Financial Times
04-20-07
A stimulating tool to help children grow
By Simon Busch
Get down on your knees,” is Cindy Haynes’s first piece of advice on designing
gardens for children “or on your belly if you have a toddler”. “You have to act like
a child,” she says, not only seeing the world at shrub-height but also “thinking
about the particular things that give children pleasure”. So, for example, choose
flowers that provide “brilliant shots of colour” rather than a “monochromatic
range” – “roses in red or pink, perhaps, but also daisies, marigolds and
sunflowers”. You might even lay out the whole garden as a palette “with a group
of plants that are all red, a group all white and a group all purple, pink or yellow,
each group clustered closely together”.
A spot of such psychological regression in the garden has never been more
urgent, according to Susan Goltsman, a principal of the US urban design
company Moore Iacofano Goltsman and a specialist in designing outside spaces
for children. It might be time not merely to put your children on spartan TV rations
but rather to rethink the very nature of play, which, Goltsman argues, has
deteriorated over the past few decades.
“In most highly developed countries,” she says, “children are not allowed to roam
and range the way they did when I was younger. Every species requires this
range behaviour, where you go further and further from the supervision of the
parent. That doesn’t happen much any more. Kids are programmed from the time
they wake up in the morning to the time they go to bed. They’re in classes or
after-school programmes; there aren’t the vacant lots where they can go and
build a fort or have their own space. These no longer exist in most urban areas or
people feel it’s too unsafe for their children to be somewhere unsupervised. This
has changed the quality of childhood.”
The new mollycoddling can damage children’s health, she says. “Obesity,
asthma and attention deficit disorder are all environmentally related. Kids are not
moving and exploring, using their bodies the way they’re meant to be used – out
in the world. This might sound silly but we’re eating less dirt than before. When
you don’t eat dirt, your immune system doesn’t make the kind of antibodies to
protect yourself from the diseases we’re seeing. So the sanitisation of the world
is hurting children in insidious ways. Getting dirty, being part of nature develops
healthy human beings. That’s why the garden’s important.”
Goltsman’s company designs spaces that are meant to stimulate children
physically and mentally, while simultaneously developing a sense of their place in
the natural world. One design, for a play park, included a giant squirrel tray that
children could climb up to and sit on, instantly transforming themselves into
larger versions of the nut-hoarding creatures all around them. These same
principles can be incorporated into home gardens designed with children in mind.
Growing a deciduous tree in the backyard is the easiest way to teach children
about the seasons, says Haynes, who lectures on education through
horticulture at Iowa State University; they can paint or draw it at different times
of the year to document its changes.
For her, a fort is also a sine qua non of the budding garden experience: “A secret
place where only the child can get into.” It could be as simple as the space
beneath an outside table or a more elaborate structure such as a treehouse or a
tunnel. The exciting element for the child is the same; it’s somewhere where, in a
dramatic role reversal, it is the parents who are banned.
In one of the several child-centred gardens he has designed, landscape architect
Jay Graham turned rock outcrops on the rugged site into “a fort for the boy and a
Wendy house for the girl”. (One hopes his clients didn’t insist on too rigid a
separation of uses; perhaps the girl wasn’t of the housekeeping kind.) “Creating a
destination”, in this way, is one of his three guiding themes in sculpting a juvenile
garden. On another site, he planted ornamental grasses in a circle to define a
small section for the client’s children; “natural walls that would become taller with
the growing season and create a sense of mystery as to what was inside.”
Use plants with strong aromas, he suggests, as part of his second theme;
“appealing to the senses”. Thickets of basil, rosemary or other pungent herbs are
tactile lures over which children can run their hands, picking up the scent. You
might plant plots of edible plants with specific themes, he says, such as a salad
garden or a pizza garden.
And, like Haynes, Graham advocates experimenting with much more intense
colours than would suit an adult sensibility. “Don’t worry about the planting
blending in with the landscape,” he says, “or a smooth transition through the
seasons. Let the garden rest in the winter and come to life in the summer. You
want to work with the drama of change.”
Finally, a child’s garden should “stimulate activity and exploration”. It should, in a
word, be interactive. A child-unfriendly garden is one that is static, which means
that a child-friendly garden, by contrast, is unlikely to be neat. Water features,
especially combined with sand or mud, are, for example, virtually guaranteed to
win a child’s approval.
That vital criterion of interactivity is also a reminder to avoid overdesigning a
children’s garden, for that would be a species of the very overprotection
Goltsman cautions against. The neglected grove of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
novel The Secret Garden encompassed some of the wilder reaches of my
imagination in my own childhood. Wild gardens, for wild children, also have their
place.