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An excerpt from:
A Child's Garden
60 Ideas to Make Any Garden Come Alive for Children
A Child's Garden
To thrive children need complex environments. That much we adults have figured out. And in our attempts to help our children achieve success in an ever more complex world, we try to fill their lives with good things — challenging schooling, enriching extracurricular activities, high-powered computers, developmentally appropriate toys. When our children clamor to go outside, we erect swing sets and slides for them, enroll them in team sports, take them to zoos and adventure parks. But how often do we provide opportunities for our children to deeply explore their own home grounds? How important are the old childhood pleasures of collecting seed pods, fishing in ditches, making bowers, picking flowers, and climbing trees? What should yards have that will be of value to children?
My childhood was spent in a variety of suburban tract houses with parceled-out yards enclosed by chain-link fences. It could have been a sterile existence, but my dad, a farm-raised son of the South, made each yard into something much more than just a space for swing sets and jungle gyms. On evenings and weekends my brothers and sister and I would play outside while our father tended his roses, lilies, strawberry patches, blackberry bushes, fruit trees, and rows of corn, okra, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, carrots, and pumpkins. His diligent presence instilled in each of us a love of gardening. But beyond that, the long hours we whiled away outdoors as he carried out his methodical work offered us the opportunity to explore our wilder natures, to test more primal urges, to be truer to ourselves as children than we were allowed to be indoors.
Disappearing Outdoor Afternoons
Long hours of unstructured outdoor exploration are a fast-vanishing aspect of contemporary childhood. Fearing for our children's safety in a more dangerous world than we parents grew up in and frenetically busy with our own lives, many of us today are unwittingly cutting off children from seminal life experiences available only during lazy outdoor afternoons. We promote the idea that the important business of real life happens only in offices and classrooms — not in yards, fields, and forests. And in answer to children's inevitable curiosities about nature we offer them books, television shows, and computer learning programs instead of taking them outside to touch, feel, and smell the real thing.
Not so long ago parents and children knew their own outdoor territories intimately. Parents passed on knowledge about useful plants and poisonous ones, safe places and dangerous ones, interesting geological formations and pulsating waterways. But that has changed. Now we worry about the dangers of our children's climbing habits, the study time lost to outdoor play, and the threats of car traffic and strangers — and we tell our children to come inside.
Parents worry that something is wrong with children, especially boys, when they cannot sit still and focused in a classroom for hours at a time deciphering and manipulating symbols. However, scores of studies show that natural environments heighten mental acuity, diminish stress, and even speed physical healing. Sick people who spend time in nature recover more quickly, require less medication and follow-up treatment, and report more interest in work and new projects than patients who do not. People under extreme stress suddenly become calmer in a natural setting: their blood pressure and heart rate drop dramatically while their ability to focus mentally increases. There is even evidence that nature's ever-changing cycles — full of visual, olfactory, and physical complexity — can increase intelligence. People and animals in complex, constantly changing environments show an increase in the number and complexity of the neural connections in their brains: they become smarter. Conversely, creatures in stagnant environments show a decrease in neural complexity: they become both more listless and more violent.
Human beings simply seem wired to work better mentally, physically, and emotionally with steady infusions of nature. Researchers say that this is because we are genetically predisposed to feel most fully at ease in environments that would have facilitated survival for the earliest human ancestors. Wide-open grassy spaces with scattered trees cause children to laugh and run and sing and play. The African savannah, which has exactly these qualities — wide sight lines to keep watch for predators and scattered trees indicating the presence of life-sustaining water — has been shown to be the favored landscape of people in every culture but especially children younger than twelve. Children are inclined to recoil from dark, enclosed spaces where their instincts tell them that predators could easily lurk. Many other human responses — anxiety when confronted with snakes, spiders, and growling animals, pleasure in the presence of verdant vegetation and bubbling water — have been shown to be so constant in every culture, particularly in young children, that researchers presume them to be genetically based.
Young children can offer adults a passage back into a world where intuition reigns supreme, says Charles Lewis, a horticulturist who has spent his career studying human responses to nature. Lewis complains that the last century of scientific advances has led to a society "so dependent on the organizing side of our brain that we've forgotten how legitimate it is to be open to our mind's intuitive responses to the world." But there is a critical timeline for "tuning in" to one's intuition. By the age of twelve, children will have experienced the vast majority of the "biologically prepared learning," in which innate responses to environmental stimuli provoke unforgettable cognitive imprints, says Lewis. So what are the implications when children, generation after generation, receive more "intuition input" during these critical years from the cleanly choreographed, ever-captivating, physically nonthreatening worlds of television, computers, and books than from physical experiences in the world of nature itself?
