Children’s gardens are designed to give young people a place to play and learn.  Exterior Worlds develops certain aspects of the garden design around the specific interests of the children in the home.  We meet with the kids and the parents to discuss what interests of the kids may also work for educational purposes.

One of the first things that we determine in this process is what type of play area we will build in to the garden.  Play areas are essential for many reasons.  From the child’s perspective, they make the garden fun. 

From the parent’s perspective, a play area integrated into educational activities helps with child development.  It also helps give children a reason to stay at home in a society where parents often feel nervous about letting their children roam too far from home.

Children like to pretend, so play areas are designed to provide an educational environment where they can take on the personality of such roles as scientist, teacher, biologist, entomologist, or even astronomer.  This is not as difficult to create in a children’s garden as you might think. 

If children love to look through telescopes, what would normally be a patio seating area for adults becomes an outdoor observatory surrounding by tropical garden plants that allows children to pretend that they are observing the stars from a remote observatory in a far off place near the Equator.

If we build a butterfly garden, children can pretend they are entomologists studying insects.  This not only gives kids an awareness of insect life, but it teaches the importance of ecology.  Butterfly gardens require many types of plants, some flowering, and some for shelter. 

Water sources are also important because butterflies also need to drink.  By playing in an environment where they can study butterflies, children also come to understand the importance of clean air, clean water, and habitat preservation as essentials to the continued existence of wildlife on our world.

Sometimes children simply like to pretend they are in a wilderness.  A children’s garden can be built that can give kids the equivalent of a remote state park in their own back yard.  Rather than using standard garden plants, we can plant trees and shrubs in a way that make children feel they have stepped into a world thousands of miles away from Houston. 

Of course they are right outside where parents can watch them, and parents can even take the kids on “family camping trips” for a vacation overnight that requires no travel.
 
Children’s gardens need to be large to accommodate the combination of education and entertainment that they offer children.  This does not mean that they need to consume the entire back yard.  However, in terms of what Houston landscaping professionals like us call “a zone of interest,” it is realistic to say that such a landscape element would probably represent an entire zone in its own respect.

While a children’s garden is designed specifically for younger people, the geometry and plant material, along with any requisite hardscapes, are nonetheless constructed to support home architecture and to work in aesthetic harmony with other landscape elements created exclusively for adults.