Native Plants Take Top Honors At School Garden

Five Lawson Middle School 8th graders, known as The Five Cheeses, dedicated a native garden Thursday in honor of beloved teacher Marilyn Lawson.

The Five Cheeses are Janaye Sakkas plus two sets of twins--Sanika Puranik and Tanaya Puranik, and Mansi Soni and Shivani Soni—who started the project more than a year ago as a Destination ImagiNation project.

Winning regional and state competitions with their presentation they took it to Knoxville, Tennessee for the organization’s Global Finals competition last year.

Destination ImagiNation is a non-profit organization with extracurricular programs to help youth develop creative problem solving skills.

The team chose as their project the problem of native plants disappearing from the region, and started the Lawson Garden Club and developed activities around the problem to help solve it.

They did such things as create a public service announcement for the City of Cupertino, wrote and sang a song which was played on the city’s radio station, planted native plants at and created the Lawson Memorial Garden in a corner of the school in a plot where a tree had died.

Marilyn Lawson, the widow of Sam Lawson, for whom the school is named, was a teacher and an avid gardener who died the week the team got permission to build a garden at the school.

“With the unfortunate passing of Miss Lawson…knowing her love for all the flowering plants, it only seemed right to dedicate this garden to her,” said Tanaya Puranik at the ceremony.

Attending the dedication were Marilyn and Sam Lawson’s son, Jay Lawson, his daughter and her family.