My mother tells me that I first learned to talk at the age of eighteen months during a visit to my uncle's farm in Kentucky. The environment there, which I would visit time and again throughout my growing-up years, was so complex — full of smells, varied land forms, and mesmerizing creatures. I remember a scooped-out pond surrounded by mud in which pigs, ducks, and geese joyously wallowed. The strange pungency of the air, the frighteningly gigantic hogs, the mysterious, billowy grasses, the ancient wells and water pumps, barns and outbuildings, and varied fences in different states of repair still fill my senses. Obviously there was much to talk about!
Children's Gardens Past
What is the best outdoor environment for children? Is it one in which they climb on exercise equipment or cavort in gardens, play with prefabricated toys or hunt for natural treasures, spend all afternoon swinging or care for animals? Is it one in which they have freedom to explore or are guided by adults? Such questions arose in nineteenth-century Europe as industrialization swept families away from the countryside and into crowded cities.
German educators and social reformers of the time were among the first to create children's playgrounds. They did so in the belief that city children suffered physically, intellectually, and morally when deprived of the riches of outdoor life so accessible to children in the country. (Remember the story of Heidi?) Friedrich Froebel, the German educator who invented the first kindergarten — literally "garden of children" — in 1837, promoted the idea that young children's play yards should distill the most edifying aspects of country life. Froebel's kindergarten yards were filled with plants, animals, building materials, simple props, and well-trained teachers who guided children through experiential lessons in the physical world. On Froebel's heels in the 1880s, German social reformers created the first public children's "sand gardens" by placing heaps of sand in public parks in Berlin. Such models— in which urban children had opportunities to garden, care for animals, explore nature, build their own creations, and play in sand — began sprouting copies in cities throughout the world.
But by the early twentieth century the outdoor play movement had turned a different corner. Exercise equipment from industrial-sized swings to slides and jungle gyms became the primary focus. Hundreds of iron-and-steel playgrounds were erected in U.S. cities between 1905 and 1909. Manufactured equipment soon began to dominate all landscapes for children, not just in cities but even, as the century progressed, in the most rural schoolyards, parks, and eventually backyards. The earlier goal of creating naturalistic play yards for urban children had been turned on its head. Now even rural children — those closest to nature — were led to believe that the best places for play were made of metal and concrete.
At the same time that mass-produced equipment was becoming ubiquitous, wealthy Americans were taking a more traditional European approach to their own children's outdoor play. On early-twentieth-century estates the centerpiece of the children's garden was often a multiroom outdoor playhouse in English country, American rustic, Gothic Revival, or mock Tudor style. These fantasy playhouses with tiny, custom-made furniture inside were surrounded by manicured gardens, wildflower meadows, and cleared woods and quite possibly were influenced by the examples laid out in 1908 by the renowned English landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll in her classic book Children and Gardens.
Jekyll recommended that parents offer children a full-scale outdoor playhouse with a kitchen, parlor, pantry, screened porch, fireplace, and working cookstove in which they could practice all aspects of the domestic arts. Jekyll prescribed surrounding gardens with a wide variety of vegetables and flowers that adults should plant and children should learn to tend, harvest, and prepare in the playhouse kitchen for afternoon teas. Many of Jekyll's suggestions are both charming and useful, such as her advice on which tools children should keep and how to use and store them — a "spade, rake, hoe, a little wooden trug-basket, and a blunt weeding knife; a good cutting knife, a trowel, a hand-fork, and a little barrow," to be used equally with both hands for "general dexterity and convenience" and never put away dirty. But if her ideal of the playhouse as a fully functional replica of an adult house seems somewhat excessive today, it must have seemed even more so in her day, when only the wealthiest families could have chosen such an option for their children. Yet such fantastically unattainable landscapes are the ones history has preserved as examples of "children's gardens." No wonder many parents are skeptical of their ability to replicate one in the backyard.
