Objectives
Engage children in nature and help them learn to enjoy playing outdoors
Provide easy and inexpensive ideas that parents can use in their own backyards to get the kids outside and interested in the plants around them
Create a natural space for families to enjoy together by providing benches and a gazebo (built by Parkland College students) with a “Little Library” where children and their caregivers can rest and read a book, or just enjoy the garden.
We encourage kids to use all of their senses in the garden by growing plants that they are invited to smell, taste, and touch. We choose plants that are durable and child-appropriate. Plants are often picked, stomped, or sat-on. We find things relocated, destroyed, or sometimes missing. That’s just part of gardening with kids!
Highlights
The Secret Tunnel with vines growing over the lattice. Kids gravitate toward this and it makes a great photo op as they come out at the opening!
The Fairy Garden is full of fun but inexpensive treasures like acorns, shells, feathers, and felt butterflies. We make fairies from silk flowers, beads, acorns, and pipe cleaners, which are an easy craft for kids to do at home.
The Living Playhouse is made by growing Black-eyed Susan Vines up a teepee-like structure simply made with bamboo poles.
The Petite Prairie is full of native prairie plants and a path of stumps to walk or hop on between the grasses.
Sensory pots are filled with lavender, chocolate mint, soft moss, black and white petunias, and crunchy strawflowers for the kids to experience with all of their senses.
The Plant Zoo is a bed full of plants that have leaves or blossoms that resemble parts of different animals. They are all named for the animals that they remind us of. Many are fun to touch, like the bunny tails, lamb’s ears, cock’s combs, and snapdragons.
Lucky Duck topiary is made by trimming a boxwood bush. She is looking across the dry creek bed toward a smaller boxwood that is in the process of becoming a baby duck.
The Living Roof of the shelter is now planted with sedum to create a more sustainable, but still colorful rooftop. Sedum spreads to make a great ground cover that is hardy, drought resistant, and crowds out weeds. These features make it great for a roof and reduce the number of times that we need to water or climb up a ladder to weed!