As the city woke up to a balmy Monday morning, the atmosphere at Sri Sankara Vidyalaya Matriculation Higher Secondary School in Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai was electric with excitement. The tree planting activity was planned for the day and several holes were dug in anticipation of the saplings to arrive. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill plantation activity having large swathes of land to plant in or troops of middle-aged men bustling in crisp white cotton.
Instead, it involved a group of earnest high school students and their teachers, in a compact school compound having a little more than a foot’s width of soil bordering the school’s buildings. It was in this fringe of soil the saplings were to be planted. It was encouraging to see how interested the students and teachers were in learning how to utilize the space they had to plant the kind of saplings that could be nourished and grown in such urban spaces.
Working together to get the saplings in
The Pitchandikulam Forest team and its group of educators brought close to 50 saplings made up of 24 herbal plant varieties for the students to plant around the campus. Children learned about the medicinal uses of each sapling before planting them and made sign boards to help with their identification. From notchi (Vitex negundo) to nilavembu (Andrographis paniculate), children grasped the significance of each medicinal plant and were eagerly looking forward to passing on and teaching their younger counterparts about it.
Planting medicinal plants
When asked how many of the children would like to take a sapling home, all hands went up! The principal Madam Latha Ravi was extremely supportive of her students and was equally enthusiastic about setting up their school’s green corner.
On that Monday morning, it wasn’t just saplings, but seeds of change watered in a small corner of the city.
Seeds of Change in Sri Sankara Vidyalaya Matriculation Higher Secondary School Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai
Schools in action for the planet 