Kids Gardens

When I was a child, we didn't really have a garden. We had a small front yard which was landscaped with a lawn, trees, and shrubs. We rarely did anything in our front yard other than mow grass and weed, but our backyard was a playground. My mother always said that she didn't raise flowers, she raised children. Kids from all over the neighborhood regularly played in our backyard, so it would have been difficult to grow many flowers. There was an area of grass where we weren't allowed to dig, but it got so much traffic, both from feet and from our wagons, tricycles, and bicycles, that this lawn was more dirt than grass.

I always thought of children and gardens as basically incompatible, but Linda Mazar changed my mind. Linda wrote Suite 101's "Kids Gardens" topic from October of 1997 to October 2001. Linda left because she was adopting another child and she was so focused on her new child that she didn't feel that she could keep up with her publishing schedule at Suite 101.

Linda's "Kids Garden's" topic is now archived at Suite 101 and it is still a great resource. I recently went back through her 47 articles and I was a bit surprised by how many of them were about garden design, so I have decided to showcase a few of her articles in this article.

My mother did have a very narrow flowerbed in our backyard. The flowers never did very well because we lived in southern California and my mother was trying to grow the same flowers that her mother had grown in Oregon. I can remember the wire tomato cage that my mother placed around a unhappy heather to try to protect it from children and pets. I am not sure what other flowers my mother planted there, but I can remember decorating that flowerbed with Disneykins (small plastic figures of characters from Disney cartoons). I don't think that my mother was annoyed with me for doing that, but she wasn't as delighted as Linda was when her son decorated flower beds with his toys.

Linda understood that most children aren't just interested in growing plants; they are going to want to play in their gardens. Her articles about garden design are not about how to conceal your child's sandbox, they are about how to encourage your child's creativity. Linda concluded her article about creating fairy gardens by suggesting that "making a fairy garden is more fun when you add a few accessories for the fairies to use. Depending on your preference, you can use store bought dollhouse accessories, or make your own from things around your garden and home. A few chairs or rocks would provide seating for tired fairies, a table made of bark (or popsicle sticks) could have acorn cups and and walnut shell bowls for hungry fairies. A small pile of soft pine needles or a patch of moss could be a bed, etc." This was Linda's first article in her series about garden themes, it was followed by Animal Gardens, in which she suggested that parents could create a wild animal garden and wrote about how she could envision this garden "with a large plastic, resin, or ceramic wild animals scattered throughout the bed for the child to play with amongst the plants. Or maybe your child will make some of clay and dry and paint them. The plants could be planted in rings like a circus or maybe semicircles."

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