What a friend taught me about trees and children
Dear Parents,
When we moved into our home ten years ago, my husband and I were excited about all of the landscaping opportunities. We spent the first ten years of our marriage in a condo, and our horticultural endeavors were limited to our west-facing, third floor balcony.
While we had many years to create beautiful planter pots, our new home promised many more opportunities to be creative. Shortly after moving in, we planted our first tree.
While at a native plant event at Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, a representative of the Audubon Society was giving away free Redbud seedlings. Cercis canadensis, a native plant in Virginia, is prized because it is attractive to pollinators, providing nectar and pollen to bees, butterflies, and moths and providing its seeds as food to wildlife.
My in-laws, who were with us, grabbed about four of those free seedlings. We grabbed one, and off we went, plants in hand.
My in-laws have years of experience when it comes to growing things. To say they have green thumbs is an understatement. A few years back, their homemade compost that they had placed in a newly created flower bed sprouted squash vines quite unexpectedly.
Vines travelled all over their backyard, which they cultivated and encouraged, covering their grass from one end of the yard to the other. Over 60 butternut squash were picked that fall, providing many a table with its flesh in multiple forms: steamed, mashed, and pureed.
We chose to plant our seedling in our backyard, reasoning that it would make for a nice view in the spring when the Redbud is in all of its glory. Striking pink flowers are a welcome and stark contrast to the late winter landscape.
My in-laws planted theirs in various places around their yard; front, left side, right side, and back. They nurtured and cared for them, and they grew and grew and grew!
Ours, much to our chagrin, didn't grow at all. It stayed small and stunted. We wondered what had happened.
When we finally dug it up and moved it, we realized the problem. The tree was planted in soil that was not suitable for growing. The water table was too high in that spot and the tree needed soil — a lot more soil.
I heard recently from a former parent, faithful donor, and longtime friend about a landscaping project she undertook in her backyard. Wanting something new, she had replaced old shrubbery and weeds with a row of young trees. One of the trees ended up crooked because of the unsuitable conditions in that spot —a fence, lack of sunlight, and other factors. The other trees all grew straight and sound.
Later in the same conversation, she offered up why she continues to give to the school, even though her children have long since graduated.
Ambleside, she said, provides the conditions for children to grow upright just like trees that are planted in the right soil with the right sunlight and with the right amount of water.
Sometimes, when describing Ambleside to new families, I describe it as offering a historically proven yet rarely applied education. Students come to school to learn academics, and end up growing into mature and versatile humans in the process. They grow in their skills of thinking, relating to others, relating to those in authority over them, their habits relating to work and so on.
Maintaining an optimal atmosphere for learning for our students is our utmost priority, so they, like the seedlings in my in-laws’ yard, can grow straight and sound.
For a few years, we convalesced our stunted Redbud in a pot before planting it in a perfect spot in our side yard. It gets sun all day, and my husband faithfully watered it during the summer and fall.
Our approach this time around has been different. Instead of just sticking the tree in the ground and hoping for the best, we have nurtured it and monitored it faithfully.
At Ambleside, we likewise are constantly assessing.
Are the teachers on method?
Are the students memorizing their math facts?
How is their handwriting?
Can they identify all of the nouns in the paragraph?
Can they solve a problem in their Algebra text using the quadratic formula?
In a letter to a friend published in The Story of Charlotte Mason, Mason wrote that it is not for children that we do this education but for the child. We do this for each individual child.
Each child at Ambleside is known, cared for, and nurtured toward growth — straight and sound.
Affectionately,
Krise