The Story: The seeds you've started in the trays have started to sprout. Huzzah! Some of them are being more pokey than others and you realize that if you were to wait for more plants to germinate, the early risers would be wilted and smothered by waiting too long in those tiny pods. Good thing you're flexible and don't mind having two different sprout-planting sessions, which wind up being about three weeks apart. Even with two sessions, there is still about a whole tray's worth of pods that never grew anything. In fact, some of them even started to mold, sitting in the miniature greenhouses that those starter trays are. Eventually you just had to face the fact that seeds are so numerous because there is a built-in mortality rate, and dump the dead pods.
Another thing you have to be flexible about is the idea of a neat-looking, organized garden. The idea of having all these lovely little native plants growing up in clearly-labeled sections with pretty hand-painted stones identifying which plants are which is so far from reality that you're laughing at the past you that had the naiveté to think that was even a possibility when children were involved. Kids planted whatever pods they wanted, wherever they wanted, regardless of your suggestions and instructions to plant the ones from this tray here and that tray there. The trays being what you thought they were in the first place was a bit of a gamble because of how the seed-starting session went (that story is here), so it makes sense that the actual planting would be equally disorganized. And the painted stones actually being next to the plants they're labelled for? Forget about it!
The Lesson: Nature is chaos. Embrace it. In the wild, native plants can grow in bunches of the same variety, but they just as frequently grow in heterogeneous communities that look like they were haphazardly thrown there by a bunch of five-year-olds, and this actually creates the biodiversity and balance that all ecosystems need to survive. So, when a bunch of children haphazardly plant your carefully selected native plant species here, there, and everywhere, they're just being true to nature. You may have to rethink what you consider a success, and that the purpose of the butterfly garden is to provide a habitat for endangered monarchs and food for other native pollinators, not to look like it was clipped from a magazine. "Clean" gardens that are more mulch than leaf, gardens that don't have plants growing up around each other, gardens that don't use as much of the space as possible to support plant life, are gardens that don't really contribute anything to the environment. If you're going to spend the time to teach kids about native plants and build a garden at your library, you want that project to pull its weight.
The Resources: Get some cheap hand trowels from your local hardware store and have some gardening gloves on hand. Most of my kids didn't want them, because who doesn't expect dirt on their hands when they're planting? But, it's good to have some for the kids and adults that do want to use them. I brought in extras from home and borrowed some tools from gardening friends as well, because nobody wants to pay for dozens of tools that you're only going to use once or twice a year.
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