“I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” ~Dr.Suess

At my school we have an interesting addition to the lobby; an indoor garden. However, it's in awful shape and treated like a waste bin. It's only been watered once since like September and because of this there is only one tree that is actually somewhat surviving and the others literally have maybe 6 leaves on them. When people walk by the throw their apple cores and gum wrappers and pennies into the garden. So, after being approached by our amazing chemistry teacher to help her save the garden about 6 or 7 of us got together last Friday to water the trees. It was really awful how bad of shape everything was in. There were huge amounts of garbage, dead leaves everywhere, a rotting plant (possibly a hosta) and a poor sagging cactus. We cleaned up all garbage, raked up the dead leaves, pruned the trees and then gave the whole garden a nice long drink of badly needed water. After we finished everything looked so much healthier and greener, I can't wait to see how well it will look after we start to water it on a weekly basis! We are hopping that this can be our big CAS project as we are full of ideas of how to make the garden less of an eyesore and more of a focal point in the lobby. After the plants already living in there start to live again, we are hoping to plant some flowers and maybe put some decorative rocks to really liven it up. Plus, the walls surrounding it need some serious TLC and we were thinking we could sand it, plaster it, prime it and then get some art students involved to paint a mural on it! There's just so much we can do with this project, not only will it increase school involvement, save some trees, improve the schools air quality, teach us some responsibility because we are now in charge of the plants' lives and give us some gardening experience, but hopefully it will inspire others to take a stand and save our plant life! I'm really excited about this project, because apparently there have been no botany classes this year at all and i find that really sad, so maybe this will get people pumped for botany next year. Here are some pictures of the garden after we finished watering it.

These are after watering and they still look kind of pitiful.