I hope that by teaching children to love nature that as adults they will save and maintain native and heirloom plants. With that in mind, I am always looking for ideas and information to help kids fall in love with the garden. A Child's Garden by Molly Dannenmaier is the best book I've read on creating a garden for both children and parents in an average backyard:
A Child's Garden: 60 Ideas to Make Any Garden Come Alive for Children
The book offers information on how children play, which garden elements provide essential sparks for imaginative play, and how to integrate this into a residential garden. Photographs support the text by giving concrete examples of how to affect these ideas.
This coming spring I'm planning to incorporate several of these ideas into my own garden. Here are four of my upcoming projects:
- create a space for kids to dig besides the vegetable garden
- build a bin to gather natural materials such as seed pods, sticks, pine cones, and leaves as material for creating
- make simple topiaries with wire frames with the kids
- plant a living hiding spot with either a weeping mulberry, ornamental grasses, or a tepee made with grape or bean vines
Other good books I've read on kids' gardens are Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots and Great Gardens for Kids.
Related post: Ten Tips for Planning a Children's Garden
2 comments:
Thanks for taking the time to write about this. This is exactly what I was looking for when I revved up google today!
I know you wrote about this 2 years ago, but the info is still just what I needed!
I agree this book is the best! I paid dearly for the original version a few years ago and still think it is worth it. So glad to see a re-release. I posted about this book as well on my blog at http://studiog.greayer.com. Please go check it out and leave a comment if you wish.
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