Promoting native plants in partnership with local high school
Cambridge Rindge and Latin HS International Sustainable Development Club partners with Cambridge Plant & Garden Club to Promote Native Plants
For a fourth year, Cambridge Plant & Garden Club offered native plants for sale in collaboration with students from the local, public Cambridge high school—Cambridge Rindge & Latin. The students set-up the ordering technology and marketing materials. CP&GC members and associates selected the plant species, managed the sale, including on-line payment options, and purchased the plants .
We offered four shade and four sun plants with two Carex sedge/grasses. In 2022 we sold 1,100 one-year old plants; in 2023, about 1,400; in 2024 1,900 plants and in 2025 is 1,440.
The plants come from North Creek Nurseries in Landenberg, PA requiring a winter order. The flats arrived in early May. CP&GC and the students got to work to package the orders. Our goal is to get as many regional, native plants out into our local world as we can.
We are working with CRLS students on two other related projects:
Distributing native plant seeds at Cambridge-wide events including the City’s compost giveaway. The high school students created, published native plant “zines” with free zines inside for our events and we included these with the seeds and plugs.
Creating a native plant garden at the high school. Proceeds from the plant plug sale will go towards this effort.
CP&GC’s partnership with the students has been very fruitful, the students providing technological know-how, creative publications that reach their peers, and physical labor. The garden club members (and associates) provided horticultural expertise, funding, and money management as well as a space for order preparation and distribution, recycled materials for plant packaging (newspapers, plastic bags and cardboard boxes) and labor.
While this collaboration is getting more native plants out into the world each year, our real accomplishment has been raising awareness of the importance of native plants to have a vibrant and resilient regional ecosystems. Our CP&GC community is engaged and eager to make Cambridge a perfect home for all our pollinators: butterflies, bees and birds.
