Children's Garden

Children are still exploring and getting to understand the world around them. The more prescriptive you are about children's play elements and how they should be 'properly' used, the more you limit their creative play. Providing them with interesting spaces that they can explore and discover, triggers imagination and encourages them to play and interact with their environment in a different way than fixed play equipment. While spaces need to be safe, research supports the importance of children learning to challenge themselves – it's the important beginning of risk assessment. Spaces where children can be free to play, and also where elements are either robust, or ephemeral and easily replaced when damaged.

The design of the Children's Garden engages with children of all ages to offer an experience of the cultivated natural world. The garden looks to engage children in this via colour, texture, scent and form, through the use of a diverse planting palate that expresses the connection between plants and people. The metaphor of a tree or plant holds a wonderful parallel to the way that people live and grow within their environment and is a tangible demonstration of the differences between individuals and the richness this diversity brings. This doesn't stop at the plant, as they too need other supportive relationships with different living and inert elements in our world in order for them all to thrive and express some of these connections. Further to this; the garden will express the underlying themes of the surrounding arboretum, to show how diversity and contrast creates stimulating environments for all types of things to occur; from its role in as a repository for global tree diversity, to the wonderment of its incredible mixture of texture, form and colour.

The garden contains both active and contemplative elements around the plants, to provide a safe, fun and stimulating experience including:

• Timber step-hoppers
• soft lawn mounds
• timber logs, and a
• wiggly worm tunnel.

Bench seats with considered placement have been installed for supervising adults.