Bay landscape designer enlightens Girl Scouts with gardening tips

Julia Shutt shares her knowledge of plants.

Have you ever seen a beautiful garden and thought, ”I wish that was in my backyard”? If you said yes, it’s easy to start your own garden. My Junior Girl Scout troop had a special visitor that taught us about gardening.

You might have seen her HUGE garden while driving down Lake Road in Bay Village. This amazing gardener is Julia Shutt. Julia started in advertising but her love of gardening made her switch careers. She is now a well-known landscape designer for Maple Leaf Landscaping Inc.

Julia created a PowerPoint presentation for us called “Are You a Gardening Girl?” It included some facts and tips about gardening. In her PowerPoint, Julia includes 10 reasons to garden:

  1. Partner with nature.
  2. Learn about flowers.
  3. Become exterior designers. I liked that because she showed us a picture of a little fairy garden. The only way you could tell it was tiny was a part of a person’s foot that was in the photo.
  4. Grow organic. People should know that eating fresh, organic foods is better than getting food that had been sitting in the store for a long time. To be organic, you do not use chemicals.
  5. Use sun power.
  6. Reuse and recycle.
  7. Notice how things grow.
  8. Just be outdoors.
  9. Get creative ideas like making art out of natural things.
  10. Plant what’s beautiful.

Between Julia’s lesson and a Lake Erie Nature and Science Center Girl Scout class the next day, our troop earned a flower badge. Now, I know a lot about flowers that I didn’t know before! 

Kendall Thomas

I am a 4th grader at Westerly School. I am a Junior Girl Scout in troop 77104.

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Volume 4, Issue 24, Posted 10:32 AM, 11.27.2012