Support Your Local Daisies

Jennifer Polanz

About a year ago I saw a small ad in my daughter’s school e-newsletter for Girl Scouts. I’ll let you in on a little secret—I always wanted to be a Brownie when I was a kid. The sashes and beanies were pretty cool, and they always went to their meetings after school, emerging with some neat craft or new badge to iron on the aforementioned sashes.

Girl Scouts teaches young girls some great lessons, including how to be themselves and how to make a difference in the world. What I didn’t know until last year is the “new” first step (since the 1980s) is the Daisy level, named after the nickname of Juliette “Daisy” Gordon Low. These are kindergarten and first grade girls. My daughter joined as a first-grader, and by default, I joined as a troop co-leader.

Why does this matter to you? Because imagine my surprise when I found out one of the “journeys”—a set curriculum to get the Daisies started in Girl Scouts—is told entirely through flowers. The journey is called “Welcome to the Daisy Flower Garden” and the goal is to teach the Girl Scout Law to the youngest members by way of flowers to make it more memorable. For example, one line of the law is to “respect authority,” which is represented through Gerri the Geranium. Another is to “use resources wisely” just like Clover. And yet one more is to “be a sister to every Girl Scout” like Vi the Violet. There are 10 Girl Scout laws and 10 flowers, with stories about the flowers to go with each. When the girls learn all the laws and complete activities for those, they earn the petals that go on their vest.

It seems to me there are some great tie-ins that garden retailers could do with the Girl Scouts to promote and encourage these activities. The Girl Scouts encourage Community Service and Take Action projects within the local community to help clean up and beautify cities and towns. In that respect, troops or even whole service units (a group of troops within one city) could get involved with the community America In Bloom program if they participate or even a special beautification project that ties into their local schools.

Garden centers can be a resource by which the girls can earn their badges by offering Daisy-specific educational sessions that work the laws into planting activities and lessons about using resources wisely. In our Daisy troop, we did a simple basil-planting project (thank you Petitti’s Garden Center in Mentor, Ohio, for donating the seeds!) to show the girls how to plant. They took them home and watched them sprout, coming back to our meetings to talk about what was happening with their little basil plants. The sheer enjoyment they got just from planting seeds was worth a little bit of mess.

The involvement doesn’t stop when the girls move on from the Daisy level, though. In each age bracket there’s a naturalist badge that corresponds to nature, either via bugs, flowers, trees or water. In fact, I just wrote a story a year ago for a local publication about an older Girl Scout troop that renovated a greenhouse for a local senior center so they could grow their own herbs and vegetables there.

My point is, there are many opportunities for local garden centers to team up with Girl Scout troops to provide education, help with Take Action projects and foster a love of nature all at the same time. At the Daisy level (kindergarten and first grade) they love to dig in the dirt. And it’s a great age for them to begin a lifelong love affair with gardening.

Most Girl Scout activities take place at the local level. There is a ZIP code locator on the national Girl Scouts website, www.girlscouts.org. Type in your ZIP to find your area council, which can direct you to troops in your town. It’s a journey you won’t regret. GP