In the late nineteenth century the Green Animals Topiary Garden in Portsmouth, Rhode Island — three acres of California privet, English boxwood, and yew shrubs clipped to resemble camels, birds, teddy bears, overstuffed chairs, spirals, and other whimsical forms — was created by Joseph Carreiro, the Portuguese gardener for the industrialist Thomas Brayton. Green Animals was never intended as a children's garden, although since it was opened to the public in the 1970s children have flocked to it, inflicting great damage on its hundred-year-old shrubs by attempting to interact with what they see as giant green toys. The topiaries of Green Animals have inspired children's garden displays in public gardens for decades. But such "look-but-don'ttouch" gardens are better suited for adults than children, who will always want to touch what appeals to them.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Children's Garden, established in 1914 as the first public teaching garden in the United States, has always offered children the opportunity to touch as well as to learn the skills and discipline of the agricultural arts. It was designed with rows on rows of five-by-sevenfoot garden beds to be planted, tended, and harvested by teams of school-age "garden partners" working on afternoons and weekends, and it has been enormously popular. The teaching garden continues to draw nature-starved children from New York City to its verdant plots and has inspired the establishment of other such gardens nationwide.
Victory gardens in American backyards during World War II firmly established the idea in many people's minds that the best garden for children was a utilitarian one, where lessons about industry, thrift, and nurture could be learned through the tilling of practical plots. But as the war years gave way to the prosperous 1950s, a new backyard philosophy began to emerge. Landscape designers such as Thomas Church in California created a new aesthetic for outdoor living that stressed low-maintenance plantings chosen to withstand the neglect of busy families and large paved and decked areas for outdoor relaxing, entertaining, and children's play. For Church and his disciples, the garden became "an informal outdoor living room filled with deck chairs, tables, and swings, more social than horticultural in its intention." One legacy of this low-maintenance philosophy, visionary as it was at its inception, has been the proliferation of American yards devoid of complexity. Most families now follow a fairly standard formula: shrubs and flowers around the house's foundation, a grassy yard speckled with a few trees, a deck or patio for outdoor meals, and a swing or climbing set for the children. Yet so much more than this is possible.
Today, more than one hundred fifty years after the outdoor ideals of "kindergarten" were first articulated, children's gardens for play are finally beginning to sprout anew in public gardens, museums, schoolyards, hospitals, and parks across the United States. In these places a new generation of children is discovering the joys of outdoor play in miniature forests, dinosaur gardens, and bat caves. Some of the children's gardens to which parents can look for examples to emulate on their own soil include the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York, home to the venerable children's garden that has opened an innovative discovery section; the Michigan 4-H Children's Garden at Michigan State University in East Lansing, whose sixty theme gardens make it among the most creative American children's playscapes; Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, with one of the first interactive children's landscapes in the United States; George Washington's River Farm in Alexandria, Virginia, administered by the American Horticultural Society, a rich complex with ten children's demonstration gardens; the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a new interactive garden with water features, a maze, and a gigantic tree-stump lookout; and the expansive New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, which provides teaching plots that local children cultivate throughout the year as well as a Family Garden adventure area. The Botanical Garden's new Everett Children's Adventure Garden is the largest and most comprehensive children's landscape in the United States — eight acres for learning and play.
At the close of a century dominated by manufacturing and technology, people have become hungry for ways to reembrace nature. And the garden is again emerging as one of the most compelling outdoor play spaces that adults can create for children.
Child's Play
How do children really play outside when adults let them do what they want to do? What outdoor elements are inherently captivating to children? Like children's literature and films, the best children's gardens are those that appeal as much to parents as to their offspring because they touch some universal chord born in childhood. In other words, the best children's gardens will always be places that parents can fully enjoy too.
That said, a child's garden should definitely not be designed around adult preferences. Adults love fragrant plots and viewing gardens, planned to delight the olfactory and visual nerves but not intended to be climbed into, picked with abandon, and rolled around in. A child's garden should be a place where children are allowed to run, play, climb, and freely experience natural materials and bodily sensations. Flowers and berries for picking can be planted in exuberant swaths, with paths made perhaps of yellow bricks winding through their beds. Climbing trees and hiding bushes should camouflage every corner. Miniature forests and meadows can be planted, miniature hills mounded, places for digging and constructing set aside. Rabbit hutches and doghouses should be designed with whimsical flair instead of utilitarian drudge. And water is essential — it is children's (not to mention adults') favorite outdoor feature.
Elemental Considerations
The following nine elements and activities outline how children really play and thrive in the out-of-doors. They also form the groups of examples that make up the heart of the book. There, in part two, are five dozen simple ideas for implementing these basic themes in any garden.
