The outdoor classroom and the sun wheel are in front of the sun wheel.

The vegetable garden beds

More veggies


The bog is to the right of the blue seats

(DANBURY, CONN. – Aug. 14, 2025) Pull into the faculty parking lot at Rogers Park Middle School in Danbury, Connecticut, today, and you will be greeted by a variety of sunflowers nodding in the summer breeze–welcoming, easy-going guardians of the gardens that are part of eighth-grade science teacher Bernardo de Castro’s outdoor classroom. 

Enter the world of the sunflowers, and you will encounter a vegetable garden of lettuce, corn, tomatoes, beans, kale, cucumbers, and Swiss chard along with milkweed and purslane (a nutritious “weed” that calls home any patch of soil that is otherwise unoccupied and is valued by the gardeners). 

Beside the vegetable garden is the wildflower meadow, where evening primrose, goldenrod, and Jerusalem artichokes, among other native plants, are keeping the bees busy as the summer air fills with the hum of their labor. Step deeper into this world of thriving plants, and you’ll find a semicircle of blue-pained benches that rest atop logs. Here, the young gardeners and their teacher discuss the work of the day and why they are doing it. Here, they socialize and laugh and eat cheese bread, pão de queijo, a Brazilian roll made from yuca flour that is as light as it is wonderfully filling. 

 As the children gather early this summer morning, you will notice another garden behind them. This is a wetland garden, a home to pitcher plants doing battle with a willow that is outcompeting them for precious water. De Castro, standing on the sun wheel for which he and his students performed the calculations and installed, gives a few words of direction, and off the children go to weed and water and pull back the grass from their brick timepiece. 

De Castro started the garden 12 years ago because, he said, he wanted to take his classes outside and to have them learn earth science from the natural world around them. He and his students beat back the invasive phragmites and the knotweed growing alongside the parking lot and installed their gardens. Since the beginning, the teacher and students have had the support of the administration, which also funded a greenhouse that students and teachers assembled with de Castro. 

 The garden has had a lasting impact on children and their families. If you had arrived early today, you would have noticed a mother and son waiting for de Castro, surveying the garden. You would have spotted a bag filled with cheese rolls in his hand. You would find out later that the boy attends a different school now but comes back because he likes to be there and enjoys the discoveries he makes–especially, today of the native dogbane leaf beetle that hops onto his hand. He and his mother will work hard to remove a few weeks’ accumulation of grass and weeds and to give the plants a good drink of water before the dry week ahead. 

You would also meet a rising high school senior who comes back because she loves the garden, the people, and the memories she encounters there. It belongs to her, too. You’d hear some girls chatting about their summers and their plans for the afternoon. You’d see other children content to be quiet while they are tending the garden. 

About half way through the two-hour work session, you’d hear de Castro tell the young gardeners to take a break and have some cheese bread. They will oblige him while he talks to a high school science teacher from the vo-tech school across town talk about how the garden began and developed. 

Returning to the conversation about plants again, de Castro will remark that most of the time you wait and see what will happen when you garden. Gardeners are observers; the most careful observers become the wisest of teachers whose students continually return to learn, to do, and to be fed in ways that ensure growth as a part of the community.