Over the summer, when the heat softened and the sky turned gold, the cross country hill above Western Reserve Academy’s fields held a quiet surprise. Just past the hockey pond, surrounded by tall fencing, a garden hummed with bees. Here, tomatoes and squash ran wild, and basil scented the breeze. Up the paths worn smooth by runners’ strides, Lydia Lockwood ’26 would make the journey, uncoiling a hose that runs all the way from Chief Innovation Officer Matt Gerber’s home.
Fingers would press into the soil, gently brush through the droop of leaves, before she’d begin the slow, meditative work of watering each bed while the golden summer sun would slide behind the trees.
All summer, Lydia made this climb — sometimes with her mother after dinner, but often alone — tending the school’s new community garden.
“I wasn’t part of the original planting,” she explained. “That was the agricultural engineering class. But I raised my hand to care for it over the summer. Watering, harvesting, making sure everything was tended to.”
Some weeks, rainstorms did the job. Other weeks, she was there, about 35 minutes per visit, twice a week, never at noon, always when the light softened.
For Lydia, this was less a chore than a calling. She’s an alumna of Old Trail School, where composting and garden-keeping are a part of school curriculum and culture. But her love of gardening began even earlier. “Growing up, my family always tried to have a vegetable garden. I remember picking cherry tomatoes, washing them and seeing what we could do with them for dinner. This felt like that, just on a larger scale.” She sees the practice as a full-circle relationship, symbiotic, where intention feeds back into the product.
That understanding now flows into her Compass Project, WRA’s signature program in which students design their own initiatives across civic and global engagement, science and technology, arts and culture, and entrepreneurship. Lydia originally wanted to tackle food waste in the dining hall, but ultimately decided to start (aptly) at the roots: education. Lydia is designing guides to sustainable eating and farm-to-table intentionality, with plans to craft print materials for easy dispersal and digital content for broader reach and accessibility. Over the summer, the garden became a living laboratory for these ideas, a visible answer to the question of where food comes from and what happens to it when we don’t waste it.
“There’s something about touching soil, working with the ground, that makes me feel centered,” she said. “I always feel fresh after working in the garden, which sounds silly because in reality, I’m actually dirty — with dirt literally under my nails!”
She also shared that the physical plant of the garden has personal resonance and good memories. She remembers playing in the valley as a kid, climbing the hill on many childhood adventures. Tending garden here feels like yet another full-circle moment, a return to roots and a chance to grow.
At Reserve, “return to roots” is more than a figure of speech in this context. In the late 1910s, the school’s Evamere Farms stretched across the school’s grounds, with an agricultural department embedded into the academy curriculum. The 1916-17 School Catalogue lists a Department of the Domestic Arts, housed on the ground floor of Seymour Hall, with a “built-in” house, complete with a kitchen classroom, where students learned to cook, preserve and manage household economies. A century later, as the school nears its Bicentennial in 2026, the sight of a student tending tomatoes on the cross country hill looks less like novelty, and more like rediscovery.
Lydia’s work also foreshadows a larger movement taking root at WRA. The Center for Food Science, Sustainability and Service, seeded by a grant from The Edward E. Ford Foundation, represents an ambitious new direction for the school. Inspired by programs at leading universities, the CFISS is designed to bring college-level scholarship into the secondary-school setting. Through new courses like Anthropology of Food Systems and Agricultural Engineering, students engage in interdisciplinary studies of some of our most pressing global issues: how we feed ourselves, how to steward our resources, and how service and community intersect with both.
In that light, Lydia’s twice-weekly climbs up the cross country hill read less like a summer responsibility and more like a pilot program in miniature: one student, one patch of land, an experiment in connecting academic inquiry with tangible service. The summer proved fruitful, with watermelons, squash, tomatoes and basil in abundance (the tomatoes and basil are still growing wild and strong, and a new pumpkin patch is sprouting, proud and sprawling). Not everything was a success — corn proved surprisingly difficult to grow.
“Gardening teaches you patience,” said Lydia. “And persistence. It doesn’t always work out, but when that happens — like if the plant dies — you just have to uproot it, and move on. It’s a lesson you can apply, really anywhere.”
Lydia dreams of a future garden where herbs and vegetables — root and leafy greens — and berries grow by seasonal chapters, well into the late summer and fall season, so returning students can experience the produce in real time. Maybe even a chicken or two, clucking merrily around the grounds. (Living pest patrol!) Inside the high fence walls, where many raised beds now sit empty, you can envision what she describes, close enough you can almost taste it.
Still, the empty soil beds hold a story. As you walk through the garden with Lydia, you can’t help but pluck a few fresh basil leaves (because even now, it feels like the garden doesn’t want you to leave empty handed). Pride and excitement are as palpable as the buzzing of well-fed bees in the air. What began as an act of stewardship has become a glimpse of the future WRA envisions: a campus where learning and service share the same garden bed, and where a student like Lydia can water an idea until it grows into something larger than herself.
