Coming Soon: The Orchard Story Walk
Though no monastery ever had a Story Walk, they certainly did a lot of walking, reading, and praying in their growing spaces.
In a world where most agricultural products are available any time of year, keeping our own gardens forces us to respect the rhythm of the seasons. Accordingly, the physical labor associated with the Classical Roots program tends to slow down during the colder months, leaving me and the students twiddling our fingers. But restlessness can drive creativity and, as we discussed how to spend the long wait between late autumn and early spring, we found ourselves reflecting on the same question over and over again: how can we draw our Grammar School students out into the orchard? After all, though the trees aren’t yet yielding fruit, the space is beautiful and functional, and it was made just for them.
There are many possible answers to this question, but the one we settled on was the construction of a Story Walk. The concept is simple: a series of mobile, weather-proof signs, each of which presents a plexiglass service under which you can slip a single page from a storybook. Once made, these signs are arranged along a planned route, allowing the community to read the story as they explore.
The beauty and simplicity of the Story Walk make it appealing to us on several levels. First of all, it forces interaction with the physical world. If laid out properly, our Story Walk will guide Grammar School students and classes through every path of the orchard; an experience that will get more and more pleasant as the planting there expands and matures. Second, since the stories are interchangeable, we can align our choice of book with different curricular needs as the years and seasons pass. Ultimately, if it outlives its usefulness in the orchard, we can even move the walk to some other place on campus.
Yet constructing a Story Walk with a group of students also presents a problem since, given the need to use power tools to do it, I can’t leverage what is normally my greatest programmatic advantage: an abundance of manpower. I’ve decided to split the difference by making all of the cuts myself during free periods in my schedule so that, once all the parts have been created, the students can be put in charge of assembling them. It’s been a slow, incremental process that has sometimes seen me using miter saws in a coat and tie, but so far it’s worked well. I’ll continue to write updates about this project as the work goes on, but our plan is to present the finished product to the Grammer School sometime in January.
One of the bigger questions we’ve mulled over as a program is the degree to which a series of garden spaces can actually be useful to a school. At first, I thought I’d have to justify these projects constantly, but my assumption turned out to be very false indeed. Looking over the history of schooling in the Western world, it’s clear that gardens have almost always been associated with places of learning. Bringing them back is just another good idea we can glean from the classical and medieval world. And though no monastery ever had a Story Walk, they certainly did a lot of walking, reading, and praying in their growing spaces. If all goes well, this small addition to our landscape will allow our youngest students a fresh taste of that sort of contemplation.
What a delightful concept, I love it! I’d also love to see you out there “mitering” in your coat and tie. 🤣 Praying safety, success and much bounty in your plants of all variety both garden and human. Great job, son.