"Dandelion Days" brings a new Storywalk to the Growing Center!

This has been a challenging year. Stuck at home and missing hugs, friends and school, we’ve all had to find new ways to connect, to play and to learn. The Beautiful Stuff Project did some brainstorming in the summer and realized that one of the projects that we’d been cooking up, a collaborative mosaic Storywalk, would be perfect for the pandemic. We scheduled a series of outdoor, socially-distanced mosaic sessions where new friends and neighbors helped to tile eight pages of an original story called Dandelion Days. The book tells the story of a dandelion’s life without any words. Each page is beautiful, and together they invite young children to explore a story, encourage older neighbors to think about how plants grow, and give everyone a reason to take a walk.

After displaying Dandelion Days at the Winter Hill playground for the fall and early winter, we moved it to the fence of the Growing Center this week. Thank you to the four wonderful 3rd graders from ESCS who helped to hold the pages up and zip-tie them to the fence. I’m thrilled that the Growing Center is willing to host the story for the winter. The story should help to educate the community about nature even when the Growing Center is closed, and perhaps it will be a reason for some people to visit the center for the very first time!

Stop by the Growing Center to check it out, and see if you can figure out what the wind and the sun have to do with a dandelion’s life. We’ll be looking for a new location for the Storywalk in the spring, so if you have ideas, let us know!

We’re also hoping to make another collaborative Storywalk in partnership with the West branch library and Mudflat Pottery School this year, so keep an eye out for it as you walk around the city!

Emily Bhargava

Community Art Director, The Beautiful Stuff Project