Horticulture students at Forbes Road Career and Technology Center soon will have a living laboratory where they can learn about plants and how to care for them.
The Monroeville school, which accepts students from nine area districts, plans to develop an arboretum and botanical garden featuring more than a dozen species of trees.
Having living, growing specimens will help the roughly 50 students in the program to more easily identify various plants, said Nicholas Falcon, the school’s assistant director.
“Plant identification has been challenging when you’re doing everything with images on the computer,” Falcon said. “The students will not only identify the plants, but they’ll learn how to cultivate and care for them. They need to learn planting, pruning and health care for the plants.”
The arboretum will be developed in a landscaping area near the entrance to the 48-acre school campus, with nearly $7,500 in state funding.
Some of the trees selected for the project include white fir, sugar maple, downy serviceberry, eastern redbud, flowering dogwood, European beech, Norway spruce and Scotch pine.
Falcon said having the arboretum available should help graduates of the Forbes Road program moving into the job market.
“Our goal is to make them very marketable, with a greater level of understanding,” he said.
