How to Incorporate Gardening into Your Lessons

Gardening isn’t just a fun outdoor activity—it’s a powerful teaching tool that can enrich learning across the curriculum. Whether you have access to a full school garden or just a few pots on a windowsill, gardening can be woven into your lessons to inspire curiosity, creativity, and a love for nature.

Here’s how you can bring gardening into your classroom, no matter what subject you teach:

1) Science: Bring Biology to Life

Gardening is a natural fit for science lessons. Use it to explore plant life cycles, photosynthesis, ecosystems, and biodiversity. Encourage students to observe, record, and analyse changes in their plants over time. You can even set up experiments to test how different variables (like light or water) affect growth.

Try this:

Create a “Plant Detective” journal where pupils track the progress of their seedlings, draw diagrams, and write hypotheses. 

The National Horticultural Society have a range of free resources to support you with building gardening into your lessons: School gardening / RHS

2) Maths: Measure, Count, and Calculate

From measuring plant height to calculating the area of garden beds, gardening offers endless opportunities for practical maths. Pupils can collect data, create graphs, and solve real-world problems.

Try this:

Ask students to design a garden layout using perimeter and area calculations, or track rainfall and temperature to analyse patterns.

3) English: Grow Vocabulary and Imagination

Gardening can inspire creative writing, descriptive language, and persuasive texts. Use the garden as a setting for stories, or have students write instructions, poems, or persuasive letters about environmental issues.

Try this:

Have pupils write a diary entry from the perspective of a seed or create a “Garden Glossary” of new vocabulary. 

4) Art & Design: Nature as a Canvas

The colours, textures, and shapes found in the garden are perfect for inspiring art projects. Pupils can sketch plants, create nature collages, or design garden signs.

Try this:

Encourage students to create botanical illustrations. Take a nature walk around your school and allow children to pick a plant, disect it and draw all the components of it from leaves and stems, to petals and stamens. 

5) Geography: Explore the World Through Plants

Gardening can help children understand where food comes from, how climate affects crops, and the importance of sustainability. It’s a great way to introduce global citizenship and environmental awareness.

Try this:

Create a “World Garden” where students grow or research different plants from around the world. If they can grow them here, why not let them? If they can't it would be an interesting project for them to find out why they cannot grow in the UK.

6) PSHE & Wellbeing: Grow Minds and Confidence

Gardening promotes mindfulness, patience, and teamwork. It gives children a sense of responsibility and achievement, boosting their confidence and emotional wellbeing.

Try this:

Start a class garden/window box where pupils can decide what they want to plant and interested students can take turns caring for plants. This will encourage ownership, team work and collaboration.

7) Cross-Curricular Projects: Make Learning Bloom

Why not plan a whole-school gardening week or a term-long project that ties into multiple subjects? Gardening can be the golden thread that connects learning in a meaningful, hands-on way.

Try this:

Host a “Vegetable Growing Competition” where each class is given the same packet of vegetable seeds to grow and see which class can grow the biggest vegetable. Classes can present how they cared for their plant, the growth journey and what they did to support it grow. 

Incorporating gardening into your lessons doesn’t require a large budget or a perfect plot of land—just a bit of creativity and a willingness to get your hands dirty. By embedding gardening into your teaching, you’re not only enriching the curriculum but also helping children grow into curious, confident, and environmentally conscious learners.