You can’t run uphill indoors
‘In the first of a guest blog series, filmmaker David Bond writes on how being outdoors can remedy the conflicts of family life….’
Visit inspiring herbaceous borders, glasshouses that take you around the World or simply relax in the oldest Botanic Garden in Britain. The Botanic Garden is the most compact, yet diverse collection of plants in the World right in the heart of the city centre and is open throughout the year for you to visit and enjoy.’
Source: Oxford Botanic Garden Website
In the previous post I set out some of the ‘natural’ ingredients of designed ‘play landscapes’. What can parents do to increase the natural play opportunities for their children? Here are ten tips – why not try to use them over the half term holidays?1. Ask yourself, how can your children have the same exciting opportunities to play naturally as you did? Remember your own childhood memories of playing in natural places: damming, running, climbing, digging, building, splashing, dreaming, chatting and watching are just some of the great natural play memories adults have.
2. Allow children the time and space to discover natural play opportunities for themselves. Natural spaces are the ultimate play environments and children instinctively seek out and discover ways in which to interact with and use nature. Children who have direct, playful experiences of nature are most likely to develop caring attitudes and behaviours in later life.
3. Find out where the nearest natural spaces are to you. Children need everyday nature. This includes free access to parks, gardens, city farms, village greens, hedgerows and rough ground within easy reach of their homes, as well as visits to woodlands, beaches and open grassland further afield.
Den building
4. Provide old clothes and outdoor gear. This will help children play naturally in all weathers. Getting muddy, wet or sweaty and coming home with snagged or grass stained clothing is just part of playing outdoors. Opportunities to play with nature, through climbing trees, exploring the world of animals, building dens or making mud pies, are fun and help children to cultivate an awareness of and respect for nature.
Most natural play areas need to be managed and sometimes benefit from man-made add ons
5. Encourage children to play out and inspire them with the magic of natural spaces. Sensitive adults can support and enthuse children by sharing the sense of wonder of the natural world and jointly uncovering its mysteries and surprises. Stories, costumes, treasure trails and quests can gently kindle the flames of children’s imaginations when playing in natural settings. Outdoor natural spaces allow children to be spontaneous and create and explore their own imaginary worlds.
Exploring nature- picture: Emma Bradshaw
6. Help children take risks in play, like climbing trees. Children need and want to take risks through play. Playing in natural settings allows children to find ways of challenging themselves and taking risks that fit them as individuals. Be open and transparent about what is involved in natural play activities so that children playing outdoors can experience the fun and excitement of stretching and testing themselves.
7. Find your nearest adventure playground. If parents and children prefer to play with adults around, adventure playgrounds usually have some natural areas. In some areas there may be play workers or park keepers who encourage children to play in natural spaces. Ask you local council what supervised play opportunities are provided locally.
Simple pleasures- a nest created from sticks, cut grass, gravel and cotton wool..
8. Look out for opportunities for free natural supplies. Children love to move things around and rearrange their play spaces. Natural resources, like tree and hedge trimmings make great den-building materials. Good play spaces can be made by adding natural elements into children’s outdoor playgrounds, such as trees and plants, earth, rocks, logs, water and natural moveable objects.
9. Stick up for children’s right to play naturally outdoors.Children need advocates who can help them find natural places to play. Encourage children to play naturally in your area, call on your local authority to provide accessible wild spaces for children to play in, and support your local play centre to run environmental play sessions in outdoor settings. Possibly lobby for ‘play landscapes’ that include a mixture of ‘off the shelf’ play equipment and custom-built structures and natural play features.
10. Experience it yourself! The best way for adults to prepare and plan for successful natural play is to experience it! Think about natural play activities you would like today’s children doing, and then have a go for yourself.
Water (and mud) play- Wells next the Sea, Norfolk
Source: after ‘Wild about Play’- Martin Maudsley
Other information:
The Forestry Commission and play
Outdoor Experiences and Healthier brains
Natural play philosophy and approach
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The case for gardening in schools has perhaps never been stronger – it encourages exercise and healthy eating and helps to ensure that children ‘reconnect with nature’ – as discussed in the initial post on school gardening.Today, in the first of a series of posts on the practical steps to creating a successful School Garden, I’m looking at how to get your project up and running.
Where do you start? How do you build up the momentum that’ll be needed to turn your dreams into reality? How can you get the resources you need to get it off the ground? Here are 7 steps to help get your school gardening project off the starting blocks.
1. Do your homework- check out the internet for advice and ideas about school garden learning and explore other school gardens in your area. This research will help you to firm up your ideas and think about how you might present them. Talk to those involved in the school gardens you visit – their advice and experience is priceless. And they might even offer to help you get started!