WATER. The eloquent Washington, D.C., garden writer Henry Mitchell once said that probably "the greatest physical joy available to a mortal (over the years and all things considered) is to slop about with water and to stay within sight of it at all times." Even the smallest city garden can accommodate a fountain or a small pool to feed children's primal need to see, hear, and feel water's clear, cool essence.
CREATURES. Children are captivated by living faces. They love to touch animals far more than any inanimate object (plants included, alas). Petting zoos figured this out a long time ago. Environmentally sensitive backyard gardens will attract wild visitors. And artfully designed pet houses can enhance a garden's appeal to both adults and children.
REFUGES. One of the most universal activities of childhood is to create caves, houses, dens, and fortresses from found materials. All people, children in particular, seek out nestlike places that provide complete camouflage but that offer some "window" to keep watch for predators. Playhouses, willow nests, vegetable bowers, and miniature forests can all serve as safe, mysterious children's havens.
DIRT. Dirt, sand, sticks, and stones are articles that many parents are loathe to let their children experiment with outside. But according to playground theorists, these "loose parts" of nature are among children's favorite things. They are the raw materials through which children can create outdoor worlds from their own imaginations — instead of relying on slick, adult-conceived prefabricated playthings.
HEIGHTS. Children love to survey a terrain from the highest point they can find. Climbing to the top of a mountain, traversing the winding stairs of a castle, shooting up the bullet elevator of a skyscraper — ascending to the top of something tall is a thrill. Children's gardens should have climbing trees, tree houses, or rooftop perches to satisfy this need to be on the top of their world.
MOVEMENT. Children are joyfully physical beings, far more so than adults. They love to run, twirl, dance, jump, slide, swing, and roll down hills, usually laughing and screaming all the while. Parents need to make room mentally and physically for children to move. Grassy play areas, winding pathways, and places for jumping all fill the bill.
MAKE-BELIEVE. Trying on a variety of roles is the most important work of childhood. Only through play can children visualize themselves as the adventurers, explorers, nurturers, discoverers, and artists they will eventually become. Landscapes where whimsical images greet children at various turns can fuel their creative play even further. Imagine turning a corner to be greeted by a tree growing in the shape of a heart or finding a maze that leads to a secret nest. Adults should pepper outdoor spaces with such surprises.
NURTURE. Children can learn to take care of their own outdoor patch of the world, but usually only with subtle, clear-sighted guidance from an adult. Planting spaces can range from containers on balconies or decks, to rectangular plots in a yard, to free-range seed scattered throughout an entire outdoor space. Pickable flowers, thornless berries, and miniature vegetables are highly child-friendly choices.
LEARNING. Children are constantly learning even when they think they are just having fun. Theme gardens with plants related to something that holds a particular fascination for children can seduce them into hours of self-propelled nature study. A garden of plants that flourished during the age of dinosaurs, a Jack and the Beanstalk garden of quick-vining beans, a planted area based on a town or community's own local history, or an alphabet garden — from A (for aster) to Z (for zinnia) — can teach even the youngest children lessons based on real physical experiences.
Gateways Back to Nature
Young children use the natural environment to become familiar with the mechanics of their own bodies. As they grow, nature serves as a science lab cum theater where they test out principles about the world their bodies inhabit. When large numbers of children cease to experience physical learning outdoors in the informality of their own home territory, what does it mean for society as a whole?
Most children today no longer know the names, uses, and histories of the plants, animals, landmarks, and waterways that surround their homes. And schoolyards, the last truly communal outdoor spaces available to young people, often lack botanical complexity, many having been stripped, asphalted, and furnished with chain-link fences and play equipment that is sterile if not dangerous to their health and welfare.
If it is true that to care deeply about nature as adults, people must have intimate experiences with nature as children, then the world community faces a huge problem. Humankind's next great challenge will be to devise new ways to preserve and reconstruct the earth's natural systems, although the natural experiences that previously informed every aspect of childhood have been allowed to become nearly extinct.
But parents, grandparents, and other adults can change this — if we tap into children's innate enthusiasm about the natural world as a way of rekindling our own. Together with children we can investigate our neighborhood's social and natural history and its botanical and geological mysteries. We can look to knowledgeable sources: books, maps, animal and plant identification guides, and neighborhood elders to learn unknown names and stories. We can visit children's gardens for more ideas. And then, with all this newfound knowledge and reignited awe, we can create Eden anew — in our own backyards.
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