Big Idea:
Kids love to play outdoors and it’s fun and easy to create a space for them to explore nature.
We engage children in nature and help them learn to enjoy playing outdoors. Kids can explore the fun plants and special garden areas. We 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.
We provide a natural space for families to enjoy together
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!
Features to point out:
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, and homemade fairies.
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 animal 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. A tic-tac-toe board provides a shared game activity.
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! A living wall is created where down-growing sweet potato vines cross paths with up-growing clematis.
A Small Sandbox is incorporated into the garden design.
Pamela Crawford Hanging Baskets provide a good elevated support for trailing vines and other heights of flowers and plants
In the Rainbow Garden, flowers are planted in a rainbow arc of colors: red-orange-yellow-green-purple-blue.
The White Garden explores how flowers of one color are pretty together, and you can notice other details- are the leaves different? Are there many shades of white? Do the white flowers have various shapes?