Brooklyn Center ESL teacher creates Tiger Sanctuary to offer children a place to engage with nature, feel safe

Tanya Novak noticed that many of her elementary students could identify just two flowers: roses and tulips. She hopes that her latest labor of love will change that.

Since last fall, Novak estimates she's spent at least 120 hours working in what she's calling the "Tiger Sanctuary," a garden on the grounds of Evergreen Park Elementary in Brooklyn Center, where the school mascot is a tiger.

Before she took over, the space was overgrown and untended. These days, it's awash with peony bushes, hibiscus plants, lilies and coneflowers. Tucked between the plants sit several plastic and rubber tiger figurines that Novak found on eBay.

The figurines are what triggered the idea for the little sanctuary. Novak, an avid gardener, was looking online for some statuary for her home garden and wondered if she could find a tiger figurine to bring to Evergreen Park, where she's an ESL teacher. (She quickly realized that most garden statues are in the shape of bunnies, Buddha or gnomes.)

"I knew that our students needed something playful and joyous after a year of distance and hybrid teaching during the pandemic," she said.

The project became all the more important this spring, after Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a Brooklyn Center police officer during a traffic stop in April. The school is about a half mile from the Brooklyn Center Police Department, which became ground zero for mass demonstrations and clashes between law enforcement and protesters.

Many Evergreen Park students live in the apartments directly across from the police department, where residents were traumatized by the commotion right outside their doors. Many of them found marking rounds on their balconies and stuffed wet towels around doors and windows to try to keep out the clouds of tear gas.

Novak, 62, also hopes that the garden can serve as a classroom. She envisions it as a spot where teachers lead lessons about counting or colors. Older students could be encouraged to utilize their observation and research skills on topics related to conservation and ecology. Maybe it could even spur the creation of a gardening club where students could learn about different types of plants and what conditions they need to grow.

For her own students, Novak plans to use the Tiger Sanctuary as a way to introduce herself and her passion for gardening.

The roots of Novak's hobby go back to her childhood, when she helped her mother plant and weed and water. As she became an adult, she realized her own interest in growing things and using gardening as a way to connect with her community.

The Tiger Sanctuary, which includes about six plots and is the size of an average front yard, isn't Novak's first public garden. She planted one on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s and she cultivated another at her apartment complex when she was living and teaching in Germany.

Gardening also comes with layers of metaphors for teaching and for life, Novak said. Caring for the Tiger Sanctuary has reminded her about a garden's way of demonstrating the cycles of life: The flowers she's planted often bloom at different times and then seed before going into their own period of rest.

So far, Novak has tended to the garden almost entirely by herself. A maintenance employee at the school helped with trimming some old lilac bushes, but she's otherwise planted and cared for the garden on her own.

She used her stimulus check to buy most of the plants and now spends about seven hours a week watering. The sanctuary offered a way to stay busy over the summer and even helped Novak lose some weight. ("Don't ever let a doctor tell you that gardening isn't exercise," she joked.)

"It's been a way for me to give something of myself to the kids that they may not fully appreciate now but they might in the future," she said.

Though the plants are still small and the school year hasn't started, Novak knows the garden is already a go-to destination for families in the neighborhood.

How does she know?

Mara Klecker • 612-673-4440