Sending Kids Back to Nature

Away From TV, Playing Outdoors

RICHMOND

Enter the new, $5 million Children's Garden at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden and you see something that looks like grandpa's vegetable patch. Walk on through a wooden tunnel and you find paths that dead-end in arches draped in willows and sized for Munchkins.

"It's inspired by the way kids used to make forts in the woods," said Beth Monroe, a spokeswoman for the botanical garden.

Forts in the woods, remember those?

Elaborate, highly designed and high-cost gardens for children are all the rage these days as a way for botanical gardens, such as Lewis Ginter, to draw a larger and younger audience -- of parents as well as kids. But in a darker reality, they have also become one of the last places for children to find nature for themselves.

Between over-programmed schedules and an ever-expanding electronic universe, children have been robbed of the simple delights of free, unstructured play in natural areas. Even if they young people had the time, argues author and child advocate Richard Louv, society conspires against their exploration of the natural world.

"Many housing tracts, condos and planned communities constructed in the past two to three decades are controlled by strict covenants that discourage or ban the kind of outdoor play many of us enjoyed as children," writes Louv (pronounced Loove) in "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder."

Seeking in part to fill that void, the Children's Garden at Lewis Ginter features a large, turreted treehouse overlooking a lake. Here, kids can drop maple seeds and watch them twirl to earth, or see the bluegills swimming at the water's edge. The ramp to the house is a gentle, snaking journey of 600 feet, designed to allow access to those in wheelchairs and to take kids through a canopy of conifer and deciduous trees without their actually climbing them.

Elsewhere, a water play area allows children to frolic in jets of water. This evokes the idea of playing in a stream, but on a rubberized, scrape-proof surface and with water that is clean, filtered and recycled, said Executive Director Frank Robinson. Nearby, parents get to sit in the shade. Another area allows kids to get dirty gardening and making crafts. An international village features child-size representations of indigenous structures from around the world, along with plots filled with vegetables and herbs distinct to those regions.

Robinson sees an attraction where kids will learn and play, a place where young families will go with their children but also an outdoor classroom for thousands of grade-schoolers from local school districts. (Part of the design includes parking space for school buses and restrooms big enough to accommodate hordes of children.)

Though no elaborate children's gardens have yet been built in Washington, various botanical institutions have strong children's educational programs, including Green Spring Gardens Park and the American Horticultural Society's River Farm, both in Fairfax County; Brookside Gardens in Wheaton; and the Washington Youth Garden at the National Arboretum, where inner-city school kids raise vegetables.

At schools themselves, teaching gardens, typically of habitat flora, are becoming more common, both in the District and the suburbs.