The Secret Play Garden grows under a hexagonal fabric canopy that provides shade and sun protection for extended outdoor play. Jim Mosteller, of Mosteller Design and Construction in Columbia, South Carolina designed and installed the 42’ x 32’ play garden as an amalgam of a customary playground and a container garden.
Exercise Through Gardening
Mosteller, an elementary school physical education teacher and exercise physiologist, views gardening as ‘theraPE.’ Experiences in the play garden zones encourage gross and fine motor development with and among plants.
Effortlessly children engage in crawling, bending, climbing, reaching, stretching, swinging, pulling, pushing, balancing, sliding, jumping, and shimmying while exploring the runner bean maze, pantomiming at the puppet stage, gaining momentum on the swing, and working with the “interactive” play panels. The tyke-size play panels include gear sets, a flower walk finger maze, and a diagram of the life cycle of a butterfly.
Pouring and sifting sand along the sand wall, painting flower pots, plantings seeds in pot towers and troughs, pinching herbs, plucking peppers, shelling beans, and picking pods and sorting seeds summon fine motor skills.
A fitness machine retrofitted with planters of flowers and food at the top challenges children and parents to push their body weight to move the fitness seesaw.
Food For Fitness
Throughout the play garden multi-colored and multi-shaped containers are filled with family-friendly fresh vegetables and herbs including okra, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, basil, oregano, rosemary, lemon balm, and spearmint. Herbs, in particular, appeal to the young child’s acute sense of smell.
Amanda Segura, garden education coordinator at Riverbanks, is concerned about the childhood obesity epidemic. She wanted the garden to immerse children in edible plants and to model how families with young children could grow fresh food at home in containers of all sizes and shapes. Local Clemson University Master Gardener volunteers helped with initial installation of plantings.
Secrecy in the Play Garden
A young child’s need for enclosed space, suspenseful passageways, and nooks and places to hide is achieved through the overhead canopy, translucent fabric walls of the runner bean maze, peek-a-boo puppet stage, arched entranceway and 90° angling of play panel walls.
For child security parents are always within sound and sight. Children are expected to be supervised at all times by parents or teachers.
Observation Opportunities
The free play garden provides a wonderful window for parents, teachers, and pre-service teachers to observe the ages and stages of child growth and development, especially physical, social, and language development.
The small size of the garden along with its unique features allows for close viewing of solo, parallel, associative, cooperative, symbolic, dramatic and constructive play.
Entrance to the play garden and other gardens at the Botanical Garden is free with regular Riverbanks Zoo admission.
Resources
- Email interview with Amanda Segura May 21, 2011
- Onsite interview with Jim Mosteller May 27, 2011
Arlene Marturano - Arlene Marturano, an educator, consultant, master gardener, and writer advocates gardens as a context and gardening as a tool for ...
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