Edible Garden and Classroom - Tyler Arboretum

The Edible Garden and Classroom at Tyler Arboretum provides seed to table learning about healthy eating, healthy living and sustaining healthy land. Designed at the residential scale, the garden showcases horticulture for the home gardener and connections to the food web that supports all life on earth. The Garden Classroom at the center of the Edible Garden offers year-round opportunities for garden education programs, camp activities, school groups, cooking classes and more. The multipurpose classroom includes a kitchen and opens to terraces on both sides.

Inspired by the Tyler Arboretum’s mission to use natural resources to stimulate an understanding of the living world, the primary exterior roof and wall material of the Classroom Building is terra cotta. Like the baked earth terracotta flower pots common to all types of gardening, the Classroom Building is a vessel for horticultural and food education. To amplify this connection, the Ludowici tiles are fired without glaze mixtures that would alter the natural brownish orange color. A small amount of surface texture was added prior to firing to create tiles capable of hosting airborne microorganisms, pollens, and mosses.