August 19, 2004 | Read Time: 1 minute
A year ago, Ken Smith, a landscape architect, and 120 volunteers planted a “learning garden” at a public school in Queens, N.Y., through a program financed by the Robin Hood Foundation, a New York philanthropy.
When he came back a year later to check on the garden, he found that the plantings “were doing well for a garden that’s been here only a year,” says Metropolis magazine (August). The school has held a science fair featuring the garden as a teaching tool and its hallways are lined with photo journals showing students planting seeds and recording their growth.
Mr. Smith also found that other work Robin Hood hired him to do was making a bigger difference. When Mr. Smith first visited the public school in 2002, he said it was littered with trash. Keeping in mind the school’s limited funds, Mr. Smith suggested a “handful of quick fixes,” the magazine says. He told the school to “cover the ugly chain-link fence with a cloud-patterned scrim; cheer up the asphalt play area and temporary classrooms with a simple graphic pattern of circles; convert brightly colored Dumpsters into planting beds, so kids can experience gardening firsthand; and use salvaged logs as a place for reading and discussion.”
Today, he says, the grounds are clean. “I believe design can make a difference,” Mr. Smith told the magazine, “but I would never have promised that it would have solved the graffiti and trash problem.”
