The Garden School

Welcome to The Garden School, a unique educational institution that is dedicated to teaching essential life skills, starting with horticulture. Our mission is to provide young people with real-world, hands-on experience that will foster patience, focus, hard work, follow-through, and cooperation. We believe that by cultivating the land, we are also cultivating the individual.

Our Story

The Garden School is located on an eight-acre property in Beverly, which was originally commissioned by local businessman Abraham Ratshesky in the early 20th century as a country retreat for urban poor women and children from Boston. The property was designed by famed Boston architect James E. McLaughlin and was used as a camp by the Ratsheskys until 1954. Since then, it has been used as a school and a summer camp before being taken over by The Garden School in 2016.

Our Plan

Since its inception, The Garden School has been a labor of love, run entirely by volunteers. Our immediate goal is to raise $1M to secure the land permanence. This will allow us to focus all of our resources on education and creating a little paradise for students to learn essential life skills and find wholeness amidst the beauty and tranquility of the garden.

Our next goal is to create a learning paradise by providing an experiential education. At The Garden School, students learn by doing through participation in the general functions and duties of the farm. This includes planting, cultivating, harvesting, marketing and much more. As students become familiar with the whole system, they begin to specialize in certain tasks, such as bouquet making or pruning. After enough experience, students become assistant teachers, helping to train the next crop of students.

We will expand this program by hiring a teaching staff and paying for visiting experts, as well as supporting continued learning opportunities for our instructors. On the farm, we will also conduct experiments and research of our own to improve the farm system and increase yields.

Create a Learning Paradise

Our classroom is the farm itself. We will perfect the functionality and beauty of the land by building terraces on the many slopes, improving pathways, building fences for pest control and livestock, as well as constructing barns for tools, animals and work space. A heated greenhouse will extend horticultural practices into the colder months. We will also continue to plant fruiting and ornamental trees and shrubs and develop the irrigation system. We will install a kitchen and restore the buildings for housing and instruction. The students will participate in all of these steps, gaining insight into landscape design, understanding natural resources, plant identification, and construction methods. There is no part of this plan that is not an educational opportunity!

Join hands with us in this adventure to UnPave Paradise and put up a garden school!