 Minister for Education, [L] Jim Knight visits The Growing Schools Garden, designed by Chris Beardshaw [R], at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Photo by Michael Walter/Troika
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Summer fun for seedlings
If you’re looking around for ideas to help keep your grandchildren busy during the summer holidays, it may be time to make tracks for the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show
In an era when headlines on child obesity compete with global warming, the focus is on getting children involved with gardening in three key ways – through growing food, stimulating their imaginations and encouraging play. Bob Sweet, RHS show organiser, said of this year’s show, “Children played a role with a number of the gardens and their creativity and imagination shines through with elements such as gigantic spider webs, winking scarecrows and pebble mazes.”
TV presenter Chris Beardshaw, in association with the DFES, scooped the Tudor Rose award for the Growing Schools Garden, which was created with the help of children from more than 30 schools.
To enter the garden, children walk down a slope where perennial plants tower over them and a raised pond allows them to see water insects at eye level. The garden also features intriguing plants such as monkey cups, chocolate-flavoured mint, and moving plants such as waterlilies, while some trees are even upside down. The multi-sensory garden boasts a straw wattle and daub nature-viewing hide, beds of appealing vegetables, a giant ant clambering over a roof, a cardboard cow and dummy sheep and chickens in the smallholding next door.
Alton Infant School’s Learning to Look After Our World was awarded an RHS Gold Medal and the award for Best Small Garden. Based on a design by Year 2 children, it includes a wild area, sensory garden, grow your own delights and highlights an experiment to deter slugs.
Other gardens may not have been built with the help of small hands, but children’s interest in adventure, hiding places and fantasy were guiding principles.
Playscape’s garden, with its lattices of tree trunks and ropes cried out to be climbed, which as designer Adam White explained was exactly the point, he believes playgrounds need to be more genuinely fun and exciting. As well as appealing to daredevils, the Playscape garden also contains daisies for daisy chains, horse chestnut trees for conkers and willows for weaving.
Aside from climbing trees and conker battles, gardens are places where games of imagination can be played out. The Secret Garden, inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, was created by Maxine Sims for CHASE, a charity that provides hospice care for children. In the novel, children find happiness and well-being in the restoration of a secret neglected garden. The CHASE secret garden features formal planting on the outside but once inside the arched gateway to the walled garden there is an abundance of planting.
Meanwhile, Boardman Gelly and Co’s magical ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ garden brings verse to life:
I know a bank where wild Thyme blows
Where Oxslips and nodding Violets grow
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine
With sweet musk-roses and eglantine
There sleeps “Titania” sometime of the night
Lull’d in these flowers with dance and delight.
A stone temple where Titania sleeps among a bed of roses is backed by a woodland bank under planted with the flowers of the verse, while the foreground is a romantic haze of blue and white flowering perennials with silver foliage.
Finally, if you decide to take children to the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show, you could pick up a Nature Trail leaflet that will take you all on a journey of discovery, while on the 7th and 8th of July, they can enjoy ‘Magic of Gardening’ workshops with children’s gardening character Mr Rotavator. Please visit the RHS website for more information
This article was created: 4 July 2007.
This article was last edited: 5 July 2007.
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