Students from several Newberg High School classes have, under the tutelage of horticulture instructor Peter Siderius, taken on a number of large projects, including planting trees adjacent to the Crater Ball Fields last spring. 

The city of Newberg gets a sweet deal through its partnership with Newberg High School’s greenhouse program.
So do the students.
  
That’s according to Peter Siderius, the high school’s horticulture teacher, master gardener and greenhouse czar. Siderius showed up at a recent city council meeting to encourage the city not to contract out a replacement for its longtime, recently departed landscaper, but to keep the job as a city staff position.
  
The founding principles of the high school’s greenhouse program don’t allow it to work for private companies, Siderius said, adding “If we’re donating plants to the city but someone’s making money off that work, that puts me in a quandary.”
  
The school-city partnership began four years ago with a landscaping project at the fire station on Springbrook Road. Thirty-some students took part. “The next year, the city bought us pizza and we had 100-some kids,” Siderius said.
  
His students have grown thousands of plants for the city over the past four years, including the flowers in its hanging Victorian baskets — another project that started small with just a few baskets’ worth of plants. “Last year, we did 48 baskets around town,” Siderius said. The city would buy the original plants and “we’d grow them for up to three months in the greenhouse.”
  
If the city bought $1,000 worth of starter plants, the greenhouse program gave back $10,000 worth of full-grown plants he said. “For what they got, they would pay a minimal amount.”
  
Last year, Siderius’s students completed a huge project, arranging 6,000 plants around the flagpole at River and First streets and on both sides of Portland Road near Hoover Park. Earlybird Rotary bought the plants for $1 apiece and let the horticulture students nourish them until they were big enough to transplant, Siderius said. “All the plants down the middle of (Portland Road) came from here,” he said.
  
The students take a lot of pride in their work, Siderius said. Many of them have gone on to study or work in environmental science, biology or the nursery industry.
 
Bryan Stewart, the former city landscaper who this month started working for the Chehalem Park and Recreation District, will continue working with the high school’s greenhouse program, and may amp up its partnership with the park district, said Siderius, who doesn’t want the CPRD partnership to simply replace the city’s.
 
“My dream is that (the city will) hire another person, similar to Bryan, that would want to be involved, that’s excited about doing landscaping and would be tied in with our program,” he said. Two Bryan Stewarts would just mean “more plants and more opportunities for kids.”

By: Jill Smith, Newberg Graphic