Wild Earth

No matter your age, when you step into BRIDGER HAHN’s outdoor classroom your inner child is awoken. It’s the backyard of imagination and dreams – a tree house sits in a hearty live oak tree, there’s bunnies in the corner, and at the ready is a mud kitchen and flower garden. It recalls childhood when handprints in mud meant art and not clean up. A wild, rugged classroom is a refreshing sight. 

“I get to use nature and the unpredictability of not knowing,” Hahn says. “That’s one thing in a traditional classroom, things are predictable. Here, you walk through a spider web, a wasp swirls, it helps regulate their (the students) nervous system to see, ‘Oh, that wasp won’t hurt me.’ I can see a lot of expansion; it gives me the opportunity to teach spontaneously.”   

Hahn says the parents notice, too. In both her homeschool enrichment and after-school programs through Wild Earth Wonder, the age ranges of five to twelve are children who grew up during the COVID-19 pandemic. She notes parents say their children did not like getting dirty and preferred games on their iPad. Now, they enjoy discovering worms deep in the dirt, their level of tolerance has changed. They can name native plants and animals and are more in tune and patient with the world around them. 

Although the outdoors steers Hahn’s lesson plans, she still looks to the books and storylines from a decade spent teaching elementary education, “I fell in love with classroom management and social-emotional learning; I consider that a huge tool,” she says. “The experience I gained working with different kids, teaching them we’re a community and community begins small and trickles out.” 

Hahn’s journey to education started with the birth of her son. Curious about his elementary school and curriculum, she accepted a teacher’s assistant position and within four years earned her master’s in education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. After moving to Carolina Beach with her family and teaching at Carolina Beach Elementary, she began to feel a nagging for more, particularly during 2020. 

“I had a strong feeling I had to give birth to something,” she says. “That was Full Moon Blooms, and that was my way to put my energy into something else. I started feeling like I had so much more I needed to do, even in the classroom.” 

During this time, Hahn was creating the garden of her dreams and was introduced to hardy annuals – flowers that flourish in cooler temperatures – by a friend. Then, the world shut down and she began making bouquets of said flowers for friends. In this, her second venture bloomed. A chicken and egg moment, her knack for nature led her to discover ancestry tied to herbalism. Full Moon Blooms then birthed Bridger’s Botanics, a collection of creams and tinctures derived from the earth and her garden. 

“There’s Wild Earth Wonder, the education component, and Full Moon Blooms,” she says. “But Bridger’s Botanics, I wanted to use my name for that in honor of the women that came before me. We have gathered around plants and relied on plants to sustain and heal us; we all have that lineage.”

To view more of photographer Aris Harding’s work, go to arisharding.com.

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