2. Make the Case – so how do you get the key people on your side? If you’re a volunteer, float your idea with one or more teachers who you think might be sympathetic and explore the idea a bit further (if you’re a teacher speak with your colleagues and sound out some parents). Once you’ve firmed up your initial thoughts, it’s time to get the Head teacher on board. You need to have a clear outline of what the project is going to achieve and how it could benefit the school’s approach to learning in general (including curriculum links if possible) and ‘learning outside the classroom’ in particular – so think ‘outdoor classroom’ and use this key phrase in your plans. Your outline should ideally include a suggested location for the garden, rough design,timescale and how the garden will be established and looked after. It might also be an idea to say how you think progress will be monitored and reported. If you are able to convice a number of teachers, governors, parents and friends of the School, so much the better.
Hedge planting- put some natural boundaries around your garden with community effort!
3. Build a team – you will not create the garden alone, even less ensure its effective ongoing use. You need to build a team around the project which can do the many things needed. A committee/ steering group/ project team of some sort needs to be set up and at this stage. It will be important to get all the key interests in the project involved; later on your committee structure might be slimmed down as individual roles start to pan out and inevitably some people lose interest. So who should you target? Keep an eye out for parents who can bring particular skills, assets (mini diggers!) or contacts to the project – these might be builders, gardeners, landscapers, forestry workers, publicists or funding bid writers and so on. Establishing a broad and varied support base at this stage will set the project on a positive course. Hold formal meetings to develop your project but also use the web to communicate. Don’t forget to ask the Head, teachers and governors to be on the committee – their involvement at this stage is important, but may reduce once the project is flying!
4. Think ahead – as the project develops it will become clear what the real goals will be and the main lines of action you’ll need to take to achieve these. Being clear, concise and friendly will help to communicate the project effectively. At the same time, be patient – it’s natural to want to launch right into construction works, but it will take time for your project to evolve and the learning opportunities to be firmed up, which will in turn have a bearing on your design, layout, routine etc. So it’s important to have detailed discussions with the teachers who will make use of their ‘outdoor classroom’. This discussion may take anything from a few months to a year.
picture- RHS
5. ‘Quick wins’ to promote your cause – whilst it will take time to clarify your overall objectives and start to firm up your design, you can keep up the momentum and start to generate wider interest. Plan activities which will test out some ideas and generate interest ; e.g. can you start to grow things in containers around the school and get children involved in cultivating flowers or food in these? A little project starting with seed sowing in the classroom and eventually seeing mature plants placed outside will demonstrate what can be achieved and get the children on board.
6. Check possible barriers to progress and get permissions – check out whether your outline design has implications for the school’s utilities or the way it operates, and if you need them get permissions in principle before going much further with your design work. For example, a reliable source of water nearby is an important if not vital consideration – will this be possible from existing outside taps/ rainwater harvesting or do you need to get another connection installed? Will this be acceptable to the school?
7. Secure the start-up resources – once you have a clear, albeit outline, view of your project and the design of the garden, it’s time to firm up what resources you’ll need to get the project established and get commitments for these. Some of these can be ‘promises’ of help from well skilled/equipped parents or friends of the school. But you’ll probably need some start up cash – to purchase materials, tools, seed etc. Sources internal to the school can be approached – the school budget if possible, but more likely a Parents/ Friends Association. Then you can explore outside sources including local charities as well as national programmes like the Big Lottery.
Source: ‘How to grow a School Garden- a Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers’- Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Kathleen Pringle, Timber Press Books 2010
Useful websites:
Garden Organic support for Schools
RHS Campaign for School Gardening
RHS young gardener of the year 2013
Learning outside the classroom- manifesto
Setting up and running a school garden- UN Food and Agriculture organisation
Cawston Primary School Garden following work by a ‘Garden Gang’ event last Saturday
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Across the developed world there is concern about a growing ‘disconnect’ between children and the natural world around them – increased time spent indoors, less time out playing – the scenario is well reported. School gardening projects are an important way to reconnect children with nature.School gardening, like ‘growing your own’ seems to be on the increase in the UK as we look for ways of bridging the ‘ecological disconnect’, saving money, reducing ‘food miles’, improving food quality and strengthening local economies. There’s powerful evidence that school gardening is one, convenient and effective way of ‘learning outside the classroom’. A way of helping to engage children with the natural world and to deal effectively with some other important issues at the same time by:
In Norfolk, England, the voluntary group of Mastergardeners is playing its part in supporting around 20 schools and many others are waiting to connect with a suitably trained volunteer in their area to develop new school gardening initiatives.
I’ve been helping a primary school to develop its school garden, which now has several raised planting beds (one for each class) and a recently completed wildlife pond with dipping platform and boggy planting areas. I tried to engage the children in growing food with a short session about the food they like to eat and where it comes from, why growing our own is important and the different types of fruit and veg we could grow. We ended up with each child making their own paper pot and sowing a broad bean seed – these were later transferred by the children to the school garden and formed a wonderful source of ‘free sweets’ during the summer!
