Highly Cultivated

NORTH HOLLYWOOD — He may have an IQ of 157. He may have aced college chemistry in the eighth grade. But when sixth period rolls around each Thursday, ninth-grader Jesse Gell-Redman is just another genius wielding a rake at North Hollywood High.

Once a week during the school year, Jesse and his Honors English classmates leave behind the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Solzhenitsyn and enter the world of hortus cultura just outside their classroom door.

There, in the school’s five-acre garden compound, they harvest not just the tomatoes and squash they grow, but lessons in literature and life, seeded by English teacher Randy Vail in a novel approach to interdisciplinary learning that uses literature as a springboard to study the environment.

For Jesse, it’s been “kind of cool . . . getting down in the dirt next to your English teacher. It’s like you work on your essay, then you go out and pull some weeds. There’s something . . . spiritual about it.”

“The Farm,” as it’s called on campus, once housed one of the Valley’s most ambitious school agriculture programs. But over the years, the North Hollywood garden was overtaken by weeds and its barn and nurseries fell into disrepair.

Then two years ago, Vail moved into one of two classrooms on the compound and, with agriculture teacher Rose Ormsby-Krueger, set about reviving the garden as a place where nature--and students--could bloom.

The teachers and their students weeded, dug and raked, uncovering brick walkways and stone ponds. One student and his father built a stage around a sycamore tree; others repaired abandoned greenhouses. They started a compost heap of rotting leaves and pine needles, and divided the newly tilled land into garden plots.

The students in Vail’s English classes are from North Hollywood’s magnet center for highly gifted students, the only program in the Los Angeles Unified School District designed for high schoolers with IQs above 145.

It’s the brightest collection of teenagers in the city’s public schools, and they all must pass through Vail’s classroom--and get their hands dirty--before they graduate.

An ardent environmentalist, the teacher sees nothing wrong with forcing his students to stop cramming for college entrance exams long enough to spend part of each semester “out here raking leaves and shoveling dirt.”

“There’s a value to this that they won’t find with their nose in a book.”

Students pick a horticulture project each year, something related to authors and themes they cover in class. A ninth-grader in Vail’s World Literature class, for example, took on hunger as his project, analyzing what had been written on the subject through the years and designing a garden that could sustain a community.

Other student projects included an orchard of fruit trees, a water garden and collections of herbs, flowers and vegetables--each with a theme related to literature they were studying. There is a Shakespeare garden, a Native American herb garden, a Greek garden, a garden of wild edible plants.

Their reading lists include dozens of authors--from Ben Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin and Sylvia Plath--and many of Vail’s selections have an ecological bent.

As they develop and write about their horticulture projects, he said, they hone their critical-thinking skills, learn to see the connection between people and their environment, and come to understand that literature is sustained by the ideas of its time, just as flowers, trees and produce rely on the environment to sustain them.

“We live in such a segmented society, where everybody is a specialist,” Vail said. “One of the things I’m trying to teach in my English classes is that everything relates, in literature, in history. . . . In the garden, that’s not abstract anymore. You see consequences, you see relationships.”

The garden compound is tucked away in a corner of the sprawling campus, almost hidden by the lush trees that grow along its perimeter, shading it from the sun on days that bake the rest of the asphalt-paved school.

It has become a popular place for magnet students to gather, with its basketball hoop and volleyball net, its grassy field and meandering trails, the benches to lounge on while reading or studying.

Vail concedes that some of the parents of his students are a little bewildered when their young geniuses come home caked with dirt. “They have to wonder, ‘What’s Junior doing with a rake?’ ” he said.

And some of his students have trouble buying into his emphasis on the environment. “I have more than a couple of kids who think I’m some sort of wacko tree-hugger,” he said.

“I don’t force them to go along with the program. ‘Convince me,’ I tell them. They get a chance to argue their point. That’s a part of the [English] lesson too.”

North Hollywood Principal John T. Hyland said he has heard no complaints and has no problems with Vail’s approach to teaching English.

“I think it’s an excellent use of the students’ time,” he said. “For many of these kids, this is the only time they’ll get to do something like this, working outdoors. And many of them are going on to be scientists, working with botany and chemistry. This has applications for them that they couldn’t get in a conventional class.”

And Vail’s notion of garden-as-classroom has support in high places. State Supt. of Schools Delaine Eastin wants every one of the state’s public schools to have its own garden and has made that a priority of her administration, along with improving technology and school libraries.

Gardens are important, she says, because they “keep children in touch with the environment and build respect for natural systems,” in addition to encouraging teachers to become more innovative in their approach to their subjects.

At North Hollywood, Vail and Ormsby-Krueger want to take their garden one step further and establish an environmental science magnet program, with courses spanning subjects from psychology to history to economics--all with an ecological theme.

The garden has been particularly valuable for the magnet students, Vail said, because for many of them, so much success has come so easily.

“It gives them a chance to fail. And it’s not like they can fix it the next day if something goes wrong. It teaches them about delaying gratification. . . . It grows on its own time; they have to adjust. It teaches them that some forces are out of their control.

“And a lot of these little geniuses are serious procrastinators,” he said. “This teaches them the evils of procrastination. You might wait until the night before a test to cram and still get an A, but if you don’t get your crops planted on time, there’s a price to pay.”

For Jesse, it didn’t take a high IQ to see the parallels between gardening and life. “Whatever you do--if you’re playing a musical instrument or reading a book or trying to make something grow--you’ve got to do it all the way.”

He and his girlfriend, 10th-grader Adriane Dellorco, have cultivated one of the school’s more spectacular plots, with a variety of vegetables and flowers.

They’ve spent lunch periods and weekends planting, watering and weeding. And now, they’re harvesting.