- December 15, 2025 - Jardin botanique : Favourites
Imagine young people getting passionately involved in growing fruits and vegetables. That’s the magic that happens every summer in Montréal’s youth centers (centres jeunesse) thanks to a project by the Jardin botanique.
Since 2020, a team from the Jardin botanique has been getting out to those centers to introduce children and teenagers to the pleasures of gardening. They take part in a variety of activities: weeding, plant pruning, watering, sowing seeds – and harvesting, of course!
This past summer, from late June to mid-August, scientific educators Élise Guerrero and Edith Mariez guided young people from 7 to 17 at the Cité-des-Prairies and Dominique-Savio youth centers. The workshops took place every two weeks at Cité-des-Prairies, now and then at Dominique-Savio. “We don’t just teach them how to grow tomatoes,” Élise Guerrero points out. “We also teach them how to connect with nature in a healthy and enjoyable way.”
Who are the young people in youth centers?
These are minors under the care of the Director of Youth Protection. They live in youth centers because of a number of different realities: abandonment, neglect, family difficulties or criminal offenses. These very different pathways come together under one roof. And in a context like this, the gardening experience takes on its full meaning: it offers a calming, rewarding activity.
Discovering, growing and sharing
Workshops are tailored to the age and needs of each group. At Dominique-Savio, the youngest (7 to 12) benefited from an approach geared to sensory experiences: working with the soil, watering plants, smelling flowers or picking fruits and vegetables. Purple beans, mixed greens, ground cherries and cherry tomatoes got their enthusiasm going. “The children were really happy to come and garden, and were excited when it came time to pick cherry tomatoes,” Edith Mariez recalls. Another youngster, meanwhile, had a curious love-hate relationship with the smell of lilies, often pulling his nose out of them covered in orange pollen. “He said he loved the smell,” a staff member at the center said, “and then that it made him sick to his stomach.”
At Cité-des-Prairies, teenagers from 15 to 17 discovered more technical aspects of gardening. They learned the right way of harvesting onions, observed the role of earwigs as decomposers and the role of spiders against aphids. Harvesting onions, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, basil, strawberries, cucumbers and much else filled baskets with pride. One youngster was waiting impatiently to pick onions for his Sunday brunch. “We’ll get to eat the fruits of our labor,” he said. Another one confided: “I loved harvesting, especially the vegetables you pull out of the ground.”
Harvests beyond vegetables
Above and beyond harvesting, the project also builds self-confidence and a connection with nature. A teenager at Cité-des-Prairies, who was afraid of spiders at first, learned to move away from them instead of eliminating them. In time he came to understand their essential role and no longer wanted to get rid of them. Other youngsters surprised the educators with their self-sufficiency: one of them, who needed guidance in the beginning just to do some weeding, ended up cleaning the hydroponic greenhouse all by himself and collecting flowers for drying. “I was so impressed by the independence he gained during the season!” exclaims Élise Guerrero.
Youngsters also enjoyed less well-known vegetables such as the West Indian gherkin, and didn’t hesitate to weed a fence overgrown with nettles and vines. For some, the experience even gave rise to a vocation: one participant chose to enroll in a horticulture course after the program. “I think it lets them grow familiar with gardening and say to themselves, I can garden too; I can have plants at home,” says Edith Mariez. “Once they’ve taken part in this activity, it becomes something that can be integrated into their lives.”
“For Espace pour la vie and the Jardin botanique, this project responds to an eagerness to listen to the needs of the community,” emphasizes Olivier Grant, Section Director, Animation and Citizen Movement. “It also aims at making the pleasures of gardening accessible to young people who can’t go straight to the Jardin botanique.”
Mutual enrichment
The experience also transformed the educators. The youngsters, whom they found “truly endearing,” encouraged them to expand their knowledge of earwigs or aquaponics. They also learned to let the groups evolve as they may, knowing that participation was voluntary, and that the youngsters were not always present from the start to the end of the project. But that everyone nonetheless took something away from the experience.
Olivier Grant focuses on the human richness of the project: “The fact that the guides actually go to the youth center, that they take an interest in young people, that they develop a bond with them – all this affects their self-esteem and leads them to a discovery of worlds other than that of their teachers.” The final visit to the Jardin botanique often inspires a sense of wonder: the young people had stars in their eyes. Beyond the harvests, there are connections, skills and dreams that are all taking root.
Testimonial
For our unit, which cares for children with autism spectrum disorder and complex mental-health profiles, it was a golden opportunity to meet their sensory needs: playing in the earth, being outside, feeling the wind on their skin, inhaling the scents of different flowers, touching various types of foliage, observing the rapid growth of plants or seeing fruits appear and change color.
The balcony garden was even used to calm youngsters during crises, for them to reconnect with their senses – by smelling lemongrass, for example, or tasting stevia. Gardening nourished their sensory curiosity while enabling them to learn a lot about nature.
These children are often very institutionalized. The fact that guides from the Youth Gardens come to meet them, not as specialists, doctors or educators but as members of the community, helps them anchor themselves in it and normalize their experience. Above all they’re children, whatever their challenges and their needs may be, and this connection with the Jardin botanique team does them a world of good.
Valérie Desnoyers,
clinical activities specialist at a youth center
The youth center project is inspired by the Youth Gardens, which are held each summer at the Jardin botanique and welcome participants between the ages of 8 and 16.