Making paper pots – an easy way to get children involved in ‘growing their own’
The whole community– governors, staff, parents, children, local businesses together with ‘shopping voucher’ and grant schemes have played their part in creating this valuable resource. The new gardening year is about to kick off with a ‘Garden Gang’ (parents, children, staff and friends of the school) session on Saturday to get the beds ready, complete the greenhouse (made out of canes and plastic bottles) and plant some new apple trees.
Other Mastergardeners are playing their parts around the County. This includes several new and more established gardens at secondary and primary schools and a novel ‘inter – generational’ project in Norwich, where some spare ground behind a library has been turned into a food growing plot by children from a local school, library staff and older people from a sheltered housing scheme overlooking the site.
One secondary school gardening coordinator recently wanted to introduce children to the ideas of ‘veg families‘ and crop rotation. She printed out 56 small veg pictures and separate names – the first task was for the students to ID the veg. Then they looked at veg families (with the students placing the different vegetables into different groups ) – then they used their computers to create their own set of ‘Veg family prints’. Finally, they looked at crop rotation and by the end of the session they had come up with a basic 4 bed rotation over 4 years, along with a write-up explaining about why we rotate crops yearly.
School gardening a century ago- birth of the ‘kindergarten’
School gardening has been around a long time – originally developing as part of the formal school curriculum at a time when many more households grew their own food. There were war – time efforts to boost food production at schools and the ‘Kindergarten’ movement saw playing and being creative in an outdoor setting as the heart of nursery education.
School gardening in war time- US style
Recently in the UK the Food Growing in Schools Taskforce, led by Garden Organic was established as a response to increasing concerns about the health and well-being of children and young people, and a confidence that food growing in schools is a successful way of dealing with these concerns, delivering many benefits. The Taskforce is made up of people representing a diverse set of interests, but all with a strong belief that food growing in schools is an important activity. You can read their findings here.
Getting the whole community involved in the school garden
Over the coming weeks I plan to post a series of articles about how to go about setting up and developing a school garden, so if you have any experiences or ideas to share I’d love to hear from you!
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Some of the wide range of Hellebore flowers
‘Killing food’ seems to be the literal translation of the ancient Greek form of Helleborus (Helein= ‘killing’ and Bora = ‘for food’), referring, perhaps to the legend that witches used it’s roots to drive out evil spirits! In fact any part of the plant, if ingested, can cause discomfort at the least and it’s sap is a skin irritant. The Greeks were probably referring to the species H. cyclophyllus (from the Greek ‘kyklos’ for ‘circle’ and the Latin ‘pilosus’ for ‘hairy’ , describing the flower).
Helleborus niger is commonly called the Christmas Rose, due to an old legend that it sprouted in the snow from the tears of a young girl who had no gift to give the Christ child in Bethlehem.
In Greek mythology, Melampus of Pylos used Hellebore to save the daughters of the king of Argos from a madness, induced by Dionysus, that caused them to run naked through the city, crying, weeping, and screaming (sounds a bit like Norwich city centre on a Friday night).
During the Siege of Kirrha in 585 BC, Hellebore was reportedly used by the Greek besiegers to poison the city’s water supply. The defenders were subsequently so weakened by diarrhoea that they were unable to defend the city from assault. And an overdose of medication containing Hellebore has been suggested as a possible cause of the death of Alexander the Great.
Members of the genus Helleborus comprise approximately 20 species (and many hybrid varieties) of herbaceous or evergreen flowering plants in the family Ranunculaceae, originally from grassy, woodland, scrub and rocky sites on limestone or chalky soils in central, southern and eastern Europe and western Asia. They are divided into two main groups:
Some of the different species are:
H. argutifolius/ H. lividus (leaves bluish or lead- colour) subspecies corsicus – the ‘Corsican Hellebore’
H. caucasicus– Caucasian
H. colchidus– of Colchis (an ancient kingdom which went on to form part of modern day Georgia in the Caucasus)
H. foetidus = fetid – the ‘Stinking Hellebore’
H. guttatus = spotted
H. niger = black(the root)- the ‘Christmas Hellebore/Rose’
H. orientalis = eastern – the ‘Lenten/ Oriental Rose’
H. versicarius = from the latin for ‘bladder’, referring to its inflated seed follicles
H. viridis = green (the flowers)
Hellebores in a woodland setting
Sources and links for further information:
‘Plant Names simplified’– A.T Johnson and H.A. Smith
‘Encyclopedia of Garden Plants’– Royal Horticultural Society
Quizzicals:- answers to those in the last post
(do I hear a groan….)
Old School Gardener
Nigel Boldero aka 'Old School Gardener'
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