What's the best thing to plant in your garden? Your children! As experts warn we're raising a generation cut off from nature, MONTY DON says there's a simple answer



Fifty years ago, at the age of seven, I went away to my boarding school in Berkshire. There was a sunken garden in front of the drive, with scruffy heathers, a few roses struggling in the very sandy soil and a curious patchwork of small plots, each just a few yards square, that were mostly overgrown with weeds.

I discovered that, until a few years previously, each pupil had their own little plot to tend. I never found out why this practice had fallen into abeyance but it was a fine idea — and although I was lucky enough to have access to a good-sized garden at home, it would have enriched my school days immensely.

Why do we not teach gardening to all children in all schools? It could not possibly do any harm and would be immeasurably beneficial.

Perhaps the answer lies in that word ‘immeasurably’.

Success in gardening, for adults as well as children, should not be measured, but experienced

The past few governments have been obsessed by measuring performance in an infantile, disastrous attempt to codify education.

The result is improved performance in exams — and impoverished education. For exams are the by-product of education, not the goal. Success in them is obviously to be encouraged and celebrated.

But if the focus is only on what can be rigorously tested and counted, then the real purpose of education — to train minds to inquire and think and use information in a flexible and creative way — is discarded in the process.

Success in gardening, for adults as well as children, should not be measured, but experienced. It is the process of acquiring that experience that is so beneficial to everyone.

The sad — even absurd — thing is that most people come to it by chance in adulthood. If we would only nurture our children in the ways of horticulture then both they and society would benefit immensely — and not only because a survey of 200 horticultural businesses found that 70 per cent could not fill skilled job vacancies.

As my fellow enthusiast Alan Titchmarsh warned last week: ‘If this situation continues, British horticulture will dwindle and become a pale shadow of its former self, and Chelsea Flower Show little more than a wistful memory.’

Monty Don says we should be teaching our children to garden in every school in the land

T he first benefit for children is the simplest. Gardening gets them outside. Fresh air and daylight are absolutely essential and yet we are depriving children of this basic need.

The combination of safety concerns from fretful parents and the attraction of computers and television means that today’s young spend shockingly little time playing outside.

Give each child a small plot — and it need be no more than a square metre shared between four pupils — and they will rush out to check it every day, regardless of weather or season.

More importantly, they will have a personal stake in something that happens outdoors — growing and living naturally.

This is the second huge benefit. Responsibility. Give a child a seed to sow and he or she must care for it. It will need watering, weeding, staking, perhaps thinning. If the child neglects to care for it then the plant will suffer or even die.

The connection is immediate and direct, unmodified by government edict or a national curriculum. It becomes a personal relationship between child and plant.

If you foster that in a raised bed at the edge of a school playground then you are beginning the process of caring about this planet, because it is yours to care for. The whole natural world becomes something that you are part of rather than something viewed only on television.

In the hermetic, artificial, digitally obsessed world that so many modern children are trapped inside, a child can grow up without any real knowledge of the natural rhythms of life.

The gardener says children¿s connection to what they eat is frighteningly remote - and gardening can educate them about their diet

The simple act of tending a garden fills this gap in our clumsy, tightly bound educational system.

Children learn that spring follows winter, that plants need water and sunshine and adapt to cope with cold and heat. They learn that an east wind is significantly different from one from the west; even something as simple as the length of daylight determines the growth of so many plants.

You do not need to take an exam in these things but my goodness you do need to know them. And not just for their own sake.

Gardening, even at its most basic, cross-fertilises a range of academic subjects. Finding out where plants come from stimulates an interest in geography. Learning about different soils teaches geology. The Linnaean system of naming plants means you have to grapple with Latin.

The physical study of plants and plant propagation teaches biology. Their botany and nutritional requirements means you have to have some knowledge of chemistry.

Plants can — and should — be drawn and written about and poetry down the ages is filled with the celebration of gardens and wild flowers. All these subjects happily overlap and merge in a rich soup of learning that stretches its influence way beyond the garden.

Modern technology has a role, too. Ten years ago I visited Writhlington School, near Radstock in Somerset, to see their orchid project. Through the enthusiasm of a single teacher, Simon Pugh-Jones, the school began micro-propagating orchids that were being stripped from their natural habitat for sale as cut flowers and house plants and were consequentially at a real risk of extinction.

Although propagating orchids in this way can be viewed as a very specialist, technically difficult skill that most adult gardeners find daunting, it proved to be a resounding success.

Monty Don says gardening knowledge is too good to waste on adults and what we sow in their minds today will reap a priceless harvest tomorrow

The school had, initially at least, laughably minimal facilities so they had to improvise and adapt to the extent of building computer-controlled humidity systems that could be monitored by pupils over the internet.

N ow they run an operation that spans four continents and is acknowledged worldwide. Not only has this become enormously successful for orchids, but Simon Pugh-Jones found that many of the school’s most troubled pupils showed themselves to be superb orchid growers and learned new behaviour and social skills.

But the aspect of gardening in schools that is closest to my own heart is connected to food and diet.

This country has a growing obesity problem with associated diabetes and heart conditions that are predicted to become dramatically worse as the current generation of children grows up.

According to current government figures, 30 per cent of children between two and 15 are overweight or obese. Not only is this appalling for the sufferers, but it will be hugely expensive to treat. Most of this could be avoided if children’s diets improved and they took more exercise. Gardening is part of the process of getting outside, moving and enjoying physical activity.

But the other side of the equation, diet, is also directly improved by teaching children to garden.

Many children do not know that chips come from a potato which in turn grows in the soil. Others have no idea that peas grow in a pod or that apples are harvestable only between late summer and autumn.

Our children’s connection to what they eat is frighteningly remote and modified almost entirely by packaging and advertising.

Buy a packet of crisps for a child and they will learn only that they are strangely addictive. But teach a child to grow a potato and then how to cook and eat it and you change and enrich their diet and health for ever. Encourage them to grow a carrot and eat it fresh from the ground, perhaps even — shock horror — with a little dirt still attached and they know something about carrots that is real and true.

If a child grows some strawberries or a radish or two then they will sooner or later want to share them with their family and friends. This quickly extends to learning how to cook with the ingredients you have grown. This is the basis of all healthy social eating: You grow good food and share it with those you love. Everybody benefits.

All education should be geared to equipping people to make the most of the opportunities that they may meet, and to live their lives as richly and well as possible.

Gardening, as so many millions discover later in life, does this to an astonishing degree.