Brothers designed neighborhoods – Roland Park and Homeland.  Managing storm water runoff has been a constant challenge on the school’s bowl shaped site that acts as a funnel for rain and snowmelt into the Stony Run, a creek on its western border channeling water that ultimately flows into the Chesapeake Bay.   Over the past 11 years, GGC has worked with students, faculty and the extended community, providing garden plans and planting supervision.  The groups have labored side-by-side, planting over 10,000 trees, shrubs, perennials, ferns and grasses in gardens designed to capture and control the flow of water.

In 2009, Stony Run Meeting joined the gardening efforts on campus.  GGC members worked with the Upper School Sustainability Club and Stony Run Meeting members to design and build the Friends Community Garden. In this vegetable garden, organic gardening practices yield harvests shared with the CARES food pantry. In 2015 and 2016, rain gardens and conservation landscaping was installed on Meeting property.

As the gardens grow on campus, faculty members increasingly find ways to incorporate them into the curriculum.  Art, science, and language arts classes as well as many clubs enjoy using resources right outside their door.  Families have inquired about and are using native plants in their home gardens and planting vegetable patches; many have purchased plants at Scarlet and Gray Day (Homecoming) Native Plant Sales. Faculty and parents from neighboring schools and members of nearby churches have toured the campus, using it as a model as they make plans for their own native plant and vegetable gardens.

More work lies ahead.  New garden designs and installations, signage, and the enormous task of clearing invasive plants to restore woodlands and the banks of Stony Run will require continued collaboration and outreach to neighbors. Together, GGC and Friends School aspire to create a “conservation campus” for water, energy, and native plants and wildlife of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed as well as generations of ecological gardeners.