The proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” But for an Addison County project, it’s been more like four villages, two business owners and one artist.
This April break, muralist Matt Denton worked with 80 kids from Bristol, New Haven, Starksboro and Monkton to create a mural on the front of a greenhouse at the Bristol Collaborative Campus.
Locals may know the site as the former home of Pine Tree Gardens, a plant nursery run by the Heffernan family for 64 years. Silas Clark, who grew up in Monkton, purchased the property in 2023. He and his partner, Megan Walsh, rechristened the garden business Bristol Botanical Nursery, which together with their farmstand and a future food-focused nonprofit will occupy the whole campus.
Clark and Walsh envision the property as a community hub. Last summer, they hosted weekly Freshie Fridays featuring food trucks, craft cocktails and live music (the series returns on May 23). To connect with younger community members, they’ve partnered with the Expanded Learning Program offered by the Mount Abraham Unified School District.
The initiative provides afterschool and vacation camp activities that are free for 70 percent of the K-6 kids who attend. The Bristol Collaborative Campus is one of the program’s nearly two dozen community partners. Working with the school district aligns well with Walsh’s vision of supporting her neighbors, she said: “I think everybody in this day and age recognizes that you can’t do it alone.”
The education program brought in Denton, 43, of Corinth, whose goal is to create murals with kids in every Vermont county — he’s up to five so far. His bold, graphic design for the Bristol project pictures the Deer Leap hills, visible looking east over the nursery’s fields; the New Haven River, which runs through Bristol; and two hands symbolizing community.
To match the greenhouse’s 30-by-12-foot curved façade, Denton mapped out the image on plywood panels that fit together like puzzle pieces, assigning colors to different sections. He said setting it up like a paint-by-numbers kit makes large-scale painting more accessible to kids. At the outset, he jokingly told them, “My No. 1 goal is to have fun — the second is staying in the lines.”
The kids painting on a recent afternoon had no trouble with that task. Avery Wells, Raegan Hill and Holland Davison(11, 9 and 10, respectively) meticulously delineated the edges of an orange section, offering slight corrections to what their peers had done. Meanwhile, five-year-old Declan Demars was engaged in applying rapid, flitting brushwork over a dark blue swath. Part of Denton’s secret sauce is to have the kids build up the image with thin layers of paint and small brushes, allowing many hands to get in on the action.
In an email celebrating completion of the mural last Friday, education program director Mandy Chesley-Park stressed the importance of this kind of community-based activity for kids: “Research tells us that when students feel like they belong to a place, they are more likely to succeed academically, take pride in their surroundings, and return home as contributors.”
Research aside, 11-year-old Wells of New Haven offered a different reason for the project’s success: “This is really fun.”
See the mural at Bristol Collaborative Campus, 140 North St., Bristol.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Nursery School: A New Mural Springs Up in Bristol”
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2025.
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