Upon entering the building, students might notice a small but meaningful area with beautiful flowers of varying types and colors surrounding memorial stones. In addition to being a sight for admiration and remembrance, it promotes good environmental health by functioning as a rain garden.
As part of the Montgomery County RainScapes program, the WCHS gardening club members traveled to Pope Farm Nursery on Feb. 7 to acquire plants for a new rain garden at WCHS. Since WCHS and its surrounding community contain various impervious surfaces like roads and sidewalks, rain gardens allow storm runoff to drain through the plants and into the soil. Thus, this mechanism is vital in preventing flooding and pollution and recharging underground aquifers.
“The greenhouse has been here since [WCHS] was originally built and has been underused, often used for storage in the past, and even neglected for a very long time,” WCHS senior and president of the Gardening Club Kevin Ma said. “But after I joined the gardening club, I saw how it was being utilized to grow various plants year round.”
Greenhouses are indoor environments that receive around six hours of full-spectrum sunlight daily, enabling plants to be grown year-round. The capability and convenient location of this structure drove the gardening club to be the first people in a long time to make proper use of it.
“We are provided with 100-200 plants that come in capsules and all the materials that pertain to taking care of them,” Ma said. “After we transport them all to school, we re-pot them into large pots to be grown in the greenhouse and then planted. Last year, we chose the location for the rain garden to be near the memorial garden and the plants we plant are native plants to Maryland, so they have special meaning to not only our school but our nearby community.”
Beauty takes time, whether it is a WCHS student getting ready for school, or a flower preparing to bloom. And with time comes the perseverance and dedication necessary to overcome the unforeseen mishaps encountered along the way.
“A challenge we faced last year was that we were planting over spring break, so nobody was there at school to water the plants, leading many of the plants to die,” Ma said. “Some officers took plants home to maintain them, but there were only so many that could do so. Since spring break is later in April this year, that might mitigate some of the issues [we faced last year], but we are going to come up with a solution to keep the plants hydrated and healthy.”
Gardening is known to be challenging, requiring lots of patience and precision to sustain good plant growth health. However, WCHS gardening members are willing to do whatever it takes to keep their rain garden plants alive, and, as a result, they can see their hard work pay off and be on display whenever they pass by the blossomed garden. For other WCHS students, the rain garden may allow them to see the first-hand impact of the lectures they learn throughout a course.
“We talk about rain gardens in AP Environmental Science and like to discuss what WCHS has done and is doing in terms of it,” AP Environmental Science teacher Mira Chung said. “We acknowledge the rain garden as how [its concept] is incorporated into the curriculum, using it as an education tactic.”
