Only one science teacher, to my knowledge, ever had anything constructive to do with growing plants in that area of the school, aside, that is, from the green-fingered gardener who seemed to live on a different plane and at a different pace. He left his employment there a year or so after the time when the greenhouses first came to my attention. The answer to such neglect of resources is really not so hard to discover. It also smiles on those disciplines which are largely abstract, numerical, linguistic and academic, removed from direct physical experience of the world around us. Gardening, in a youth culture, is for the middle-aged and the elderly.
Gardening is for the retired and redundant.
Gardening is a bolt-on leisure pursuit. Gardening is too slow in a world which insists on acceleration. So the school's three greenhouses, hallowed by the few, are ignored by the many. It does not. And I shall try to tell you why by way of illustrating an example of a primary school in which gardening is regarded, for a range of excellent reasons, as an integral and essential component of a sane curriculum.