THE LIVING CLASSROOM
Tour the Living Classroom!
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I call it the Living Classroom, and it’s where Yard Gatherings, workshops and yard tours happen. Come experience the beauty and practicality of living simply! This urban yard is a vibrant ecosystem, with abundant perennial food for people, birds, bees, and butterflies.
Everyone who visits — students, volunteers, and friends— sees how much food, habitat and medicine it's possible to grow in a small urban space, and learns how to create such an oasis on the land they tend. It's towards resilience for climate challenges, reversing ecosystem collapse, and sharing, within a lively human community. Green wildness and human "village" are possible even in the city! The Living Classroom is a permaculture demonstration site, a food forest and an exuberant habitat surrounding my small home on an urban corner lot in Missoula. More than 100 species of Montana-native flowers, shrubs and grasses offer shade and beauty, as well as edible and medicinal fruits, leaves and roots. They mingle with grapevines; raspberries; asparagus; apple, plum and apricot trees; hazelnut, cherry, gooseberry and currant shrubs. Since these native plants have evolved with this valley and its bees, birds, and butterflies, they provide critical refuge in the midst of asphalt and lawns, providing climate resilience and conserving water. In the Classroom, volunteers and interns ease my workload and increase the potential for education and inspiration to casual passersby, friends, students, and co-conspirators. I like teaching as we work. Tasks are diverse, dependent on the plants, season, and weather. They vary from placing mulch, training vines, discouraging perennial weeds, & pruning and transplanting, to building infrastructure such as a grape arbor or raspberry trellising. |
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Sketch of Overall Design
East Side Yard Fall 2025
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Layers of cardboard & compost over grass to build deep rich soil .
Help from friends Trez & Lindsay creating a sheet mulched bed.
Southeast Yard Fall 2025
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Rocky Mountain Bee Plant (Cleome serrulata), an important native annual with edible "wasabi" leaves as a bonus!
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Nourishing friendships through the sharing of plants and food: a Jerusalem artichoke digging day this April 2025
If you like listening to inspiring podcasts, check out these episodes on wildwithnature.com that feature the Living Classroom! They are 10 - 20 minutes long.
Waiting for rain: making it through climate change wildwithnature.com/2024/10/01/waiting-for-rain-climate-change/
How to grow a bird-friendly garden in western Montana wildwithnature.com/2023/03/24/montana-native-plants-for-birds/
Five late-summer wildflowers & the complex world of their bees wildwithnature.com/2022/08/19/five-late-summer-wildflowers/
Wild with Nature is produced by field biologist, naturalist and storyteller Shane Sater, who is also my son. The companion blogs showcase his amazing photos.
Waiting for rain: making it through climate change wildwithnature.com/2024/10/01/waiting-for-rain-climate-change/
How to grow a bird-friendly garden in western Montana wildwithnature.com/2023/03/24/montana-native-plants-for-birds/
Five late-summer wildflowers & the complex world of their bees wildwithnature.com/2022/08/19/five-late-summer-wildflowers/
Wild with Nature is produced by field biologist, naturalist and storyteller Shane Sater, who is also my son. The companion blogs showcase his amazing photos.
GLIMPSES OF WILDLIFE IN THE MIDST OF THE CLASSROOM'S FRUIT AND FLOWERS:
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Silver buffaloberry (Shepherdia argenteus) in fruit A migrating Western tanager stopping at the Classroom to fuel up
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An amazing native bee Fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) A beautiful native moth
Given my commitment to community, I find that this project and love of mine can't help but ooze out into my neighborhood. So in 2021 I had the delight of imagining and designing planters and larger "parklets" of native meadows for several traffic-calming areas out in the midst of our neighborhood's asphalt to bring pockets of lovely and vital ecosystem connectivity into the streets. Lots of others joined in to make the idea a reality.
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Franklin to the Fort neighbors working together to bring patches of native meadows into the streets for traffic-calming to create a network of ecosystems
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In the way that one thing grows into another, the enthusiasm of 35 neighbors working together in this way has become a "Green Team" within Franklin to the Fort Neighbors in Action (F2FNiA), my neighborhood's engaged group working to bring the kind of hopeful change here that F2F folks want for a more livable community of humans. In 2022, we collaborated with Missoula's Developed Parks and Trails staff, and planted a native plant “patch” that fall in nearby Franklin Park. It’s ~200 square feet of native Montana plants-- from chokecherry, curlleaf mountain mahogany and wax currant to white prairie aster, showy milkweed, twin arnica and cutleaf daisy. Citizens walking their dogs or biking along the Park's north trail can see how they might beautify and enliven their own lawns with the rich diversity of a native blooming ecosystem, while conserving precious water resources.
Rubber Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa), a deep-rooted native perennial shrub
In the Classroom, all kinds of native plants flower from spring to fall:
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One of the raised beds for vegetables and native plant starts.
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