Peter Grove, 82, of Narberth, longtime award-winning science teacher at Friends’ Central Lower School in Wynnewood, former executive director of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project in West Kensington, lifelong environmentalist and conservationist, prolific writer, lecturer, British Special Air Service Reserve veteran, mentor, and world traveler, died Wednesday, May 6, of age-associated decline at his home.
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Reared in rural Surrey, England, Mr. Grove arrived in Philadelphia in 1972 and spent the next 45 years teaching science, horticulture, and civic responsibility to students young and old. He also mentored other teachers and fellow naturalists, and created dozens of notable community gardens and wildlife habitats around the region.
“Gardening,” he told The Inquirer in 1986,“is a real way to bring about change.”
He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and education at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, and joined the Friends’ Central Lower School faculty in 1987. Until his retirement in 2017, Mr. Grove taught thousands of preschool and elementary school-age students at Friends’ Central about gravity, butterflies, bees, birds, mold, trees, and other scientific wonders.
He was a gifted young student of horticulture back at the old Surrey County Merrist Wood Farm Institute in the 1950s and ‘60s, and he dreamed up dozens of riveting scientific demonstrations for his students. They launched hot air balloons, waded in streams to study fungi, and traversed fields and woods on orienteering treasure hunts.
They even pulled his car up a hill every year with a scientific pulley system. “He made learning come alive,” a colleague said in a tribute.
Outside his brick-and-mortar classroom, Mr. Grove and generations of students landscaped much of Friends’ Central’s Lower School campus on Old Gulph Road. They designed fish ponds, a bird blind, a bridge, and flower and vegetable teaching gardens.
In 1995, they collaborated with students at Overbrook School for the Blind to make a fragrance and texture garden for blind people. “This was great for our kids,” Mr. Grove told The Inquirer. “They’re all digging and working, and making new friends, and learning about a different kind of school.”
Before Friends’ Central, Mr. Grove taught second graders at the Miquon School in Montgomery County. He was also an adjunct science professor at Rosemont College in the 1990s, a summer camp science instructor for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. in the early 2000s, and a science instructor for Penn’s Teach for America program from 2007 to 2010.
In 1981, he became executive director of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project and supervised the building of a solar greenhouse in 1983 and the cleanup of Norris Square Park in 1985. “Everything we do here is slanted toward the neighborhood,” he told The Inquirer in 1983. “It’s all aimed at being able to produce something, do something, or find something.”
He was also an award-winning lifetime honorary board member at the Riverbend Environmental Education Center in Gladwyne and onetime president of the Narbrook Park Improvement Association. During a sabbatical from teaching one year, he volunteered in Costa Rica to protect leatherback turtle eggs from poachers.
He earned a lifetime achievement award from the Lower Merion Township Environmental Advisory Council, was a semifinalist for the National Science Teachers Association’s Teacher of the Year Award, and received more than a dozen other honors.
Inspired by the film Around the World in Eighty Days, he signed on with a Norwegian oil tanker in 1966, bicycled across North America for two years, and returned to Europe on a Swedish oil tanker in 1968. He then hitchhiked to India, worked for two years on agricultural improvements for underserved communities, and met his future wife, Nancy Greene, a longtime Philadelphia resident.
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Amazingly, she was also inspired by Around the World in Eighty Days and on her own global road trip. After India, Mr. Grove moved on to construction jobs in New Zealand and Australia. He finally settled in Philadelphia and married Greene in 1976.
For the next 50 years, the two adventurers hiked trails in Borneo and New Zealand, and climbed Mount Kenya and Mount Kinabalu. “I was his biggest supporter,” his wife said.
Born June 1, 1943, Peter Adrian Grove grew up in Send, a village about 28 miles southwest of London. He connected with nature as a boy, worked as a landscaper and carpenter in the early 1960s, and spent two years in the British Special Air Service Reserve.
He earned an associate’s degree in English and biology in 1974 at Montgomery County Community College, and his bachelor’s degree at Penn in 1976 and master’s degree there in 1977. He constantly wrote and recorded audio clips about his life and adventures, and he shared those tales enthusiastically in school and at public events.
He and his wife had a son, Evan, and a daughter, Marian, and lived in Fitler Square and then Narberth. He doted on his children and grandchildren, and bonded with his dogs.
Mr. Grove constantly whipped up candlelit gourmet dinners for his family. He was funny, everyone said, and he loved to sing, dance, and fish.
He called himself a simple man despite his many achievements and lived with cancer for years. “He was,” his wife said, “quite simply one of a kind.”
In addition to his wife and children, Mr. Grove is survived by five grandchildren and other relatives. Two sisters died earlier.
A celebration of his life is to be livestreamed on YouTube.com at 1 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 8, at Wayne Presbyterian Church, 125 E. Lancaster Ave., Wayne, Pa. 19087.
Donations in his name may be made to Friends’ Central School, 228 Old Gulph Rd., Wynnewood, Pa. 19096; the Lower Merion Conservancy, 1301 Rose Glen Rd., Gladwyne, Pa. 19035; and Friends of the Earth, Box 7010, Merrifield, Va. 22116.
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