The Why and What of Gardening with Your Kids

Catherine Eberbach opened her Longwood Graduate thesis chapter on children’s garden design quoting Gertrude Jekyll, "the best way to help children love and value a garden is to give them a pretty one ready made." This principle lies at the heart of what I think separates the truly great children’s gardens from the rest.

I often get asked what I think makes a great children’s garden, and if I think the Hershey Children’s Garden is one of those great spaces. Well, okay, I am little biased, but let me offer from my experience the key principles to engaging today’s youth with the earth. In the next several posts, I will share eight principles behind the design of the Hershey Children’s Garden and what keeps adults and kids alike returning again and again.

But first let me leave you with one simple thought. A children’s garden, and the Hershey Children’s Garden is no exception, is a garden and not a playground. It is a garden, not a classroom. Many children’s gardens designed over the past five years have tended toward one of three types: a playground with some plants thrown in, an outdoor museum with some plants thrown in, or a garden with exuberant immersion experiences. I love what Tres Fromme, the lead designer of Longwood Garden’s new indoor children’s garden stated in a recent Longwood newsletter. The point of good children’s garden design is to "create a world-class garden experience. Interpretation and blatant educational messages should be secondary to aesthetic concerns."

Posted by Josh Steffen
 

Tags: children's gardens, Hershey Children's Garden, Youth Gardening

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Josh Steffen, Youth Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.