About the Garden

In 2006, the newly formed Friends of Carthay Center booster club secured funding for the Garden of Possibilities. Composed of parents and community members, the group envisioned the garden as a tool to enhance student learning and engage school families and neighbors in community service. With a $10,000 matching Beautification Grant from the City of Los Angeles, parents, teachers, students, community members, and Master Gardeners transformed an unused campus area into a vibrant garden in a year. This project symbolizes a successful partnership between the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Carthay community.

Spanning 5,000 square feet adjacent to the main play yard, the garden features dedicated raised beds for each grade level and various in-ground plots. It includes a stone fruit orchard, Citrus Orchard, Tropical Garden, Butterfly Garden, and Poetry Garden, with seasonal plantings of flowers and herbs. Students enjoy growing papaya, bitter melon, luffa, bananas, grapes, pea shoots, pumpkins, mulberries, watermelon, mustard greens, and arugula flowers.

Since its establishment, the Garden of Possibilities has become central to the school’s identity, chosen by Carthay teachers and administrators as the focal point for the School for Environmental Studies program.

In 2024, Carthay PTA was awarded a $40,000 grant from Partnerships for Growth LA’s Freedom Farm’s program. The focus of these funds is to refurbish areas of the existing garden, install new tower gardens and other beds, and produce more edible food to distribute to the Carthay and local community.

Carthay is the only school in LAUSD selected by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) to host a BioSCAN sampling station, as part of a large-scale insect biodiversity survey across part of the Los Angeles Basin as part of a new research initiative: NHM Biodiversity Science: City and Nature (NHM BioSCAN) . This first-of-its-kind scientific investigation will discover and explore biodiversity in and around one of the world’s largest cities: Los Angeles. In three years of sampling from the urban core right out through less-urban surrounding areas, Carthay will help NHM focus on the insects, the most diverse group of animals on our planet. We will discover and document the diversity of insect species living with us in Los Angeles as well as test intriguing hypotheses about how natural areas around the city affect its biodiversity and, conversely, how urban areas may be affecting their surroundings. As a result of Carthay’s participation in the BioSCAN project, a previously unknown insect was found on the Carthay campus!