Griffin Brown, a 14-year-old Malibu High School student, didn’t spend this summer at the beach the way most teenagers did. Instead, he embarked on an adventure that he will long remember.

Griffin set sail in Boston aboard the Spirit of Massachusetts, a 125-foot two-masted schooner built in 1984 for the Ocean Classroom. The ship is a replica of the high-speed Fredonia, a renowned 19th century Gloucester fishing schooner.

Bound for the Canadian Maritime Provinces via New England, Griffin was a participant of the Ocean Classroom’s Summer Term 2001 at Sea, the nation’s only fully accredited high school at sea program.

Recognizing his mother, Cathy Caballero, for discovering this challenging and educational sailing experience in Atlantic Monthly Magazine, Griffin wasn’t sure what he was in for when he decided to participate.

“The voyage turned out to be harder than I expected,” confesses the young teenager, who was gone for six weeks, “because it was a lot of work. There was so much to learn about sailing and I was responsible to keep up with my academic work, too.”

The Ocean Classroom is a complete semester at sea for high school students and post-graduates, fully accredited by Proctor Academy of Andover New Hampshire and offered in cooperation with South Street Seaport Museum and the Allied Whale Research Center. Grades, credits and transcripts are sent to the student’s high school. It has received national awards for excellence in education.

No stranger to the sea, Griffin grew up in Malibu, surfing since age 11, and has always had an appreciation for the ocean.

Right from the start, the 16 students he set sail with became a team. The 10 girls and six boys, ages 14-19, gathered in small groups to study marine science, maritime history, navigation, whaling history and research, as well as the fisheries of the regions, while calling at 10 ports. Their first landing was at St. John’s, Newfoundland, with more stops at fisheries in the Gulf of Maine, Bay of Fundy, St. Pierre and Lunenburg. Essential to learning was the history of the many ports visited.

A typical day on his seafaring journey was an early rise for six hours of morning watch with the professional crew, handling sails, hauling lines, navigating and steering within the traditions of the tall ships.

Next came three hours of demanding class study, collecting information, preparation for marine science projects, literature lessons and discussions, ship responsibilities, homework assignments, socializing and the long-awaited time to sleep.

“The ocean was the medium for learning, adventure and travel for each student’s personal discovery,” relates faculty member Devri Byrom, who specializes in marine science education and has been a major contributor to the courses of the Ocean Classroom and a leader in underwater research expeditions.

Detailing that students had a comprehensive study load at sea that included sea-related literature, with reading and discussion of Kipling’s “Captain Courageous” and Farley Mowat’s “The Boat That Wouldn’t Float,” she mentioned that sea poetry and sea shanties were learned and sung, too.

“Although Griffin was one of the youngest students, he was an active participant,” said Byron. “He and his partner, Victoria Ford from Tennessee, created an outstanding mixed-media replica of a traditional whaling vessel from gathered pieces of bark, collected on beaches, intermingled with toothpicks, then glued and varnished.”

She added, “Griffin was an able-bodied deck hand, who found personal satisfaction with navigation skills and seamanship.”

Although he thought the voyage quite long, “The whole trip will affect my life,” stated Griffin. “It made me more interested in sailing and more knowledgeable about the sea. I will always remember the excitement I felt when I climbed to the top of the mast to tend the sails. I also learned time management, as a way to balance learning, sailing, homework and sleep.”

His fascination with whales emerged into a project relating to issues pertaining to the whaling industry, specifically the humpback whales; conducting interviews in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia with experts in the field. Gloucester, the small fishing port where so many fishermen lost their lives, made a lasting impression on him. As his final project, Griffin developed a term paper on the “Evolution of the Dread Naught Battleship.”

The memory of these authentic sea experiences and the lessons relating to the ocean will remain with this Malibu youth for the rest of his life.

When you’ve walked in Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny, gazed at the lily pads from the Japanese footbridge and marveled at sky-high trellises entwined with roses, it’s hard to come home to Southern California’s arid mountain landscape.

I was actually thinking I could incorporate some of Monet’s planting designs in my garden. Well, not the lily pond, of course–Monet got permission to divert water from a river, for Pete’s sake. First of all, there’s no river nearby, and if there were, getting permission to use some of it would bring enough grief from environmentalists to make me give up gardening altogether. And all those trellises would look pretty stupid on my rugged hillsides. Besides, I’ll bet Monet’s six gardeners never had to deal with gophers.

While I was ogling those magnificent French gardens, the gophers were living high on the hostas, so to speak. Just about everything not planted in chicken wire was doomed. Whole tomato plants, two or three feet tall, just disappeared, sucked whole into the tunnels of death. Perennials and annuals alike met their demise: nemesias, marigolds, Shasta daisies, zinnias, cosmos all gone without a trace. I’ve set Macabee traps till my fingers were bloody, installed sonic harassers that drove only me crazy, pumped their tunnels full of truck exhaust (the carbon monoxide did slow them down a bit) and fed them Juicy Fruit chewing gum in quantities that would choke Godzilla. Nada! Zip! Zilch! Nourished by my organic vegetables, the wretched rodents have flourished.

Anyway, the Monet thing won’t fly here because, duh, no water. Still many of the flowers that thrive there can get along with much less rainfall and irrigation.

So here’s the plan. Think Vertical. Forget seed packets that say space 12 inches apart. Plant those puppies so close together they couldn’t spread if they wanted to. Heaven forbid a little dirt might show in between. Monet’s flowers lean on stakes and trellises and walls and each other. And they grow to astonishing heights. Plain old dahlias, planted three or four to a stake, are eyeball to eyeball with the average 12-year-old. And French gardeners aren’t stuffy about mixing them up socially, so to speak–highbrow roses are at nose level with common sunflowers and lowly geraniums and nasturtiums bloom at their feet. Of course, we would never plant invasive exotics like nasturtiums anyway. Would we? Well, maybe only on a rocky, shady hillside that’s 10 miles from the nearest state park.

Another strategy used in the impressionist’s famous garden is to train flowering shrubs into trees, again to bring the maximum floral effect up to eye level. Solanum (potato vine), its delicate purple flowers and creamy centers, and lantana, in all its various colors, are perfect choices for this design. And raising the planting beds, while enriching the soil, also enhances the vertical effect. In Monet’s day, the beds would have been enriched with manure, courtesy of local livestock (or perhaps his own hens).

Monet’s famous green Japanese bridge has been almost consumed by wisteria vines, which must be spectacular when in full bloom. My experience with wisteria is less glorious. Our old ranch house had a wisteria growing up its south-facing wall that sported flashy violet flowers in late spring. It also scraped the shingles off the roof, poked its tentacles in between the clapboard siding and reached out to touch (and strangle) a flowering plum tree nearby. My advice is to forget the wisteria unless you have an old railroad trestle to hang it on or an ugly shed you want to camouflage. Even then, you may someday have to take an ax to it.

In Monet’s garden, century-old trees create a lovely canopy of dappled shade for begonias and impatiens. Those of us who live in newer houses will not likely be able to duplicate that effect, at least not for a decade or two. But it couldn’t hurt to plant a few sycamore or cottonwood and hope for the best. Bon jardin.